Re: Implicit human echolocation

[Barry Blesser <bblesser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Any discussion about how we experience sounds immediately reveals the lack of a consistent vocabulary. Each author uses words as they see fit. One has such words as detection, awareness, decoding, perception, meaningfulness, significance, cognition, and so on. Similarly, one has theory, model, heuristic, concept, and so on. When I was doing a review of the literature, I was constantly struck by the difficulty of language.

 

To really understand the problem of language, I very strongly recommend Guy Deutscher's book, The Unfolding of Language. An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention.

 

Now back to the discussion of echolocation. I distinguish between hearing (perception) something and giving it a (interpretation) meaning. Most everyone can hear a spectral difference of a modest boost in low frequency background noise, but few can translate what that perception into a sense of distance to a wall.

 

Barry