544: Batman

Ira Glass

So today we have a story that we think might make you believe something that right now you do not believe. And to tell that story, I'm joined here in the studio by NPR science reporters Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller. Hey there, guys.

Lulu Miller

Hi.

Alix Spiegel

Hello.

Ira Glass

And do I have this right? So you bought a rat, and you brought it to NPR headquarters in Washington, DC?

Alix Spiegel

We did.

Lulu Miller

Alix bought the rat.

Alix Spiegel

I did.

Ira Glass

And where at NPR did you bring the rat to?

Alix Spiegel

We ferreted it into a little kind of edit booth type thing--

[GIGGLING]

Alix Spiegel

--type office. And we invited people into the room one by one.

Alix Spiegel

And sat them down in front of this rat and asked this question.

Alix Spiegel

And it was almost unanimous. People did not believe that their personal thoughts would have any effect on the rat at all.

Alix Spiegel

And Ira, maybe that's what you think too.

Ira Glass

That is what I think. I don't think that people thinking thoughts will affect a rat's behavior.

Alix Spiegel

Well, you're wrong.

Ira Glass

No.

Ira Glass

OK, so who's this?

Alix Spiegel

This is a man named Bob Rosenthal. He's a research psychologist. And early in his career, he did this thing. He went into his lab late at night and hung signs on all of the rat cages. And some of the signs said that the rat in the cage was incredibly smart. And some of the signs said that the rat in the cage was incredibly dumb, even though neither of those things was true.

Alix Spiegel

So then Bob brings this group of experimenters into his lab, and he says, for the next week, some of you are going to get these incredibly smart rats. And some of you are going to get these incredibly stupid rats. And your job is to run your rat through a maze and record how well it does.

Alix Spiegel

So, Ira, we actually did a very lo-fi, unscientific version of this in that little room in NPR.

Ira Glass

They let you do that?

Alix Spiegel

We didn't ask permission.

Lulu Miller

And you've probably already guessed where this is going.

Alix Spiegel

Yeah. In Bob's real study, the experimenters ran the rats that they had been told were smart.

Alix Spiegel

And the rats they had been told were dumb.

Alix Spiegel

It was not even close.

Alix Spiegel

In Bob's real study, the smart rats did almost twice as well as the dumb rats.

Ira Glass

Wait, even though they were the same?

Alix Spiegel

Yeah, even though the smart rats were not smart and the dumb rats were not dumb. They were all just the same average kind of lab rat. It was so shocking, people didn't really believe him.

Ira Glass

And so what was going on? Like, what was actually happening to make the rats do this?

Alix Spiegel

So what Bob figured out was that the expectations that the experimenters carried in their heads subtly changed the way that the experimenters touched the rats, and that changed the way that the rats behaved. So when the experimenters thought that the rats were really smart, they felt more warmly towards the rats. And so they touched them more gently.

Ira Glass

And how does this play out when it comes to people? How do our expectations of other people work?

Alix Spiegel

Well, what you saw in the rats totally holds for people too. I talked to Carol Dweck, who's a psychologist and researcher at Stanford.

Alix Spiegel

And it happens in all kinds of areas. Research has shown that a teacher's expectations can raise or lower a student's IQ score, that a mother's expectations influences the drinking behavior of her middle schooler, that military trainers' expectations can literally make a soldier run faster or slower. So my question was-- you know, how far does this go?

Ira Glass

Well, from WBEZ, Chicago, it's This American Life. Today on our program, we have a kind of hard to believe example of what expectations can do to people. This story is from a new radio show and podcast that Alix and Lulu are launching this week. It's called Invisibilia. It's about the invisible forces that shape human behavior, like beliefs and assumptions and emotions, which I know sounds a little abstract. But in execution, I have to say it is anything but.

Ira Glass

Alix used to work here at our program. Lulu worked at Radiolab, and their new show is sort of halfway between the two. A quick heads-up before they launch into this. As you may have noticed, their voices sound a lot alike.

Lulu Miller

They are.

Alix Spiegel

Sorry. Yeah.

Ira Glass

Yes, I know that is not news to the two of you at all. So stay with us. And Lulu, let's just jump right in. Where do you want to start?

Lulu Miller

Well, I'll start with a question that I asked the rat scientist, the expectations guy, Bob Rosenthal.

Lulu Miller

So I'm deep in the woods of Southern California with a man named Daniel Kish. We've been hiking for hours, climbing over tree stumps and along the edges of a steep ravine. And we're just sitting down in the dirt to take a break.

Lulu Miller

And then Daniel pulls down his lower eyelids--

Lulu Miller

--and removes his eyes. They're prosthetic, of course, and they clink a little bit as he hands them over to me.

Two of the most beautiful hazel-blue eyes I've ever seen in the palm of his hand.

Daniel's eyes had to be removed when he was just a toddler because of cancer.

Lulu Miller

And yet he's the one who's led me on this hike deep into the woods. We get to forks in the road, and he knows they're there. He leads me across a footbridge that's maybe two and a half feet wide without slowing down.

Lulu Miller

And over and over, the path takes us right alongside the edge of a cliff. And Daniel gets within inches but always senses it. So how does he do it? Well, he's got a cane and a hiking stick. But mainly--

Lulu Miller

--he clicks.

He clicks with his tongue as a way of understanding where he is in space. This is basically what bats do. Echolocation, the scientists call it. It's like sonar. From the way those clicks bounce off of things in the environment, Daniel gets a sort of sonic representation of what's around him.

Lulu Miller

Now, Daniel just happened to intuitively invent this when he was a toddler. No one taught him or trained him. He just made it up. And since he's been doing it his whole life, he's now so good at it that he can tell all sorts of things about what's in front of him-- if there's a wall, if the vegetation is dense or sparse.

And not only does this allow him to hike--

Lulu Miller

--navigate foreign cities alone, rock climb, horseback ride, but the one that gets all the attention is that he can ride a bicycle.

Lulu Miller

You may have heard of Daniel Kish before.

Lulu Miller

He's usually called the Batman.

Lulu Miller

Because he is the man who clicks, like a bat.

Lulu Miller

And he has made the media rounds to demonstrate what is usually described as his most amazing--

Lulu Miller

--nearly superhuman ability of being able to ride a bicycle even though he is blind.

Lulu Miller

A narrative that Daniel thinks is all wrong.

Lulu Miller

This is Daniel's buddy Brian Bushway, who has had to watch his poor friend wheel out the old bicycle so many times for the media that he couldn't help but mock the whole set up when I asked him to do it for me.

Lulu Miller

And though Daniel indulged, pulling figure eights and riding beautifully as I ran beside him with my microphone, the two of them made it clear that my amazement was kind of offensive.

Lulu Miller

And here's where we get back to expectations. See, Daniel thinks there is nothing amazing about him. He thinks that most blind people who don't have other disabilities could do things like ride bikes.

Lulu Miller

See, he thinks the reason that more blind people don't isn't just because they haven't learned to click. But it's because the expectations that you or I are carrying around in our own heads about what blind people can do are simply way too low.

Lulu Miller

Daniel, like Bob, thinks those expectations, those private thoughts in our heads, are extremely powerful things, because over time, they have the ability to change the blind person we are thinking about.

Lulu Miller

And so Daniel thinks if we could all change our expectations of what blind people are capable of, then not only would you see a lot more blind people on bikes, but--

Lulu Miller

--in a very real way--

Lulu Miller

Yeah, he just said "see."

Lulu Miller

And it turns out neuroscientists are looking into this idea and seeing some pretty shocking results. And we'll get there. But first, to understand what Daniel means, how expectations could give a blind person vision, we need to first see how Daniel himself shot through this forcefield of low expectations, a story which starts back in 1967, when Daniel was 13 months old, and that second eyeball had just been removed.

Lulu Miller

This is Danielle's mother, Paulette Kish. And a few days after taking her son home from the hospital, Paulette realized she was facing a really difficult choice.

Lulu Miller

See, Daniel was a very rambunctious little guy.

Lulu Miller

And that didn't change when he went blind.

Lulu Miller

So Paulette needed to decide, was her mom right? Was it time to start putting some restrictions on him, or was she going to raise him like a seeing child, allow him to explore his world with very few restrictions on him for blindness? And Paulette went with option two. She was going to banish her fear.

Lulu Miller

And so, when two police officers showed up at her door--

Lulu Miller

--having picked up Daniel for climbing the fence into their neighbor's yard--

Lulu Miller

--Paulette felt their same worries--

Lulu Miller

--but didn't make Daniel stop.

Lulu Miller

And when the elementary school called and asked her to make Daniel stop clicking--

Lulu Miller

--Paulette said, too bad.

Lulu Miller

And so Daniel clicked, [TONGUE CLICKING], past people doing double takes on the street, [TONGUE CLICKING], occasionally bumping into things.

Lulu Miller

Your blind kid is not only scaling trees and fences by himself, but using just his clicks-- not even using a cane at that point-- he's walking to school by himself, crossing busy roads, exploring his way into neighbors' driveways.

Lulu Miller

He'd have to click way more than usual.

Lulu Miller

But by six years old, he could do it-- ride completely comfortably on the bike.

Lulu Miller

And when neighbors would pop their heads out the door--

Lulu Miller

--with their concerns--

Lulu Miller

--she'd look at his smiling face--

Lulu Miller

--and think--

Alix Spiegel

Hey, Lulu?

Lulu Miller

Yeah, Alix?

Alix Spiegel

Can I cut in with a question?

Lulu Miller

Yeah.

Alix Spiegel

Did he ever get hurt? Like, really hurt?

Lulu Miller

Well--

Lulu Miller

And this was not the only pole in Daniel's life. On the schoolyard, he ran into a pole and knocked out his front teeth.

Lulu Miller

A few years after that, he ran straight into a soccer shed.

Lulu Miller

So yeah, he got injured pretty badly a bunch of times. But the way that Paulette reacted to these injuries--

Lulu Miller

--was that she always let him keep going. I mean, shortly after the bike thing, a bicycle appeared under the Christmas tree.

Alix Spiegel

And, like, I am a mother, and I think that if my kid kept showing up with his front teeth knocked out, I would begin to wonder if I had made the right choice.

Lulu Miller

Yeah. Paulette knows it seems extreme, which brings me to the reason she decided to do this, to raise her blind kid so differently from the way that most blind kids are raised.

Lulu Miller

Daniel's biological father, who's now dead, would hit Paulette.

Lulu Miller

And he was tough with Daniel and Daniel's little brother, taught them to fight.

Lulu Miller

And Paulette says this is why she ended up being so hands-off with Daniel.

Lulu Miller

She says that after years of feeling so small and powerless in that marriage, when she finally made it out, she vowed never to be ruled by fear again.

Lulu Miller

And the same would go for Daniel. She refused to let those scary thoughts of what could happen make her keep Daniel too close.

I asked her.

Lulu Miller

And so bikes were bought for Christmas.

Lulu Miller

And tree climbing was permitted.

Lulu Miller

And this blind little boy was allowed to wander the world as freely as any sighted child.

Alix Spiegel

I mean, were they considered outside the norm? Did they consider themselves outside the norm?

Lulu Miller

I don't think they noticed it much. I don't think they thought about it much. Particularly Daniel didn't know that there was anything odd about the way he got around the world.

Lulu Miller

So Alix?

Alix Spiegel

Yeah.

Lulu Miller

This is where the story takes a kind of complicated turn, because Adam is basically the first other blind person that Daniel ever encounters. They meet in the fifth grade, when Adam suddenly enrolls in Daniel's school.

And Daniel was not exactly welcoming.

Lulu Miller

Daniel said that Adam completely unnerved him because of how incapable he was of getting around on his own.

Lulu Miller

Adam says he had simply never needed to get around on his own before.

Lulu Miller

And there, he was taken around on someone's arm almost all the time. In the lunchroom, people brought him his food. They helped him carry his books, helped him tie his shoelaces.

Lulu Miller

And Daniel was baffled by Adam.

Lulu Miller

He'd come home to his mom mystified.

Lulu Miller

And then what happened is that the kids at school started to mix up Daniel and Adam.

Lulu Miller

And so almost to prove his distinction from Adam--

Lulu Miller

He started bullying him.

Lulu Miller

He'd tease him in front of other kids--

Lulu Miller

--and even beat him up a few times.

Alix Spiegel

So then what happened?

Lulu Miller

Um--

Lulu Miller

Adam and Daniel went to different schools, and Daniel just tried his best to forget this kid so like him, who couldn't get around in the world.

Lulu Miller

Daniel goes off to college, doesn't really associate himself with the blind community. His plan is to become a researcher, an autism researcher. And then one day, he happens to pick up this book.

This is the book's author, Bob Scott, a former professor of sociology at Princeton. And inside this book was the idea that would change Daniel's life, an idea that when you first hear it sounds kind of out there-- that blindness is a social construction.

Alix Spiegel

Wait, was Bob saying that people are not physically blind?

Lulu Miller

Kind of. But let me just tell you how he gets there.

Alix Spiegel

OK.

Lulu Miller

OK?

Alix Spiegel

OK.

Lulu Miller

So fresh out of grad school, Bob got this job to conduct a huge, multi-year long survey to see how effective blindness organizations were at helping the blind.

Lulu Miller

And so he begins interviewing hundreds of blind people, goes out on hundreds of site visits.

Lulu Miller

And then one day, many months into the process, he had--

Lulu Miller

He was out walking in a snowstorm in New York City, when he happened to see--

Lulu Miller

--asking for money--

Lulu Miller

And he thought, hey, someone else to interview for my survey.

Lulu Miller

Turns out the man had worked at a paint factory until a few years before, when an accident there left him blind. And the people at the factory really liked the guy, so they said, look, why don't you go to an organization for the blind, get some training, and then come back and work for us? So the guy said, great.

He went to an organization for the blind. He said, I've got this job all lined up. Can you just help me with a few basic things. And the blindness organization said no.

Lulu Miller

And Bob said there was one sentence in that response that jumped out at him.

Lulu Miller

And he began to wonder, wait, is that true? Could this guy really not work in a paint factory? Because over the course of his research, he'd seen blind people that could do all sorts of things. And the more that Bob looked around, he started to see that message--

Lulu Miller

--being communicated to the blind people by the blind organizations that serve them-- not necessarily always as explicitly as in the case of the paint guy.

Alix Spiegel

Like, how else then?

Lulu Miller

Well, take the fact that at that time, of the almost 20,000 blind kids that were in America, 2/3 of them were being kept on the sidelines in gym class. Play tag, run around on your own--

Lulu Miller

And then there was the organization's insistence that adult blind people get help getting around.

Lulu Miller

And even though all this was intended to help, Bob began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the organizations' low expectations for what blind people could do was in some way actually limiting the blind people that those organizations sought to help.

Alix Spiegel

Hey, Lulu?

Lulu Miller

Yeah, Alix?

Alix Spiegel

So is Bob saying that blindness is mostly in our head? That blind people can actually do everything that sighted people can do? Because my dad is blind, and he is very, very limited in what he can do. And I gotta say, I don't feel like the obstacles that he faces are obstacles that he wouldn't face if he just thought differently about his blindness.

Lulu Miller

Well, Bob is pretty hardcore about this. I think he would say that with enough time, your dad actually could do a lot more, because he thinks the only real absolute physical limitation of blindness is about an inability to perceive things in the distance.

Lulu Miller

But you can compensate for everything else. And Alix?

Alix Spiegel

Uh-huh?

Lulu Miller

Bob wasn't actually the first person to come up with this idea. Blind people were. A group called the National Federation of the Blind has for a long time advocated this kind of idea. This is a group formed by blind people for blind people, and they think that the physical condition of blindness--

Alix Spiegel

So if you buy this logic, people who are blind-- like, the only thing that's standing between them and walking around the world, like Daniel does, is our beliefs?

Lulu Miller

Yeah. You know, that sounds totally crazy, and that is exactly what he's saying. Which brings us back to Daniel. Daniel reads this book, and he starts thinking about Adam.

Lulu Miller

You know, maybe it wasn't that Adam was this weirdo, tentative kid but that he was a very typical product of a system.

Alix Spiegel

You mean, like, the system taught Adam that he would have trouble moving around.

Lulu Miller

Yeah. I mean, he was led around school. People brought him his food--

Lulu Miller

And when Daniel looked at the world around him, he thought, you know, a lot has changed. But a lot is frighteningly similar.

Alix Spiegel

From then till today, things are similar?

Lulu Miller

Yeah.

Lulu Miller

I called around to over a dozen blindness organizations all over the country.

Lulu Miller

And supervisor after supervisor told me that what Bob Scott saw is still very much alive today.

Alix Spiegel

In what way?

Lulu Miller

So most children who are blind in America don't actually go to schools for the blind anymore.

Lulu Miller

Thanks to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, most blind kids stay in their local public schools, which is great. But on those public school grounds, says Norris--

Lulu Miller

So many of the blind students are still placed with a paraeducator, which can be good. But sometimes--

Lulu Miller

Like Adam.

Lulu Miller

I talked to mothers whose blind kids were pulled off of playground equipment. And perhaps the most chilling thing is the fact that most blind kids will intuitively start clicking--

Lulu Miller

--or snapping or stamping to test out their environment with sound. But they are so often discouraged--

Lulu Miller

--that they never get the chance to develop their skill to the level Daniel did.

Lulu Miller

He points out that in America, a majority of blind people are unemployed. And while that could be for a lot of reasons, Norris thinks that's on us.

Lulu Miller

That's Daniel Kish again.

Lulu Miller

And so, though he had never wanted to work in the profession of blindness-- in fact, he'd wanted to get as far away from it as he could-- Daniel Kish decided he sort of had no choice.

Lulu Miller

He could see what was happening. And he held in his tongue, [TONGUE CLICKING], a way out. So he decided that he would dedicate his life to trying to liberate blind children.

Alix Spiegel

Kind of like Batman?

Lulu Miller

Exactamundo, fighting for good in the world in a kind of vigilante way, because actually, the way that you go about liberating a blind child from the constraining forces of culture, it can get kind of ugly.

Ira Glass

Coming up, the Dark Knight rises. Lulu and Alix are back in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today on our program, we have a story from a brand new radio show and podcast called Invisibilia. It's from NPR News. Science reporters Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller are the hosts. And they're here today talking about how profoundly other people's expectations can affect us and about a blind man named Daniel Kish. Anyway, again, here's Alix.

Alix Spiegel

So when last we met Daniel, he had decided that he was going to become a kind of real-life Batman who would save people who were blind from the low expectations of their culture. But before we keep going, I should probably point out that lots of blind people don't necessarily want him as their savior. A bunch of them told us, basically, clicks shmicks!

Alix Spiegel

This is Bob Ringwald, a musician in California. He says he's got a cane. It works great. He does everything he wants.

Alix Spiegel

Now, Bob Ringwald-- in fact, all of the blind people that we spoke to for this story-- agreed with Daniel that low expectations hold blind people back. But that didn't necessarily mean that they wanted to echolocate. For example, when Bob Ringwald was seven, in school for the blind back in the '50s, he knew some kids who clicked and said they just seemed a little weird.

Alix Spiegel

Eric Woods is also blind, and a retired mobility instructor in Colorado.

Alix Spiegel

And Daniel knew this. He knew what he was up against. So Lulu, what did Daniel do?

Lulu Miller

Well, he starts up a nonprofit, as you do-- a nonprofit that will teach people how to echolocate.

Lulu Miller

This is one of his early instructional videos. It's now 2001, and since his aim is nothing short of liberation, he calls it World Access for the Blind.

Lulu Miller

Now, the only little problem that he runs into is that at that time, a blind person teaching another blind person how to get around is basically unheard of.

Lulu Miller

In fact, until the mid '90s--

Alix Spiegel

Wow.

Lulu Miller

So this is actually when the bike trick became big-- like, though he sort of hates "Look at the blind man ride a bike," he realized that could get him attention. So he starts going on all these TV shows with his trick.

Lulu Miller

And on these TV appearances, he'd try to send some sort of signal to blind kids who might be watching, who might be able to contact him.

[APPLAUSE]

Lulu Miller

And it worked.

Lulu Miller

Slowly but surely, families started contacting him, which meant that Daniel was now faced with a question. Could he actually undo the damage of low expectations? And this is where things begin to get a little morally complicated.

Lulu Miller

Daniel told me about going out to teach one of his first students ever, a little 10-year-old boy.

Lulu Miller

Out in Washington state.

Lulu Miller

And so Daniel's idea was to get him to climb a tree.

Lulu Miller

But the kid won't budge. So to get him out the door, Daniel takes away all his toys.

Lulu Miller

And after about a week, the kid finally agrees to go climb a frickin' tree. And he gets up onto the first branch and the second branch and then says, OK.

Alix Spiegel

Oh my god, Lulu. And what does Daniel do?

Lulu Miller

Well, he catches him. He's right below him. And he just says, no.

Lulu Miller

And they stay in this tree battling it out.

Lulu Miller

But by the end, the kid was doing it himself.

Lulu Miller

And Daniel thinks this training and how the parents then took it on too changed the boy's life.

Alix Spiegel

Hm. That is just crazy, though, that story, on some level. I don't know if that kind of bullying is even allowed in America anymore, you know?

Lulu Miller

Yeah. And most schools for the blind have been reluctant to hire him because of liability issues. They're scared it'll be too dangerous for their students.

Alix Spiegel

I bet.

Lulu Miller

But see, Daniel would say that attitude, Alix, is part of the problem. So what are a few tears, huh, a few scratches? He has this line he always says.

Lulu Miller

He worries that when you prevent a kid from, say, running into a pole, what you end up preventing them from is the kind of experience that allow for-- and this gets me back to that crazy sounding claim he made at the beginning of the show-- actual sight.

Lulu Miller

Daniel thinks this because, well, he says he sees.

Lulu Miller

And he isn't talking metaphorically here.

Lulu Miller

This is Lore Thaler, a German neuroscientist at Durham University in the UK. And Lore knows a lot about sight. She studies vision in the brain-- literally how the images we see are constructed.

Lulu Miller

Several years ago, Lore happened across a video of Daniel.

Lulu Miller

And as she watched the way that he so easily moved through space, she found herself wondering, was there any way that Daniel's brain was indeed constructing images?

Lulu Miller

OK, so you may know this already, but Lore reminded me that an image, even though it feels like it's out there in the world in front of your eyes actually exists behind the eyes.

Lulu Miller

In a part of your brain called the visual cortex. So Lore brought Daniel and a few other people who can echolocate into her lab, and she took recordings of them while they clicked at different objects in space.

Lulu Miller

A car, a lamppost-- these are her actual recordings-- a salad bowl, a salad bowl in motion.

Alix Spiegel

How do you get a salad bowl in motion?

Lulu Miller

You stand behind the person with a salad bowl on a fishing pole, and you slowly wave it.

Alix Spiegel

Right.

Lulu Miller

And the microphones were actually in their ears.

Alix Spiegel

Oh, that's neat.

Lulu Miller

And then she played the recordings back to them, one object at a time, while they were lying down in fMRI machines, so she could watch how their brains responded. [TONGUE CLICKING] Salad bowl. [TONGUE CLICKING] Salad bowl in motion.

And then in a second study, she compared those readings to what happens in the brains of sighted people looking at the same kinds of things. Salad bowl. Salad bowl in motion.

Alix Spiegel

Very clever, very clever.

Lulu Miller

Yep. And what she found is that even though for decades scientists assumed that the visual cortex goes dark when you are blind, Daniel's was lighting up like a disco ball.

Lulu Miller

And the way in which it was lighting up-- this is really cool. So it turns out that there are all these different parts of the brain involved in vision. So there's an area that's specifically dedicated to processing motion, and that's way over here behind the ears. And then there's a completely different area for texture--

Lulu Miller

--orientation, shape. And in Daniel's brain, many of these areas were lighting up. Color and brightness, no action there. But motion, when they did that salad bowl in motion test, the motion area behind the ears started pumping with blood flow.

Lulu Miller

And orientation-- turns out there's sort of a grid for orientation in the brain. And she could watch as the salad bowl moved across those quadrants.

Lulu Miller

All right, Miss Spiegel. So I know that sometimes neurology and neuroscience--

Alix Spiegel

Goes over my head?

Lulu Miller

Or just sounds like a foreign language that you're not particularly interested in speaking.

Alix Spiegel

Uh-huh. Just land the plane for me. What does this mean?

Lulu Miller

What this work suggests is that you may not actually need eyes to see.

Now, Lore is by no means the only person seeing this result. The idea first started coming up in the mid '90s, when a lab at Harvard saw that visual areas of the brain can be activated by sound and touch.

Lulu Miller

And since then, dozens of labs have been looking into just how nuanced and rich that visual imagery may be. So there's a guy at Berkeley, Santani Teng, who's been trying to determine the acuity of these images. You know, like an eye test-- how close to 20/20 are they?

Alix Spiegel

Uh-huh.

Lulu Miller

And what he's found is that their 75% localization thresholds indicated spatial acuity as fine as 1.5 degrees of the subtended angle.

Alix Spiegel

No!

Lulu Miller

It's true! I'll put it another way. He thinks their world looks a lot like your peripheral vision. So imagine that you're texting on your cellphone walking down the street. OK, you're looking at that screen. Now, what does the street look like to you?

You know, you can see people coming at you. You can see cars. You can see trees. But you couldn't read a sign. That, he thinks, is Daniel's world.

Alix Spiegel

So what does Lore say about this? Does she think that the echolocators are actually seeing?

Lulu Miller

Well--

Lulu Miller

Lore asks the only people on Earth who can know-- people who use to see. You know, is what they're experiencing comparable?

Lulu Miller

This is Brian Bushway, who you met briefly at the top of the show.

Lulu Miller

But once he learned echolocation--

Lulu Miller

--the world around him, although blurrier and colorless, appeared again.

Alix Spiegel

Wait, wait, wait. So Lulu, does every blind person have this?

Lulu Miller

No. And that's the thing-- Lore has looked at the brains of people who do not echolocate, and though there's definitely some activity in the visual cortex, it's simply not as active. Which brings me back to Daniel's teaching methods. The thing about echolocation is, yes, you can learn it when you get older. But it gets so much harder with age, which is why Daniel doesn't give a damn about making a little kid cry, because he thinks at the other end of those tears is sight.

Lulu Miller

So I finally got to see one of these training sessions in action. We went to see a five-year-old boy named Nathan Nip.

Lulu Miller

Brian's with us too, actually. He's now one of Daniel's deputy teachers.

Lulu Miller

And part of the goal that day was to get Nathan out of his comfort zone. But the bigger part-- and really, what is often this other major part of what Daniel is trying to teach-- is to get the people around Nathan to back off.

Lulu Miller

So we go into the house.

Lulu Miller

Daniel asks to hear Nathan's clicks.

Lulu Miller

And then we head out to a faraway park.

Lulu Miller

Ding, ding, ding. It's a sports field flanked by a really busy road.

Lulu Miller

And the idea is to make Nathan find his way around this park by himself.

Lulu Miller

So he finds a soccer net.

Lulu Miller

He tries to find a fence at one side of the park--

Lulu Miller

--but gets a little turned around.

Lulu Miller

And then it's time to find the edge of the road.

Lulu Miller

So Brian tells Nathan to walk toward those cars.

Lulu Miller

At this point, it's just me and the godmother and Brian.

Lulu Miller

Everyone else is on the other side of the park.

Lulu Miller

Nathan is leading.

Lulu Miller

And picture this-- I mean, this is, like, a little five-year-old boy with a tiny white cane--

Alix Spiegel

Kind of tapping his way towards oncoming traffic?

Lulu Miller

Tapping his way toward oncoming traffic, which is a jarring sight. And the person closest to him is Brian, who is also blind.

Lulu Miller

And he's getting closer and closer to the edge of the road. Four feet, three feet, and then--

[CAR APPROACHING]

[SILENCE]

--his godmother just shoots out and grabs him back. And Brian kind of noticeably flinched.

Lulu Miller

Because while he completely understands why the godmother would reach out for Nathan, he said it is precisely that kind of moment that does the damage.

Lulu Miller

I think part of the problem is that when we have eyes, we can see things coming from further away. The whole point is, like, when it's your cane and you're clicking, you catch edges at what appears like the last moment.

Alix Spiegel

Can I ask you a question?

Lulu Miller

Mm-hmm.

Alix Spiegel

What if you're a half-second too late?

Lulu Miller

Right.

Alix Spiegel

Because I think that probably a lot of parents-- I mean, the thing that keeps them reaching out well before the half-second before is kind of the specter of the half-second after.

Well, this is exactly what Nathan's godmother brought up.

Lulu Miller

She understands the dangers of a half-second too early.

Lulu Miller

But at the end of the day, she is far more concerned about the dangers of the half-second too late.

Lulu Miller

Which brings me to possibly the biggest thing that Daniel is up against in his quest to change expectations-- love.

Lulu Miller

This is Dan Norris again from the blindness organization in Vermont. And when we asked him if a change like the one Daniel's hoping for, a massive change in expectations, could actually take place, one of the main obstacles he brought up was love.

Lulu Miller

Even when the expectations for that kid are high, he said love can get in the way.

Lulu Miller

But when he thinks about the sheer volume of love, brimming in every household on every schoolyard and every street corner--

Lulu Miller

And this gets us finally to what may have been Daniel's one true superpower.

Lulu Miller

Daniel is 49 and has never been with a partner. And he finds the whole idea of physical intimacy--

Lulu Miller

We had finally reached the end of our hike, the place Daniel wanted to take me.

It was a huge old oak tree, miles from civilization, that Daniel said was one of his favorite spots on Earth.

Lulu Miller

And so we climbed up it together.

Lulu Miller

20 feet, 30 feet, maybe 40 feet.

And it was there in the branches that he told me he's never really been one for love.

Lulu Miller

He even used to have nightmares about it.

Lulu Miller

In one, a hand chased after him.

Lulu Miller

He's not sure where this comes from. He wonders if it could have been the surgeries he had as a tiny boy or from the way his parents raised him. Or maybe he just always was that way.

Lulu Miller

And while he's not suggesting that you need this quality to become independent, when he looks back, he wonders if this may have been one of the things that protected him from the debilitating effects of low expectations. Because unlike the rest of us, when those arms reached out for him, he never once had any desire to fall back into them.

Lulu Miller

That's his mom again, Paulette.

Lulu Miller

We sat there for a while, watching the afternoon slip away.

Lulu Miller

And suddenly I got that pang you get when you realize it's getting dark, and you are far, far from civilization. And that was followed by another pang that it literally didn't matter, because he'd be the one leading us out.

Ira Glass

Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel of Invisibilia, the new public radio program and podcast. Lots of public radio stations, hundreds of them, have picked up the show. So check your local station's website to see if they might be carrying it and when. Or to get the podcast, go to npr.org/invisibilia.

Ira Glass

Our program was produced today by Sean Cole and myself, with Stefanie Foo, Chana Joffe-Walt, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. NPR's Anne Gudenkauf is the editor in Invisibilia. She edited today's story. Production help today from JP Dukes and Simon Adler. Seth Lind is our operations director. Emily Condon's our production manager. Elise Bergerson's our office manager. Adrianne Mathiowetz runs our website. Elna Baker scouts stories for our show. Research help today from Christopher Swetala. Music help from Damien Graef.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He says, sure, yes, it's true. He was found wearing a bathing suit standing out in the middle of the street in the middle of winter, in the middle of night, holding a quarter million dollars in cash that was not his.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.