Human echolocation working with other senses (besides eyes) can help blind people, Health Canal reports. David Buckingham from Heriot-Watt University has proved that people are able to get the right information about object sizes via echolocation.

Some blind people use echolocation to assess their environment and find their way around. They will either snap their fingers or click their tongue to bounce sound waves off objects. This skill is often associated with bats which use echolocation when flying.

The researchers had three groups taking part in the experiment: blind echolocators, blind non-echolocators, and control subjects with no visual impairment. All three groups were asked to judge the weight of three cubes which were identical in weight but differed in size.

The blind group who did not echolocate experienced no illusion, correctly judging the boxes as weighing the same amount as one another because they had no indication of how big each box was,” said Buckingham. “The sighted group, where each member was able to see how big each box was, overwhelmingly succumbed to the ‘size-weight illusion’ and experienced the smaller box as feeling a lot heavier than the largest one.”

 This showed that echolocation was able to influence their sense of how heavy something felt. This resembles how visual assessment influenced how heavy the boxes felt in the sighted group.”

The findings are consistent with earlier work showing that blind echolocators use “visual” regions of their brain when listening to their own echoes. This new work shows that echolocation is not just a functional tool to help visually-impaired individuals navigate their environment, but actually has the potential to be a complete sensory replacement for vision