The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Human Echolocation, Extreme Pogo Sticking, Elephants Evading Poachers

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

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At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Perbita Saha. And I'm Corinne Iosia.

Everyone welcome to the first episode of The Weirdest Scalorne this week, season six. And of course, since Corinne is here, that means this is a very special episode for reasons other than being the season premiere. Oh, yeah. What could it possibly mean? We haven't set any pattern here whatsoever. So the fall issue comes out next week and it's a really, really fun one. The theme is Daredevil.

And this was a particularly potent one for me because I'm genuinely a pretty risk-averse person. And what this issue asks is, what happens when you get up to the edge, when you get up to a cliff and you just say, eff it. I'm going to jump. And sometimes people find amazing things when they do. They learn stuff and they make discoveries. And sometimes it's also just, oh, maybe shouldn't have done that. Some of it is a man sticking a drill bit up his nose, which is genuinely featured in one of our stories in the Daredevil issue.

And a story I highly recommend, highly recommend. We will not be talking about Blockheads today. You will have to access the issue. on popsai.com or via Apple News Plus, if you already use such a platform or would like to get started, popsai is a great reason to take it for a spin, I have to say. But today, we are here to talk about some daredevily stories that may or may not make an appearance in the latest issue of the magazine. So let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact,

story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, creating a magazine, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Corinne, what's your tease? My tease is that there is a world in the United States and beyond where there is such thing as a professional post. Pogo stick. I see. And presumably a professional Pogoer to go on it.

To ride a topic, absolutely. Wow. Well, I'm scared. Can't wait to hear more about that. Now I'm just thinking about how I have like really never, I never mastered the Pogo. I am. It seems like it should be easy. Right?

Yeah. And I'm very, I guess as a kid, I was very cool. quick to give up on things that embarrassed me. And I think the pogo is in that category. I was like, no, not for me. Yeah, see previous note about me being risk averse. I also feel like it wasn't fun unless you could do it right and get pretty high. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I remember like making my parents get me one and then being like, you're never going to use this and you can only use it outside. and then them being absolutely right that I used it like twice. And I was like, well, this is silly.

I'm just kind of shimmying around trying to balance on this thing. Anyway, trampolines much more my speed, even though absolutely you can fully wreck yourself on a backyard trampoline in easily, perhaps more easily. Well, cool. I can't wait to hear what kind of professional circuit I missed out on. giving up immediately. Perbita, what's your tease?

My story is about African elephants, specifically female ones, and how they have gotten the upper hand on poachers in Mozambique. Oh, very cool. My tease is that I want to talk about real life, daredevils, who navigate the world like the superhero daredevil, and why their experiences. are a reminder that parents should let their children be daredevels. That is my story. I want to start with Pogo's because I'm still really thinking about my failed attempts in the 90s.

So I want to know where I went wrong and where other people have gone right. Okay. Let's get into it. So I'm going to flash back to start. I've been vaguely familiar with the. idea that there's such thing as a souped up pogo stick for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years. Early in my pop-s-eye career, I was the tech editor, which meant I spent a lot of time looking at a lot of stuff, going to a lot of product showcases and things like that.

One year I was walking the aisles at the Toy Fair, which is the big toy expo at the Javitt Center here in New York City, and I saw someone's head bobbing up and down from the other side of a rather high partition wall. And I rounded the corner and there I saw a teenager on a weirdly burly-burly-looking pogo stick. And he was easily clearing six or seven feet. Oh, boy. I was like, okay, cool. And then he back flipped.

And I was like, damn, okay. He was riding something called a fly bar, which had taken what is. conventionally the springy part of a pogo stick, literally just a steel-gaged spring. And it had replaced it with 12 giant rubber bands. And so you pushed down and then the band spring back. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was impressive. It was a really fun novelty.

I wrote it up for the magazine and more or less didn't really think about it again. Until this year, when a viral video started making the round, And it was showing all of these elite Pogoers doing all manner of madness. Front flips, back ropes, grinds, things like that. These guys were acting like skateboarders. And I googled it. And sure enough, extreme Pogo is on its way, this group of Madcap's hope to becoming a thing. Capital A, capital T, a thing.

So then I found a Smithsonian Magazine article from 2012 that was running down the inventions and contraptions that got us to this point. And the inventors were folks like an MIT dropout in a former Northrop engineer. So then I called one of our longstanding pop-si writers, my friend Andrew Zaleski, and I said, Andrew, there's a world championship of Pogo in a few weeks. in Pittsburgh, and I kind of think you have to go. He did not take much convincing. So that championship, which has been going on since 2004, is called Pogo Palooza. Of course. And the road to Pogoosa 2022 and the road to extreme Pogo in general as a sport is, you know, paved with lots of really intense stuff and really brutal injury.

cracked kneecaps, broken bones, split muscles, even one reconstructive surgery that I know about, but also a new generation of pogo sticks that really aim to break open the sport by reimagining how these things work. So since the first time I saw a flybar at toy fair, the tech has been eclipsed by what's now a go-to for professional competitive pogoers, sticks from a company called Vortigo. So the issue with rubber, right, is that you can only really stretch it so far. And the more you stretch it, the more it wears out, right? We all, everybody on this call has longish hair, right?

We know what happens with our hairbands. We know it even happens with regular rubber bands over time. So the Vortago doesn't use the rubber bands. It does not use steel coiled springs. It's inventor, a guy named Bruce Spencer. explained his concept to the Smithsonian and is based around basically a piston. He's compressing air. And what he figured out was that if you compress air to half its volume, you double the pressure.

We didn't really figure this out. This is physics. But you go to one quarter and you push that into a cylinder and the cylinder basically becomes a jackhammer. He realized that if he used the entire length of a pogo stick to squeeze that air, he could launch a full-blown adult-sized human dangerously high. And he got a patent for it. So a Pogo-Paloosa ready stick, most competitors use a model called the V4, holds between 70 and 100 pounds of air pressure per square inch.

Oh my gosh. So for comparison. That seems dangerous in and of itself. Yes. So comparison. A basketball, eight pounds of air per square inch. A car tire, an average car tire, you know, like a Toyota Corridor. or something like that, an average mid-sized car somewhere between 30 and 50.

Right. So we're talking two times the pressure of a car tire. And to your point, Rachel, this is quite dangerous. And in the invention and iteration process, things did go badly. But for these elite guys, right, injuries are part of the game. So one of the first generation of extreme poguers, we are now into the second. It was a fellow named Dan Mahoney. He set the first Guinness World record for pogo jumping height in 2010, 9 feet, 6 inches.

He's got two titanium plates in his face. And a fella named Fred Grzbowski, who did some pogo stunts on the David Letterman show, has broken his back. And like I said, this group more or less accepts these risks, right? What goes up must come down. and when the current world record held by Dalton Smith is 12 feet in the air, coming down can come with a really brutal thud. But that's not even the most intense part of this whole thing. Where this moves from the place where we're all just terrified and we start getting impressed

if we weren't already is what these guys do while they're up there. Because remember, it better be good. It's really stinking good. So obviously they want to see, they see this as the next extreme sport, right? They want to legitimize it. And so they're taking a lot of cues from X games, skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX. They have moves. They become standardized.

They have names, right? Some of it is self-explanatory, backflip, front flip. They grind, which is something that skateboarders do, right? but they're doing it with the peg at the bottom of the pogo stick. There's something called a 360 bar spin, which is basically the equivalent of a kickflip in skateboarding. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can picture it.

Yeah. And so if you're not familiar with a kickflip in skateboarding, it's when the skater jumps off of the board and the board does a full rotation, and then you land back on the board. I have never attempted, never shall. No. Not for me.

But those are pretty standard, right? Let's get crazy. Pedestrian. Absolutely. Let's get nuts. Let's talk about the no-foot cannonball. The no-foot cannonball happens when a jumper is mid-flight and they toss the stick up above their head. They smack their hands onto the foot pegs.

And then as the pogo stick comes back down, they have to re-grab it and remount. Wow. I can't even visualize that. It took me a few. There are videos. We will be linking. There's the Mandy, which one Pogo were named after his ex-girlfriend. In this one, you don't let go.

You hold onto the handles and you huck the stick forward up and over your head, right, without letting go. And then your body spins around behind the Pogo stick because your feet are no longer on the pegs. then you have to land back on the pegs again without dying. Then there's the leapfrog. In this one, the rider vaults themselves over the top of the stick, lands with the stick behind them and their heels are on the foot pegs instead of their toes, which is the normal riding position, which is also just what, okay, sure. But then, then it turns into something called a slingshot flip. So the rider is standing there, mid-air, the stick is behind him, his heels are on the footpegs, and he flips forward in that position, passes the stick under the legs, and again,

somehow doesn't die. So you take all this, and now imagine it on a course. So they're doing this stuff midair, but they're also doing it off and on a series of obstacles to impress the Pogo Paloosa judges. Parkour. How have I been working on this story with Andrew for like five weeks now? And I have yet to experience a parkour joke. Wow. Well, happy to oblige.

I feel like I need to go back into the story now and write this egregious wrong. So Pogo Pogoosa. big event is called Big Air, right? And it's basically their equivalent of freestyle runs. And they get scored half on skill and half on style. And the course has all kinds of obstacles for them. There are boxes that are two to six feet high. There are slanted platforms for them to jump on and off of. There's a wall that they can ricochet from. And then there's something that they call the death box. The death box is more or less like any other platform, except that it's eight feet off the ground.

And some people decide to jump over the death box. Other people decide to use the death box as a point from which to launch themselves even higher into the air. And that's what a young gun named Connor Kellogg did. He is the current reigning Big Air Champion. And what he did was the first move we talked about, the no-foot cannonball,

the thing where you're slapping your hands onto the, the footpegs. So we did that. And then he bounced onto the death box and did what Pogoers called the Bruce Lee, which is basically just a super wide kick to the sides. Classic. Landed again. Did not die. So this is all very impressive, right? I'm not wrong in thinking this is just kind of bananas cool. And I want people to watch it and be impressed by it. But whether or not this all takes off, if you will, in the mainstream is still very much TBD, right? This year's Pogo Paluzzo was the most well attended, but it was still 150 people.

Some videos have gone viral. And it seems like we're at a point where, like, a tipping point where something that inventors have been noodling on for decades is sort of starting to work out. there have been Pogo iterations almost since the first toy versions were brought to the states in the roaring 20s. A Russian immigrant named George Hansberg trained performers at the Ziegfield Follies

to use the old Springy style as part of their show. When will that be in the Funny Girl revival? That's the real scandal. Oh my goodness. Those people have been robbed. Robbed, I tell you. And the Vortego is.

and the fly bar are really only the most recent attempts. The scooter company Razor marketed for a time a thing called the Bogo, which was similar to the flybar, but it used a fiberglass springy thing in order to generate its bounce. And there are even wilder ideas in the annals of the U.S. Patent Office, a couple that the writer of the Spassonian article pointed out were gas-powered and ones that had helicopter rotors on them. Yeah. Oh. Oh. I can see how that would be so smart is having a helicopter rotor near your head on an object that involved jumping. No way that could go wrong. No, and like fire in the sky should be totally fine.

Where would the rotor be exactly? You know, I'm not sure. I have to confess, I did not look up this particular patent. I think it was on the bottom. I think the idea was more to stay up than to do fancy stuff while you were there. Which also couldn't go wrong at all because it's not like your feet are important for anything. No, you don't need them. You have a rotary powered pogo stick to get around.

Congrats. Screw you flying cars. And Vortago is also thinking about how to get people interested in this. excited about it, right? Because the thing about skateboarding is it is dangerous, right? You can hurt yourself, but the barrier to entry is quite literally lower, right? These professional grade pogo sticks are extremely intense. And you're also kind of hard pressed to like, in most cities and even suburbs in the U.S., a kid who picks up a skateboard can go find other kids who are skateboarding in a place that they know how to skateboard. And,

You're probably not going to find that with extreme Pogo. Yeah. So Vortago is working on a model that is appropriate for children, right? A little bit smaller, less pressure because they want to get some fly boys and some fly girls really, really into this. Well, and I mean, speaking from the roller derby perspective, like to level up a sport that isn't mainstream. yet, like to make the level of competition more elite, you really do have to start getting kids into it. Like, there are now, like, the first generation of people who did, like, junior roller derby

are young adults. And they are, like, they're a different species. So, I remember the first bout that I went to, right? The young girls were the halftime show, and I was like, yeah. Well, and then you have to meet one of them who's like 23 and playing professionally or, you know, as close as you can get in roller derby. And you're like, ah, yes, yes, yes. So you have more years of experience in this sport than anyone on the planet. Cool.

Full stop. I mean, skateboarding was at the Summer Olympics for the first time this past year. and the gold and silver and bronze medalists, I think, in girls, they were all like under the age of 15. Right, yeah. They were born in the aughts. Yeah, well, and it's like, you know, when you look at the Olympics, a lot of the, in most sports, the people who are, you know,

really going to take home all the gold are the people who are like, just old enough that they have like more than a decade of experience. doing the sport, but still young enough that, like, you know, doing the sport constantly hasn't destroyed them. So I can understand why Extreme Pogo wants to, uh, wants to get in on that. That is definitely what they need to get into like that, you know, X-game style space. Exactly. Like, this is a talent pipeline problem. Yeah, pipeline problem. Wow. I still don't want to do it, though. No, no. I'm ever more impressed, but. no I the level of impressed that I am is equal to my level of no thank you yeah it does make me

miss um not that I ever owned them but remember when like moon boots were a thing the little like trampoline shoes yeah I think those should make a comeback that I think your personal trampoline yeah yeah those are not dangerous were they I mean anything can be dangerous if if it encourages you to launch yourself into the air and do flips and stuff. So anyway. I will say for the olds out there, including all of us, I do think it's okay to have your one, I can break all my bones sport in adulthood.

Yeah, I agree. I have broken all my bones in adulthood, so I'm with you. But yeah, no, it's true. Just because you didn't grow up doing stupid, dangerous stuff. that, you know, made your parents freak out, which will become relevant when I do my fact. But just because you didn't do that doesn't mean you can't do it now. There's still time. And it also doesn't mean your parents won't freak out.

That's true. They will probably grown up. Yeah, they do. They'll say, why are you doing this? You're too old for the shit. And you'll be like, it wasn't a phase, mom. I'm a daredevil now. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts.

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Yeah, we're going to talk about African elephants, which I believe are the biggest land mammals we have, or land animals we have on this planet. And this story came out of one of the features in the Daredevil issue written by Jason Biddle, who is an excellent animal journalist. And Jason pieced together a few examples of Daredevilish beasts who are adapting. to all the pressures that humans are putting on the planet and its resources, and adapting in ways that are not so much depressing, but more inspiring and also mind-blowing in terms of what we think the limits of biology are. So Jason covers some great species. There's a very funny-looking turtle that lives on Kauai now.

there's a stripy snake that is switching up its appearance, and then we have the African bush elephants. So before I get into the story, I want to give a little background on the specific place where some of this research on elephants took place. It's a national park called Gorongosa, quite famous. It's very well visited today, because of its diversity of wildlife.

And it's in the African nation of Mozambique, which went through a giant civil war between the 70s and 90s. And during this time, a lot of the megafauna in Mozambique were killed either because of poaching for meat or poaching to distribute the resources and make money for both sides of the war.

So after the civil war, the wildlife populations in Gorgongosa were depleted. And the elephants were particularly hard hit. They were down to 90% of their population. And in the decades since, the animals have seen a really great rebound because the National Park is really well managed. And there are a lot of locals who are contributing to protecting the wildlife and also building out economic, revenue from getting tourists and travelers to the national park. So with this giant crisis in the country's history, there have been a lot of studies looking at what have the impacts been on the different wildlife species and how have they adapted as

they've come back in this time of peace. And African elephants have provided a really interesting example. In the few years right after the war, biologists noticed that a lot of the elephants were being born without tusks. And this is a huge deal. I mean, if you picture an elephant in your head, whether it be African or Asian, you immediately think about the tusks. They're huge. In an African elephant, they can grow up to six feet long each and be 50 pounds. And that also means 50 pounds of ivory, which sells at a really high rate. It is being cracked down on a lot these days, but it can still go for one African elephant tusk can go for up to $5,000 U.S. dollars.

So huge market. you can see why impoverished poachers would continue to harvest that. But it's a big deal that an elephant would be born without those tusks. They don't just use them to defend themselves. They also use them to forage for food and to kind of excavate the land as they need. So it's not only very important for the survival of an elephant, but it also has a really big footprint on the land where these herds live. So in the early 2000s, people were noticing that specifically female elephants were being born tuskless. And it wasn't just in Gorghosa National Park either.

It was happening in many countries across Africa. It was happening in Kenya, Tanzanese. Uganda. So different groups of biologists started looking at these populations. And the biggest effect we've seen has been in Mozambique. So a study released in the journal science in 2021, researchers actually clued in on what made this switch happen among the elephant herds. So they had this idea that because it was only being seen in the female elephants, that it was being passed down by the X chromosome, since females have two of that chromosome. So they took blood samples from both male and females, tuskest and tuskless from the gorgosa herds, and they found that the

tuskless animals had the presence of two genes on the X chromosome, and they were mean. mutated. And these genes are, humans actually have them too. They help us grow in our incisor teeth. So think about that times like a hundred to make a tusk in an elephant. But in the females- Which ones are the incisors? Is it the, is the ones we call canines? No. I think they're the pointy ones, right? They're the pointy ones. Okay. I might be wrong. I think so. colloquially called vampire teeth. There you go. So the females, these two genes were mutated in them. And again, because they have two copies of the ex-cromosome,

the mutations ended up being dominant. So they would be born without tusks. Any males who ended up with those genes because they could still get a copy from their mother, they actually were not born. It was a lethal mutation for the males. So that's why we end up only seeing testlessness in the females. And it was pretty prevalent.

I mean, it's important to know that the elephant population was really small by the end of the war, and it's only been steadily climbing. But the percentage of testlessness was up to, was anywhere between 30% and 50% in the female elephants, which is a lot. You know, if you're looking out into a herd, let's say it's about 20 elephants deep, you're seeing between like six and 10 elephants that don't have tusks there. So it's a major, major effect. And the similar numbers we're seen in the other African parks as well.

So it's not like testlessness never was. seen in elephants before. There were, you know, randomly there would be a female or male born without tusks pre-poaching. But with the specific, you know, factor of like heavily increased poaching and that connection to the very severe rise in testlessness, it seems pretty clear that the females were doing this just so that the, they wouldn't be targets for hunting. And it makes sense. You know, why would a poacher go after an elephant if it doesn't have tusks?

This has also been seen in other animals like big horn sheep, which are a commonly hunted game animal up in Canada. Some populations have gotten to the point where they have smaller horns because the ones with the bigger horns are more heavily hunted. So the big question, well, there are a couple big questions still. We still, because poaching is so defended against in Goringosa Park now, it's hard to know whether those females do evade poachers as they're intending to.

So most of this is still hypothetical, but it's a very strong hypothesis. And a very clever one, it seems, on the elephants part. But there could be some really serious survival disadvantages to not having tusks. So in a way, it could backfire on the female elephants in the herds. So that's something that biologists are still trying to figure out. We've had a couple decades to see this pattern of losing tusks. But now the question is, okay, how does it affect the elephant survival outside of poaching? One thing that scientists have already seen is that the elephants that don't have tusks,

they actually eat a different diet of plants than the elephants that do have tusks. Oh, wow. Because they have to forage in a different way. Right. They can't pull stuff and move stuff around in the same way. Yeah, like strip down tree bark, kind of dig up plants. So one question is, okay, is that diet just as nutritious? And even more of a far-out question is, if we end up with a elephant herd that is 30% tuskless,

what does that look like on the local environment? Like I said before, the fact that elephants have tusks, that really shapes what landscapes look like. We've kind of had similar questions about the disappearance of bison and buffalo. here in the U.S. Like that completely changed what the American West look like. So maybe we'll see the same effects in these microcosms of national parks in Africa. So lots of questions and maybe this bold daredevilish streak in female African elephants is not all that beneficial in the long run.

but it is a really interesting, really interesting adaptation to poaching. And very quick, too. It happened in just a few decades. Yeah, I was going to say, is that even two generations? Not even. Yeah, elephants are pretty long lived. They live a long time. Yeah.

I think, again, one reason it was expedited was because the pool of elephants became so small from the poaching. So any elephants that, any females that did have the mutations could pass it on and it kind of became amplified in those like maternal lineages. Yeah. It's so interesting. And it's going to be so fascinating to see how that impacts the landscape. Like you said, everything is so connected. I think there might be a song about that even that features some elephants. I won't sing it out today.

but okay next time we're all singing it in our hearts we'll remember and I do want to give a daredevil shout out to the park rangers who work at Gorgosa and some of these other sites in Africa it's a very dangerous job and I think we've all read stories about these conflicts that they have with poachers and many of them end up losing their lives

so yeah a lot of the wildlife diversity we have today is thanks to them and thanks to their own daredevilishness. Yeah. Awesome. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with one more fact. This summer, serve up the cookout classics. Oscar Meyer hot dogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard or loaded Chicago style. We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Meyer and Heinz. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs.

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Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. All right, we're back. And I am going to talk about why echolocation might be a much more common human superpower than you think. So in 2015, the NPR podcast Invisibilia did an episode called How to Become Batman. And that was my first real introduction to Daniel Kish, who's arguably the most famous human echolocator on the planet. But it wasn't the first time I'd seen him.

And even if you missed that NPR segment, you've probably seen viral videos of Kish. He lost his eyes to retinal cancer during infancy, but he has this ability to navigate the world that rivals that of any sighted person. He uses his tongue to make these clicking noises. And then he interprets the sounds and their echoes to give him feedback on the space and objects around him. And he is very, very good at it in a way that really, um, blows people away when they see it for the first time. And of course, inspires a lot of comparisons

to the superhero daredevil, which is why my husband Oliver suggested that I get into this one for today. So Kish is now famous for teaching loads of other people with visual impairments, how to use what he calls flash sonar. He prefers that to echolocation, though it is not surprising that people often make that comparison since that's echolocate by making little noises and then interpreting how they come back to them. And his prominence has inspired loads of research. And as it turns out, flash sonar or echolocation might actually be a pretty common superpower. So according to an analysis by Cambridge psychologists in 2014, the earliest known example of this practice was reported in 1954, when researchers described a child who produced clicking sounds

to navigate his neighborhood on his bicycle, and he was, of course, blind. But it's actually quite likely that the French philosopher Didero? Sure, that's his name. Great. Describe something similar in 1749. he recounted that a blind acquaintance of his could locate and estimate the positions of objects that didn't give off their own sound. He thought that his friend was like taking note of tiny changes in air pressure to his skin, which would be totally wild. And sure enough, as late as in the 1940s, folks were still trying to explain how that would actually work.

A lot of the proposed explanations were like very woo-woo bordering on occult. And it was around this time that researchers started to figure out that this might actually be an auditory thing. The objects weren't producing sound, but the people perceiving those objects obviously were, because people make sounds just by existing in a space. By the 1960s, folks had started doing experiments where, for example, they gave their blind subjects earplugs and thereby removed their ability to guess where objects were. And on the other hand, you had experiments that numbed the skin to try to negate the like very spooky sounding air pressure sensing and that had no actual effect on their ability to navigate.

So we got our way there eventually. And this, of course, makes sense. because even if you're not producing clicks with your tongue, moving around produces noise. Breathing produces noise. And everyone with the ability to hear uses audio to get information about the world. You can tell when a car is speeding by behind you. You also know when that car is gone. You can tell the big size and shape of like a horrifying dark void you're dropped into by saying,

hello, you know, you get the idea. All the time. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely to me, at least once a week. But all joking aside, we do definitely use auditory information to figure out the physical spaces we're in. I mean, if you think about, you know, kind of like 3D immersive audio sound design and how like if you're listening to an audio drama that uses 3D audio, you can like hear somewhere

walking around behind you and you can tell that they're leaning in and getting close based on like the quality of the whisper and where it is in space and you can tell that you're in like a I don't know a tiny room because of the quality of the sound so all of this is to say that like yes of course sound tells you about the space you're in and the objects around you and And obviously, when a visually impaired person who has the full use of their hearing uses a mobility tool like a cane, they're getting auditory input along with the tactile. So I think it's really interesting that it took someone doing something as like in your face and superhero-esque as Kish does for everyday sighted people to be like, oh, wow, that's so fucking cool. I wish I could do that. when really, like all visually impaired people who can hear probably do this.

And the good news is that you probably can too. So in 2021, an admittedly very small study led by researchers at Durham University showed that blind and sighted people like could learn to effectively use flash sonar with 10 weeks of sessions. So we're talking about like something from 40 to 60 hours of training total. And by the end of it, some of them were even better at specific tests of their spatial perception than long-term experts of the technique. And that's especially cool because the idea of deliberately teaching this practice to people

who could benefit from it is super new. Kish has really spearheaded that. So any methods of teaching it that seem particularly effective can really have a huge impact on someone's independence, confidence, and, of course, the resulting quality of life. And that brings me to kind of an unfortunate side note, but one that I hope is going to change soon. The work on this topic increasingly suggests that Kish's trajectory of teaching himself flash sonar, probably from infancy, isn't quite the wild superhero origin story it's often presented as in those viral videos. Or it is, but it doesn't have to be an uncommon superhero origin story.

It seems pretty clear that most humans who have limited vision and who don't have auditory limitations are capable of using hearing to replace sight. I know the heightened senses thing is like such a TV trope that you're probably like, duh, but I mean literally, when the average person off the street hears clicks like the ones Kish uses, their brain's just your noise. Your brain would react the same way you would react to any, man clicking his tongue. Whatever that calls to mind for you is what it calls to mind. But something different happens in your brain if you've learned to use flash sonar like

Kish has. And it's different between sighted people and blind people. So if you can see, parts of your brain associated with auditory processing light up in this particular pattern. You're recognizing that there is information encoded into these clicks. Like, give it as the equivalent as like your ears perking up at the neuron level. So you're looking for that information with the part of your brain that interprets audio, you know, that same part of your brain that's able to say, oh, there's someone walking behind me and they're wearing high heels, and they're getting closer and they're getting faster. Oh, no. Or, you know, whatever. Getting attacked by somebody in stilettos. That's the scenario. In blind... Every day. Yeah. Oh, my gosh,

all the time. It's the concrete jungle. In blind participants, though, researchers, they saw those same areas light up, but they also saw parts of the brain associated with visual processing light up. So the journal Frontiers for Young Minds, which basically writes up scientific findings for like very young children to read. Had a great way of explaining this that I'm going to steal because we're all children at heart, really. So imagine your brain is full of train lines. You've got your New York City subway and you've got your Metro North Regional Rail and you've got Amtrak and you need the right ticket to get on each one. Now consider the senses.

Site and hearing are quite similar to each other in that they take input from the world, light waves and sound waves and then convert them into electrical signals that your brain interprets because everything's made up inside your head. But they run on different rail lines. So research on so-called human echolocation shows us that if you're not using your visual processing centers, your brain can reroute different traffic there. So like imagine if suddenly your weekly subway ticket was good for Amtrak too. Wild. So when we say senses are heightened, it's important to remember that like we create senses inside our brains.

So what that looks like isn't like, oh, their hearing is so much sensitive, though it may literally be more sensitive in some people. But their brains are literally working smarter, not harder to better analyze auditory information using these train lines that otherwise would not have passengers. That's a cool analogy. Yeah. I loved it. Yeah.

I'm also just thinking about where I would go if my metro card suddenly worked on Amtrak. Right. I was like, it wouldn't be very useful for like day to day. That's where my picking specific train lines for this analogy falls apart. But imagine that it opened up a whole new world for you. So why do we care? Well, other than the fact that this is just really freaking cool and shows that brains are capable of doing some weird and wonderful stuff.

and also that, you know, differences in ability when it comes to particular senses do not translate to, you know, a loss of overall total ability to perceive the world. We also care because anything that involves getting your brain to do things differently than it generally does is easier when you're a kid. You know, we call that neuroplasticity and your brain is very plastic when you're a baby. simply because you've done less. Like your brain really forms these like neuron pathways that are like shortcuts. Like you, we often do things this way. So we're going to make a really, a really express train line that does this. And you can always alter the pathways in your brain.

That is what a lot of trauma therapy is designed to do. It's really cool that our brains can do this. but it will always be easiest to put in new train lines or reroute them when like there aren't train lines there yet or there haven't been any passengers on them yet. Like there's really, the world is your oyster when you've got a squishy little toddler brain from a neuroplasticity standpoint. All brains are squishy. So there's very real reason to believe that when you give a child the freedom to explore the

world around them using whatever senses they have available to them, that will set them up to be able to navigate the world without limitations as they get older. So there isn't much research on this yet, but there is this growing sense that probably a lot of people with visual impairments would learn to do this naturally or could, but are maybe hindered by a well-meaning attempt. to keep them safe. So if you are not given the opportunity to toddle around your house, you know, figuring out what noises your slappy feet make that translate to how fast you're careening down the hall and all of that fun stuff, that missing out on that period, you know, can make it harder

for you to do this later. Like I said, it does seem like it is totally possible for older people to learn. And so you should not feel disparaged, dismayed. You should not feel like you shouldn't try to do this if you think it could be fun, if you think it could improve your quality of life. But when it comes to parenting, it is a difficult but important thing for parents to try to remember. And that's an important lesson for all parents. actually, because research shows that having the ability to undertake risky, dangerous play in the safest

way possible is key to developing confidence and critical thinking skills and self-preservation. Even letting kids experiment with being, like, kind of mean or, like, beheading their Barbies, which is called Dark Play. We had a great essay about that in a previous issue of the magazine. I'll link to that on Popside.com slash weird. But even that kind of stuff where it's like, is my kid like identifying with the villain of this Disney movie? And are they going to do that forever? No.

Let them enjoy it for a couple weeks. It's an important way of letting people develop their own moral codes. As opposed to just feeling like afraid of everything or like I don't do this because I'm ashamed to identify strongly with the villain of this Disney movie. You know, that kind of thing. Obviously, parenting is very hard. and I am in awe of people who do it, but danger being a little bit of a daredevil does seem to be pretty important. I'm going to end with a quote from Daniel Kish that came up on a few kind of articles geared towards helping parents navigate this stuff and that I just really love and I think is universally applicable. He says, running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster.

That's great. Yeah, that's so good. Brains are wild. People can do anything. I love it. Yeah. Wow. No, I'm just thinking.

I remember how at the beginning, I was like, I'm a very risk-averse person. Thanks, dad. Yeah, I have to say doing researching this this morning, I was like, Thinking back on some moments of object terror in my childhood and being like, well, I guess that's why I hate breaking rules. I wasn't like feigning to do the things, right? Right. Like it wasn't like they had to hold me back. Yeah.

I don't remember ever being fearless. So. Something to. Well, and I have to say too, like I really. am in awe of parents who seem to have mastered this balance. And it's something that I worry I'm going to be really bad at once I'm a parent. Because like if I see a kid doing something and I'm worried they're going to fall, I'm like, oh, my heart is in my throat. And like I understand that there is like a, there's a fine line.

Like is that fall actually going to put the kid in like serious risk? A lot of falls won't. Some will. One time I thought... And sometimes your pogo stick explodes. Right, that too. And sometimes your pogo stick explodes. So it's all relative.

Anyway, I love this story for the neuroplasticity angle, but also, you know, just in terms of like the importance of not trying to figure out people's limitations for them. You know, we all have limits and no one will know them. us through trial and error. I have run into a pole before. Same. I think it was actually like a traffic sign or something, like, you know, or like a parking sign. I have very poor spatial awareness.

It's bad. My peripheral vision is fine, but I ignore it. So that's what I have going for me. I think I was looking at my phone. That'll do it too. That'll do it. I say run into polls. but do not put your tongue on a cold pole because that definitely is bad.

Yeah, absolutely. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? These are all so good. They are really good. I mean, Pogo blew my mind, but so did elephants. I know. I was going to say I like echolocation just because it has such a broad, it can affect so many people. Yeah, I think echolocation, right, is the one that's staying with me.

For me, it's just like, dude. I will accept the win by a hair with a very close tie for second from the two of you. So, excellent. Everybody, check out our daredevil issue. You can find links to subscribe on poptie.com. Or if you're already an Apple News Plus subscriber, you can find it right there in your feed. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now.

And if you like what you hear, please read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popseye.threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bode. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden.

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