This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Many bats use a system similar to sonar to navigate in the dark.

They send out high frequency sound, sometimes as clicks, and get

information about their surroundings by the timing and quality of the sound that

bounces back. And just as turning up the light in a darkened room helps to illuminate the objects there,

bats are known to turn up the intensity of their clicks when they have trouble detecting a target.

Now bats have had millions of years of evolution basically to to sort of develop these mechanisms

to dynamically adjust their missions. Laura taller a neuroscientist at Durham

University in the UK and what we were wondering is, well, do people do the same?

Because some people with impaired vision

can indeed navigate using the echoes of finger snaps,

hand claps, or mouth clicks. But it's not known how dynamic that ability is. So Taller and her team presented

eight expert echo locators with a challenge. Could they tell whether a small

dinner plate-sized object was being held up about

three feet from their head by clicking alone? You can try this at home, by the way, with a plate or a book.

And if you hold it very close to your face while you're speaking, you can notice that the

sound that you hear really changes.

But move the plate 45 degrees to the side, then 90, then behind your head, and the task gets harder.

But similar to the way bats do, the study subjects increase the number of clicks and

their loudness as the object became harder to detect, perhaps as a way

to amplify the weak sounds echoing back. The subject still had trouble detecting the object a full 180

degrees behind them. They did only slightly better than chance. But they guessed

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