Tongue helps blind find their way

Wednesday May 28, 2008

Published in The Telegraph

 Tek Lal and Manti are hoping that the new skill being taught in a workshop they are attending in the city will enable them to find their way through busy streets anywhere without turning to strangers for help.

Echolocation involved teaching the brain to perceive images with the help of sound stimuli and is commonly used by visually challenged people abroad, especially the UK.

The five-day workshop, organized by Mercy Hospital, is being conducted by Daniel Kish and Brian Bushway of World Access for the Blind, an American non-profit organization.  The first training session was held on Monday.

Kish, who is himself blind since birth, said all visually challenged people were naturally inclined to use echolocation to a certain extent.  What he and Bushway have done is develop this method into a full-fledged curriculum.

The first stage of learning echolocation is "stimulus comparison" through exposure to diverse objects, like buildings and bushes.  Students are taught to distinquish between them through the difference in sound reflected off each while clicking with the tongue.

The next stage is stimulus association, where students are required to compare an object with one perceived earlier.  In the final stage, participants are taken to an unfamiliar location and asked to find their way through it using their new skill.

Tek Lal is confident of "picking up" echolocation equickly.  "We use this method unconsciously," he said.  

Kish said a trained person would be able to accurately differentiate between objects solid and hollow, big and small, and gauge the distance at which it stands with just a lick of the tongue.  "A flat, dense object like a wall will produce a louder echo than a fence."

Kish's colleague, who has been blind from the age of 14, even does mountain biking and plays the bass guitar in a band.  The duo would like to return to the city for a more comprehensive programme.

Jabesh Dutt, the founder-director of Divine Fellowship Blind School where the workshop is being held, said the best part of the workshop was that the teachers were being trained, too.  "We will incorporate the technique into our curriculum," he added.