 Most people don't expect a blind person to ride a bike, but I do. It's almost like a sixth sense. When we were visiting a doctor, they did all these exams on him and basically had a puzzled look to their face. Like, there is no way that this individual should be doing this. It's almost like a superpower. When I was first made aware of Brian Bushway, I checked him out on YouTube and I must say, I was a bit skeptical, but I was blown away at his abilities. People are heavily dependent upon vision to conduct their day-to-day lives. Can you imagine the world with no signs, no GPS, no screens? I wasn't always blind. I was 14 when I was playing hockey and my job was to keep the puck in front of the blue line and all of a sudden his shoe by me. My coach is just like, what are you doing? Get the puck! Move to the puck! Are you blind or something? And that's the fact of what was happening. The doctors told me that my optic nerves were deteriorating. It was just sort of this weird flute. And as the doctor turns off the lights, the lights never came back on. And I remember leaving the doctor's office and it was in the middle of the afternoon. I could feel the sun, but I couldn't see the sun. And I asked my mom and mom, like, where's the sun? One of the most heart-wrenching moments for me, as a kid Brian always had a little change jar and it said, car. And he'd put quarters, dimes, whatever he had in there. And one day he said to me, I'm never going to need this because I won't be able to drive a car. I was at a loss and I really did feel very limited. I couldn't find my way out of my room. And how was I then going to figure out ways to navigate the world was a completely overwhelming thought. And it threw me into an identity crisis of where do I fit in life? What does it mean to be a whole human being? Nobody really wants to deal with you anymore. And so you really feel this tension of exclusion. And it happens because we all think if we can't see, we can't do anything. This is the constant struggle that I find myself socially always in, is that people are underestimating my full capacity of what I can do. The first steps of getting outside into the world was being introduced to the white cane. The cane is great for information up close. But the cane is limiting to what only the cane can touch. But there was one day when my life changed forever. I had learned the route to my eighth grade class and I was walking by myself with my cane. And I was just walking out of the center of the hallway but I could tell that there was a pillar and an open space and a pillar and open space. I swear I could see these things and I touched them to confirm what they were. It was a pillar. What I was doing was passively echolocating these objects. It's human sonar. Echolocation is a term that biologists use to refer to the ability that some animals like bats and dolphins have to use sounds that they produce themselves to create echoes bouncing off things in the world around them and to use those echoes to understand what it is out there. Echolocation is the human ability to see with sound. Brian can use echolocation to navigate the world. He can use it to walk down the street without bumping into parked cars or whatever. But he can also use it to identify objects. For example, a bush from a tree. So he's sensitive to the nature of the echoes that are returning from that surface. And he can also tell, quite remarkably, the size of objects. I noticed this object here. I'm thinking sort of the size of it. It seems more broader at the bottom and it sort of gets taller at the top. We have a tree with all these sort of bushes here. And you can sort of sparse objects so you can sort of hear through a lot of this stuff too. But collectively, here's a sort of bushy area. You can hear even how the path continues up in that direction. It was more than just hearing. I was actually imaging the world around me. When we tested Brian on his ability to detect changes in the position of an object, he was absolutely astounding. He could tell if we moved the object only a few inches, something that I never expected someone who was echolocating would be able to do. He doesn't have super hearing or anything of that kind. He was tested by a clinical audiologist, someone who tests how good your hearing is. He's actually normal for his age. What he can do and what is quite amazing is that he can attend to these very tiny echoes that we ignore. Echolocation changed my life forever. My world became 3D. I was absolutely flabbergasted to find out that indeed those YouTubes were right on the money. I had never seen anything like that before. Brian was quite amazing. Never in my life could I have imagined that human beings could learn to see with sound, like bats and dolphins. If human beings can see with sound, what else is possible? Echolocation gave me real connection to my physical environment, which then gave me greater freedom to my social environment. The better I was at mobility, the easier it was to make friends and to do things with people. Everybody has something to learn from echolocation and that is that we all are capable of so much more than we previously thought. We're now just discovering in humanity that a person who is labeled blind can learn to image their world acoustically. This keeps life kind of fresh. We are really living in a new era of exploring the question what can blind people see? I mean, it's sort of a temporary state because now we can actually teach our brains to image acoustically. People often ask me, Brian, do you wish you could see? And my response is I already can.