by James Nestor
Bushway, who has a muscular frame and a frizzy mop of hair, tells me he began losing his vision at fourteen. One day, he couldn’t make out writing on a school chalkboard. A few weeks later, while playing hockey, he couldn’t find the puck. He started having trouble recognizing his friends. A new set of contact lenses didn’t help. When he woke up one morning and saw that everything in his field of vision was bright white, his mother rushed him to the hospital. A doctor dilated Bushway’s pupils, then turned off the light to conduct a routine check.
“The lights never came back on again,” says Bushway, taking a napkin from the table and placing it on his lap. “After that, I remember walking out of the office with my mom and asking, ‘Is the sun out?’”
The sun was out, but for the first time in his life, Bushway couldn’t see it. He would never see anything again.
Bushway suffered from optic nerve atrophy, a rare disease that destroyed the optic nerves in both eyes. After he got home from the doctor’s office, he spent the next several months feeling helpless. Doctors recommended doing a biopsy of his optic nerve so they could test whether the damage was genetic. Surgeons shaved half of his head, cut out a section of his skull, moved his brain aside, and clipped out part of his optic nerve. After the surgery, scar tissue formed on his brain. He started having seizures. Doctors put him on antiseizure medication, which gave him extreme vertigo and constant shakes. “I felt uncomfortable moving,” he says. “I just sat on the couch and listened to talk radio and books on tape.” The highlight of his day was going with his mother to a drive-through restaurant, picking up food, coming home, and eating it.
Bushway returned to school a few months after he lost his sight. In the past, he had prized his independence and lived an active lifestyle. Now, an adult needed to guide him around campus. He could no longer play sports, walk by himself, or relate to his friends. He felt like an outcast, totally alone. He dreaded the idea of living the rest of his life this way.
Weeks later, while standing in the courtyard of his school, he suddenly sensed something in front of him. It was a pillar. He noticed several more pillars next to it. “I wasn’t touching them,” he says. “I was five feet away, but I swore I could see them. I could count them—it was like a sixth sense; it’s even a magic power.”
Bushway was soon back to riding his skateboard, shooting hoops, and roller-blading. He joined a mountain-biking team and bombed down local trails. His vision hadn’t returned; the optic nerve damage was irreversible. Instead, another sense within him had suddenly turned on that allowed him to “see” through his blindness. With this sense, Bushway could point out a car in a parking lot a hundred yards away, tell you the width of a tree trunk from across a sidewalk, and distinguish a Rubik’s Cube and a tennis ball from across a dining-room table.
He honed these skills with the help of a blind activist named Daniel Kish, whom he’d met at a lunch for blind students a few weeks after first sensing the pillars at school. Kish, who had lost his own sight at the age of one, ran a nonprofit organization called World Access for the Blind. The program taught blind people how to use an echolocation system that Kish had developed called FlashSonar.
FlashSonar isn’t a device; all the tools required to use it exist inside the human body. And the “magic power” that allowed Bushway to first see the columns in the courtyard at school wasn’t magic at all, Kish explained. It was the same echolocation sense that dolphins and whales used to navigate through dark ocean depths for the past fifty million years. Humans could also “see” in the dark, he said. Most of us had just forgotten how.
BACK AT THE CUBAN RESTAURANT, I watch Bushway emit a quick, crisp click from his mouth, pause a second, and then reach across our table to grab a water glass. We pay the bill and Bushway clicks again as we get up from our table. He’s still clicking when he leads me out of the crowded restaurant, through a parking lot, and across bustling sidewalks. At the footpath to his apartment building, he stops, tells me to watch my step, and then takes me through his front door.
It’s time for my first lesson in FlashSonar. He asks me to stand arm to arm with him in the middle of his living room. He lifts his tongue to the roof of his mouth and slaps it down just behind his bottom teeth, releasing a click. He listens for the echo of this click to determine the shape and distance of things around him.
For instance, a wall three feet from him will reflect an echo faster than one further away. Objects sound different too, depending on their structure and materials. “If something looks soft,” Bushway tells me, “it will sound soft.” A wooden wall, for instance, absorbs more sound, so the echo will be more muted than that of a glass door. Bushway perceives these differences almost instantly.*
He clicks, then walks across his apartment living room and enters the kitchen. He bends down, opens a drawer, and pulls out a cutting board. He clicks again, approaches within two feet of me, stops, puts the cutting board at an arm’s length to the left of my head, and ties a blindfold over my eyes.
“Now click,” he says. I slap the tip of my tongue down to create a popping sound. With my eyes still blindfolded, I hear Bushway walk to my right side. He holds the cutting board up (although I can’t see it) and tells me to click again. I immediately sense a difference in the echoes. Within a few minutes I can identify the location of the cutting board at different spots around the room from a distance of about six feet.
I take the blindfold off. I’m feeling pretty confident, but Bushway jokingly tells me not to get too excited. Five-year-olds can do what I’m doing, and can probably do it better.
He mentions a Spanish study in which researchers took ten sighted volunteers and taught them the basics of FlashSonar during two training sessions. Each session lasted an hour or less. Afterward, the students were placed in an empty fifty-foot-by-fifty-foot room. A stereo played white noise and complex echo patterns in the background to mimic a real-world environment. Volunteers were able to detect flat surfaces like walls, wooden panels, and flat monitors from about thirty feet away. As they walked around, they were able to stop twenty inches away from hitting walls.
In 2011, a team of Canadian researchers placed Kish and another blind echolocator into fMRI machines and recorded the activity in their brains as they used FlashSonar techniques. The researchers then brought in two sighted subjects who had never used FlashSonar and had them click at their surroundings while they were being scanned by the fMRI machines. They compared the scans of the blind FlashSonar users with those of the sighted subjects. The scans revealed that when Kish and the other blind echolocators used FlashSonar, the visual part of their cortexes lit up. Sighted people showed no activity in this area when they clicked.
These findings suggested that FlashSonar users were processing auditory information in much the way the rest of us process visual information. The echolocators were, in essence, seeing via echoes.
The Master Switch and magnetoreception are latent and unconscious senses. We never know they are working. Human echolocation, however, is patent—we can consciously hear its effects and “see” its effect. And with some practice, anyone with decent hearing can hone this nonvisual sense of sight.
Bushway now works with Kish as an instructor for World Access for the Blind. In the past five years he has helped teach FlashSonar to more than five hundred blind people in fourteen countries. “When you go blind, the blind community gives you a cane, a dog, shows you how to go to the post office and a restaurant, then you come home,” he says. FlashSonar is a way to regain total freedom.
He tells me to put the blindfold back on. Then he opens the front door and leads me into a world as black as the ocean’s lowest depths. I stand still, waiting for my ears to acclimate to the sounds of the night city. Slowly, LA comes into focus in a new way, sounding sharper and richer than I’ve ever heard it before.
“Now,” Bushway says, “click.”
LIKE CETACEANS, WE TOO CAN use clicks and echoes to perceive and navigate through our world. Fabrice Schnöller
believes cetaceans also use these sounds to communicate with one another.
Back in Réunion, he closes the dolphin burst-pulse file on his computer and opens another audio file. The echolocation discussion is over, he says. He now wants to tell me why he’s invited me and a group of scientists, freedivers, and researchers to come here for the week. It concerns cetacean clicks, he says, but has nothing to do with seeing in the dark.
“I want you to look at this.” He points at the computer screen in his unkempt office. “Look at how coordinated it is.” On the display are two spectrogram readouts of dolphin vocalizations called whistles. The whistle patterns are precise, each separated from the next by the exact same millisecond-long interval.
Schnöller believes that cetacean clicks and whistles underlie a sophisticated form of communication. He plays two more dolphin whistles whose spectrogram patterns look identical to the last two. Dolphins can repeat these whistles in the exact same frequency and length over and over again. They can then add slight variations, repeat these multiple times, change them slightly, and so on. Schnöller says each of these whistle patterns could represent some form of language. “This isn’t, you know, your dog barking.” He laughs.
In one of his first experiments, in 2008, Schnöller downloaded dolphin whistles to a waterproof mobile phone and headed out in a motorboat along Réunion’s coast with his twelve-year-old daughter, Morgane. An hour later, dolphins approached the boat. Schnöller took an underwater video camera while Morgane grabbed the mobile phone, and the two jumped in. When they got within a few feet of the dolphins, Morgane pressed the phone’s Play button.
“It was the same as a dolphin popping its head out of the water and saying, ‘Hello, James,’” Schnöller explains. “Only I’m not sure what exactly we were saying to him. We could have been saying hello, or we could have been telling him to fuck off!”
One dolphin in the receiving pod, whom Schnöller named QuackQuack, stopped suddenly, did a double take, and replied with a series of high-pitched whistles, then swam away. Morgane turned up the phone’s volume and pressed Play again. QuackQuack stopped, turned, and repeated his reply.
“He thought we were really talking to him,” says Schnöller. “Like we had learned their language or something!”
In the months that followed, when Schnöller went to sea, QuackQuack would often find his boat, approach, and start vocalizing, as if he were picking up the conversation where they’d left off.
Schnöller tells me dolphins use specific, extremely detailed signature whistles to identify themselves in large groups. A mother dolphin will often whistle the same pattern to a newborn for days—a way, some marine biologists believe, to imprint a name on the baby. Dolphins use these name signatures when they approach other dolphins, to identify themselves. They also speak their names when they approach humans. Schnöller reasons that when QuackQuack heard a whistle blast from the mobile phone, he immediately replied with his name. He was introducing himself.
Last year, Schnöller created his own signature whistle, essentially his own dolphin name, to introduce himself to the dolphins. He specifically corrupted the whistle so that he could distinguish it from other dolphin whistles should the dolphins learn it and speak it back to him. All dolphin whistles ever recorded have been in the form of smooth sound waves. Schnöller’s whistle was very harsh in acoustic terms, a sharply angular square waveform—a form no dolphin had ever been recorded using. He motored out to the coast, tracked down a pod, got in the water, and started playing his strange signature whistle.
“The first time we try it they are very, very interested, but did not make any imitation,” Schnöller tells me. Six months later, Schnöller was back in the water recording the whistles of a different pod of dolphins. When he returned to his office and analyzed the recordings, he discovered that all ten dolphins in the pod had adopted his square signature whistle form into their whistles.
“They were using it in their language!” Schnöller says. To him, this was like traveling to some distant village in China to find that everyone knew your name.
Cetaceans have disproportionately large and complex brains compared with other animals. The brain of the bottle-nosed dolphin, for instance, is about 10 percent larger than that of a human, and in many ways more complex. For instance, the dolphin neocortex, the part of the brain that performs higher-order thinking functions like problem-solving, is proportionally larger than the human neocortex. To Schnöller, who had spent months in a brain lab while in college, this was no coincidence. It proved to him that dolphins and other cetaceans were very intelligent and capable of sophisticated communication.
Dolphins don’t have vocal cords or larynxes, so they can’t vocalize in a way that sounds like human speech. Instead, they use two small mouth-like structures embedded in their heads— vestiges of what were once nostrils. The dolphin can flex and bend these nasal passages, called phonic lips, to create a variety of sounds—whistles, burst pulses, clicks, and more—in frequencies that range between 75 and 150,000 Hz. Scientists did not detect many of these sounds for years because humans can’t hear them. (Humans can vocalize in frequencies from about 85 to 260 Hz; we can hear frequencies from only about 20 to 20,000 Hz.) The only way scientists discovered the dolphins were communicating at such high frequencies was by recording them and then playing the sounds back through a spectrogram. When they did, the sound waves of the whistles and clicks resembled a primitive form of hieroglyphics.
Schnöller realizes how far-fetched all of this might seem, and he’s determined not to go down what he calls a “New Age bullshit path.” All data he collects will be analyzed by established researchers in the field; all papers DareWin publishes will be peer reviewed first. “This will be real science,” he declares.
SCHNÖLLER HAS GOOD REASON TO be defensive. He’s following in a long line of researchers who have lost their minds or, at a minimum, their reputations by attempting to crack the cetacean language code. And no scientist is more representative of this crew than Dr. John C. Lilly, a neurophysiologist who began his career at the National Institute of Mental Health.
In 1958, during one of his first dolphin experiments, Lilly recorded a click-and-whistle conversation between dolphins and played it back at a slower rate. When he adjusted the frequency and speed of these dolphin sounds in water to match human speech in air, he found the ratio worked out to 4.5:1. This was a remarkable discovery. Sound travels 4.5 times faster in water than in air. The frequency of communication the dolphins were using, if modified to the density of water, Lilly wrote, matched the exact frequency of human speech in air. When he played the dolphin sounds at this slower speed, they sounded startlingly similar to human speech. Lilly concluded that dolphins were speaking a language similar to ours, but at a much faster speed, one far too rapid for us to comprehend. He announced his discoveries at an American Psychiatric Association meeting in San Francisco later that year and made international headlines.
By the early 1960s, Lilly had built a sprawling two-story compound that featured a thirty-thousand-gallon saltwater pool and a multiroom office/laboratory complex along the shore of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The sole purpose of this complex, which he named the Communications Research Institute, or CRI, was deciphering dolphin language.
In 1961, he joined renowned scientist Carl Sagan and Nobel Prize–winning chemist Melvin Calvin, among other esteemed astrophysicists and intellectuals, in a semisecret group called the Order of the Dolphin. The purpose of the order was to communicate with extraterrestrials; its first goal was to crack the dolphin language code. Members wore bottle-nosed-dolphin badges. They traded coded messages. Then they began experimenting. Sagan visited Lilly at CRI several times to help design lab tests, which Lilly started running.
In one experiment, Lilly took two dolphins and placed them in separate pools located at opposite ends of the laboratory building. Inside each pool was a hydrophone and speaker that would transmit sound between the two rooms—an intercom
of sorts. Lilly would leave the dolphins alone in their rooms and monitor their behavior in his sealed office. Whenever he opened the lines between the rooms, the dolphins immediately started emitting whistles and clicks. The pool in each laboratory was just a couple of feet wide and a few feet longer than the dolphin’s body; the animals couldn’t be using these sounds for echolocation. They were talking to each other.
Lilly discovered that each of the dolphins’ two phonic lips can operate independently of the other; one lip can whistle while the other clicks, and vice versa. During the experiments, sometimes one dolphin would click while the other whistled; other times, a single dolphin would click and whistle while the other remained silent. To the untrained ear, these vocalizations sounded cacophonous, but when Lilly studied recordings of them, he noticed that the exchanges were always consistent, in that the dolphins would never send clicks or whistles while the other dolphin was sending clicks or whistles. In other words, they never talked over each other.
The dolphins, Lilly deduced, could hold two separate, simultaneous conversations with two separate modes of communication, clicks and whistles—the equivalent of a human talking on the phone while chatting online.
When Lilly shut off the telephone, the conversation immediately ended, but the dolphins would repeat the same whistles over and over, as if to say, Hello? Hello? The results of the experiment were published in Science.*
Lilly was convinced dolphins were communicating in a language that was far faster, more efficient, and sophisticated than human speech. But he still had no idea how to translate the whistles and clicks into English. He continued the intercom experiments, regularly publishing the results in Science and other peer-reviewed journals.