I am sitting at my desk with my eyes closed, moving a dinner plate back and forth in front of my face while repeating “Test! Test! Test!”. It may look eccentric, but I am trying to teach myself the fascinating skill of echolocation: navigating the world by echo, just like a bat, or a dolphin.

Echolocation has gained prominence in recent years as a skill that some blind people use to map their surroundings with astonishing precision. They can detect trees, buildings or doorways by making a clicking sound with their mouth and listening for the echo.

But research has shown that the basics of orienting yourself this way can be learned by anyone, blind or sighted. A growing body of research encourages us to expand our sensory potential – awakening senses that have been neglected, suppressed, or even considered outside the human realm.

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Human echolocation has been known as a concept since the 1940s. But it has only been studied systematically in the last decade, both as a potentially life-changing skill for blind people and as a way of examining how our brain deals with sensory information.