Positivity: Blind Boy Sees with Sound

The best adjective to describe how amazing Ben Underwood is hasn’t been invented.
It is a remarkable story of a boy overcoming blindness, in part thanks to loving but demanding mother (also catch the video at the link):

The Boy Who Sees with Sound

July 14, 2006

Blind since age 3, Ben Underwood skateboards, shoots hoops and plays video games. How does he do it? Just like bats and dolphins

There was the time a fifth grader thought it would be funny to punch the blind kid and run. So he snuck up on Ben Underwood and hit him in the face. That’s when Ben started his clicking thing. “I chased him, clicking until I got to him, then I socked him a good one,” says Ben, a skinny 14-year-old. “He didn’t reckon on me going after him. But I can hear walls, parked cars, you name it. I’m a master at this game.”
Ask people about Ben Underwood and you’ll hear dozens of stories like this – about the amazing boy who doesn’t seem to know he’s blind. There’s Ben zooming around on his skateboard outside his home in Sacramento; there he is playing kickball with his buddies. To see him speed down hallways and make sharp turns around corners is to observe a typical teen – except, that is, for the clicking. Completely blind since the age of 3, after retinal cancer claimed both his eyes (he now wears two prostheses), Ben has learned to perceive and locate objects by making a steady stream of sounds with his tongue, then listening for the echoes as they bounce off the surfaces around him. About as loud as the snapping of fingers, Ben’s clicks tell him what’s ahead: the echoes they produce can be soft (indicating metals), dense (wood) or sharp (glass). Judging by how loud or faint they are, Ben has learned to gauge distances.

The technique is called echolocation, and many species, most notably bats and dolphins, use it to get around. But a 14-year-old boy from Sacramento? While many blind people listen for echoes to some degree, Ben’s ability to navigate in his sightless world is, say experts, extraordinary. “His skills are rare,” says Dan Kish, a blind psychologist and leading teacher of echomobility among the blind. “Ben pushes the limits of human perception.”

Kish has taught echolocation to scores of blind people as a supplement to more traditional methods, such as walking with a cane or a guide dog, but only a handful of people in the world use echolocation alone to get around, according to the American Foundation for the Blind. A big part of the reason Ben has succeeded is his mother, who made the decision long ago never to coddle her son. “I always told him, ‘Your name is Benjamin Underwood, and you can do anything,’ ” says Aquanetta Gordon, 42, a utilities-company employee. “He can learn to fly an airplane if he wants to.”

….. Ben plays basketball with his pals, rides horses at camp and dances with girls at school events. He excels at PlayStation games by memorizing the sounds that characters and movements make. “People ask me if I’m lonely,” he says. “I’m not, because someone’s always around or I’ve got my cell phone and I’m always talking to friends. Being blind is not that different from not being blind.”

Ben was just 2 years old when doctors discovered his retinal cancer. Ben’s first Braille teacher, Barbara Haase, believes the boy’s ability to see during his first two years helped him develop “a sort of map of the physical world,” she says. Growing up, Ben got help from his brothers Joe, now 23, and Derius, 19, and sister Tiffany, 18. (His father, Stephen, died in 2002.) “They taught him how to find the seams on his clothes so he puts them on right side out, stuff like that,” says Aquanetta. “But they didn’t overdo it.”

….. Ben learned how to read Braille and walk with a cane, but when he was 3, he also began teaching himself echolocation, something he picked up by tossing objects and making clicking sounds to find them. His sense of hearing, teachers noticed, was exceptional. “One time a CD fell off his desk and I was reaching for it when he said, ‘Nah, I got it,’” says Kalli Carvalho, his language arts instructor. “He went right to it. Didn’t feel around. He just knew where it was because he heard where it hit.” Haase took walks with Ben to help him practice locating objects. “I said, ‘Okay, my car is the third car parked down the street. Tell me when we get there,’ ” she says. “As we pass the first vehicle, he says, ‘There’s the first car. Actually, a truck.’ And it was a pickup. He could tell the difference.”