The gist of the show was that the way we approach things, experiments, (dare I say life itself?) may affect what then happens. In the terms of the show, how our expectations of a particular result can bring about that exact result. While there's a danger here of veering into psuedo-science, I don't think there's anything superficially shocking here. The primary example from TAL was of an archetypal rat/maze experiment in which the rats had signs placed on their cages labelling them as 'smart' or 'dumb'. Lo and behold, when the rats were run through the mazes the 'smart' rats performed amazingly while the 'dumb' rats performed poorly. The twist here is that the rats were all just normal rats, any intellectual abilities they may have had were unknown and so identifying them as smart or otherwise almost certainly came down simply to the prejudices of the people involved in the experiment.
I wrote that this wasn't particularly shocking to me, what I initially thought was simply that the experimenters were using their judgement in some way, allowing the 'smart' rats to achieve higher scores than the 'dumb' rats by subtle differences in the way that information was recorded. The truth is a little more depressing than that it turns out. What actually happens is that the experimenters are nicer to the smart rats, handling them more gently and so on. This actually has a large effect on the rats performance, (I'm guessing) largely due to stress levels and the extra attention given to the smart rats. Thus are the results explained, although the idea that people are meaner to dumb rats than smart rats confuses and upsets me.
Taking this idea forward, the life of Daniel Kish is explored, or at least, his life as it relates to being blind and being an echolocator. There is a lot written about Daniel in various places so I don't really feel the need to repeat it in much detail, if you want a bit more than I'm offering here, listen to the podcast, watch this short video, read this interview or check out his wikipedia page.
The headline grabbing bit about Daniel is that he rides a bike, occasionally during rush hour, while blind. Having lost both of his eyes before the age of two, he has little choice really apart from possibly, you know, not riding a bike at all. Although, if you were to hear Daniel speak you would realise that this is not a choice at all. Having learned to navigate his way around the world using echoes from clicks he creates with his mouth, Daniel creates mental representations of the world in his visual cortex. The visual cortex has previously been supposed to be all but silent for blind people, at least until people actually started to look at it. However, experiments using the magic fMRI machine show that blind people who use this kind of echolocation have precisely the same areas of the visual cortex light up when presented with various representations (salad bowl, moving salad bowl, wall, etc) as a sighted person does.
The conclusion of Dr. Lore Thaler is that blind people who can echolocate have a 'vision' roughly equivalent to a normally sighted person's peripheral vision. Something akin to a person attempting to navigate whilst looking down at their hands (I'll stop short of comparing a blind person's navigational skills to those of someone who is texting, as the blind person is probably devoting their entire attention to the navigation, whereas the texter is not).
What really struck home for me about this whole story is that Daniel Kish developed his skills and now lives a happier, more independent life simply because his parents (well, parent, you'll have to listen to the podcast really) refused to wrap him in cotton. His mother didn't give him his independence exactly, but she refused to crush it. When Daniel's school told her to curtail his clicking because it was 'socially inappropriate', she refused. When friends, family and concerned neighbours told her to stop him riding bikes, she bought him a new one for Christmas. I will now write that horrible phrase which will remove any credibility but as a parent the thought of my child losing his eyes fills me with dread and I can only imagine that the temptation to coddle him for the rest of his life was extremely strong. Fighting this temptation is the knowledge that allowing your child to discover the world in his or her own way is the only way that they will truly find their own way around it.
Another amazing aspect of this whole story is that apparently blind children often develop this clicking or another form of echolocation as a means of navigation. What is awful is the thought that this ability might be taken away from them simply on the grounds that they are not behaving as we expect them to. It is Daniel's opinion (amongst others) that it is expectations like this which create helpless blind people, in no way is it the blindness itself. Despite his initial (and ongoing) reluctance, Daniel now runs the non-profit World Access for the Blind in order that he can help others develop the skills which he uses to navigate the world. I should point out that he finds nothing remarkable whatsoever in his ability to ride a bike through traffic. He detests being the 'blind guy on a bike', as if he is a sideshow act. If more people can take on board what he has to say then perhaps we could all learn to see things his way too.
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