Flash Sonar - Daniel Kish

Speaker 1 00:00

I'm Vaughan Bennison. Just before we get started on this week's episode of New Horizons, this program comes from 2016. So any information in the program may well be out of date. I would encourage you to do your own research.

(THEME) 00:14

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Speaker 1 00:41

Hello and welcome to this edition of New Horizons. I'm Vaughan Bennison. This week, we have the privilege of speaking to a visitor to Australia, Daniel Kish. Daniel is a specialist in orientation and mobility and lives in the United States. Daniel, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Can you start by telling us a bit about yourself and what it is that you do?

Speaker 2 01:00

I am an orientation and mobility specialist. I was certified in the States. I've been blind since I was about a year old from retinal blastoma. I have two master's degrees, one in Developmental Psychology and one in Special Education. And about 15 years ago, I led the establishment of World Access for the Blind to bring freedom of movement to a new level. So really to help blind people achieve a higher degree of freedom through movement and navigation than I felt was happening.

Speaker 1 01:35

Where did you feel at that time that orientation and mobility services were lacking?

Speaker 2 01:40

I felt that the instructional paradigm was relatively rigid, I felt it was too structured, I felt it was too regimented, and I did not feel that it was really student-centred. I felt it was more about what agenda teachers felt the need to teach than about what really goes on in the student's head and how a student interacts with their surroundings. I also felt that it was quite sight-centric, so it was based on a sighted perception of blindness rather than a blindness perception of blindness, and it was quite tied to sighted perspectives, especially at that time when there were no blind mobility specialists officially teaching. So as part of my master's thesis in psychology, I conducted a research project, it was a pilot in human echolocation, it was geared toward children, and it formed the basis of what is now our curriculum, which continues to evolve.

But there were very, very few instructors that I found at the time and since that were teaching echolocation to the degree that I was teaching it and using it, and able to help students use it. So with the use of strategic forms of echolocation and more advanced forms, blind people were able to move more confidently, more quickly, more gracefully, and engage in a wider range of activities, and most importantly, to establish their own relationship with their own environment on their own terms with little or no supervision or direction from others.

Speaker 1 03:18

Can we just clarify for listeners who are not blind and vision impaired, what echolocation actually is?

Speaker 2 03:24

James Holman, who was a blind explorer back in the 1700s, explored most of the known world from horseback. And he said the striking of his horse's hooves on the ground was like the striking of flint to him. And it provided him with these flashes of images of what was around him. We use tongue clicking, which has its advantages. But the principle is exactly the same. And before I came across this reference, I used to say that it was like striking a match in the dark. A very simple example would be if I make a continuous sound and then I move towards an object making that exact same sound, as the surface approaches and recedes, the signal being emitted changes. 

So if you take that principle and you expand upon it and refine it, you can use that process to not only determine that a surface is there and where it is, but to determine a lot of characteristics about the surface, its general contour, its size, its shape, its dimension, its texture, its density. And the detection process can occur for hundreds of metres with a large enough surface and with a strong enough signal.

Speaker 1 04:42

As children, most of us are told, Stop making that noise. Stop making that clicking noise. And I can remember as far back as... two or three sitting there and going and thinking, Oh gee, I can tell where the lights are, or I can hear how high the roof is. Or, and you know, my parents did tell me not to do it. And to some extent I listened and in other respects I didn't. Did you find that this was something that you had always grown up with, or did you develop it more recently?

Speaker 2 05:08

My parents would say that I had begun finding my way around quite comfortably somewhere between 15 and 18 months. Apparently, the click that I developed was relatively discrete, so no one can really remember exactly when it began happening. And I suppose it just sort of fit in maybe to the kinds of noises that an infant toddler might make. And as I got older, the concentration became more about how effectively I could navigate and less about how I did it, I suppose. I think that I just learned to tailor my click according to the activity and environment. So in very quiet environments, my clicks were very quiet in very loud environments. Of course, they were louder for objects that were further away, they were also stronger to be able to reach the objects. 

I was lucky in the sense that I didn't have a lot of instructors around me. I didn't attend a school for the blind. So there wasn't this sort of built-in, You must be this way or You must be that way if you're blind. Much more attention was given to what I could do.

Speaker 1 06:17

Well, I never stopped using echolocation, although I tend to use finger clips, clicks and maybe tapping my side, and sometimes my watch, if I'm in a room and I want to get an idea of how big the room is, I'll click my watch, all sorts of subtle things, or maybe if it's particularly noisy, lots of noisy traffic, of course I use the echo of the traffic to detect all sorts of interesting things. But often I'll walk a bit more heavily and I hadn't thought about it until I thought about doing this interview, just how much echolocation I use in my normal life. Do you find that's fairly common with blind people, or do you find that frequently you have to teach them these skills?

Speaker 2 06:57

It ranges from pretty much zero awareness and zero utility. I mean, it may be happening, but it's hard to measure and it's hard to observe, to relatively high levels. It has a lot to do with how much a person has been inhibited in their navigation, in their getting around. And it sounds like you weren't particularly, right? So you would be among those who tended to develop a stronger skill. So you're clearly using an active form of echolocation and it sounds like the signals you choose are signals that would fall into the range of what we would call Flash Sonar.

For the most part, you're choosing pulsed signals, which for scientific reasons that I won't go into tend to be most conducive to echolocation. The reason we propose the tongue click is this. It's hands-free. You have wide control over the signal. You can make it pretty much as quietly as possible or as loudly as possible. You can make it with little or no visual ticks or distractions. And it's relatively easy to focus, so it's easy to direct. And so it has most of the characteristics that make it a highly conducive signal for echolocation. That does not mean that finger snaps do not work. They do work quite well, sometimes better. It doesn't mean that the click on your watch, which probably sounds amazing, wouldn't work.

Speaker 1 08:27

How have you found it works for people with a hearing impairment?

Speaker 2 08:31

Like visual impairments, hearing impairments are a case-by-case thing, and there are a wide range of hearing impairments. So, broadly speaking, the most common form of hearing impairment is age-related hearing impairment or high-frequency hearing loss, and the interesting thing about high-frequency hearing loss is the low frequencies may not be affected. So there's a lot of echolocation that occurs in the lower frequencies as well, and there's there are a lot of highly useful, highly functional skills in the realm of navigation that can be done without high frequency.

So high frequencies give you detail. There's no question about that. So if you're looking for things like features of a surface or wire fences or shopping trolleys or bushes or, you know, you want a lot of information about your surroundings so that you can make some pretty precise decisions or determinations, those high frequencies definitely help you. But that said, detection of building lines, even at a great distance, detection of corners, detection of arrangements of largish or highly reflective surfaces, a lot of those things that really support navigation would not be affected by high frequency hearing loss and also hearing aids.

If they're spatially oriented, so if the hearing aids have been prescribed with spatial hearing in mind, you can echolocate quite well through hearing aids. I work with a boy in Canada who has a sensory neural hearing loss, so it isn't even high frequency hearing loss. It's hearing loss across the spectrum. He's aided in both ears, so he's adapted quite well to echolocating, crossing streets, crossing busy roads, crossing car parks, using bilateral hearing aids. 

Hi, I'm in Queensland at the moment. I did some talks in Sydney. I also did some talks and some private trainings in Melbourne. I'll be returning to Melbourne to do talks and trainings there. I was basically brought here by World Access for the Blind Australia, which is a sister company to World Access for the Blind US. They have brought our philosophy and approach to Australia with the intent of distributing it to blind folks in Australia. I will be releasing a textbook, end of this year, beginning of next year, which focuses on flash sonar, but it actually delineates our entire approach, which is Flash Sonar and Beyond.

In many ways, it rewrites the orientation and mobility curriculum and orientation of mobility, instructional methodologies, and paradigms. So it's a big step, and so far the field testing that American Printing House for the Blind has done in the US has been quite positive. I am expecting an onslaught of What about this, and Can you add this, and Can you expand upon that, etc., etc., which is good. That's a good thing, but it will keep me busy.

Speaker 1 11:33

Hmm, and I guess the obvious question is since you've been doing this: have you found that it's had a significant impact on the O&M system?

Speaker 2 11:42

I think the biggest difference has happened more in the general public and the general public's awareness of echolocation and what it is, and also the real capacities and the real challenges rather than the imagined challenges that may be faced by blind individuals. So we've been in articles in National Geographic, CNN, almost every major television and radio network in the world really and a variety of major publications all mainstream. The TED talk was mainstream and so we get a lot of responses from families, from blind clients, and even from the general public requesting more information about this. How can we learn it? How can we do it? How can we bring it to someone who we think might benefit, etc, etc. 

So our scope of interest frankly isn't just the blindness field, it isn't just the orientation and mobility profession. Our scope of interest is broader than that because every major change that has happened in the O&M profession has been brought about by pressures from outside that profession, not necessarily from interest within the profession. I mean of course there are sympathetic instructors who often push these things or a grassroots effort within the field who push these things but these I would dare say are the explorers, the discoverers, the frontier individuals who are willing to bend the rules if you will and willing to change the structure and willing to step outside of the march that is kind of imposed from on high in the profession.

So everything from early cane training, I was exposed to a cane when I was eight but regular training didn't begin until I was 12 and by that time I would have nothing of it. So that's changed and it changed because families wanted it to change. It changed because people wanted it to change and so it was a push, it was a push, it was a push and finally it changed and so I think that that flash sonar and also our instructional paradigm which is much more based in constructivism and not so much based in didacticism will also be a push from the outside.

Speaker 1 14:10

Well, I really do wish you luck with it - and thanks for joining us on the program.

Speaker 2 14:14

I appreciate the opportunity, thank you very much.

Speaker 1 14:17

That was Daniel Kish, an Orientation and Mobility Specialist. I'm Vaughan Bennison, if you'd like to contact me, you can do so by emailing new.horizons@bca.org.au ... Blind Citizens Australia can be contacted by emailing bca@bca.org.au or by calling 1-800-033-660. Thanks for joining me on this week's New Horizons. Take care, until next time.

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