[romwell]

That's not at all what echolocation is. What you describe is locating the source of sound using binaural hearing (similar to how we can gauge distances using stereoscopic vision).

Echolocation is finding out distance to objects (not sound sources!) by sending a sound wave in a direction, and listening for echos that bounce back. Hence echolocation.

The only sound source is you.

It's a form of active sensing: literally how a submarine sonar works (or radar, for that matter). Bats do it, too.

This has very little to do with "locating things in headphones", as that is entirely missing the active part in the first place.

Then, locating sound sources using binaural hearing is not the same as analyzing the scattered echoes when the sound source is you (relative to yourself, you know where you are already!).

It's interesting that this is currently the top comment. I wonder how many people read the article before engaging in this discussion.

[yazzku]

> literally how a submarine sonar works

And dolphins and whales, no need to go to submarines.

[jacobolus]

Interestingly, it took until after the invention of SONAR for the theory that bats navigate by echolocation to be accepted. The theory that bats use hearing for spatial awareness was first proposed in the late 18th century, with experimental evidence, but was rejected by the scientific establishment for more than a century. People didn't know marine mammals used echolocation until the 1950s.

[romwell]

I didn't know this, but the intuition that a tech example will be easier to grasp than an example from biology was why I mentioned sonar before bats in the first place.

Fascinating to find out that the scientific community had this kind of bias as well.

[almd]

yeah- yikes I did not expect that to happen. My comment was extremely tangential and there were a good few comments already when I added it. I completely agree - it’s not about echo location

[planewave]

This comment captures a lot of important detail about echolocation.

[romwell]

Thanks! I'm glad you found it useful.