"He clicks with his tongue as a way of understanding where he is in space. This is basically what bats do." That's how the science podcast Invisibilia recently described Daniel Kish, a blind man who taught himself how to navigate by echolocation. But their description slightly misses the mark. While both humans and bats can paint visual landscapes from echoes, the pointy-eared flyers possess a stark advantage: ultrasonic sound.

Those higher frequencies, which offer a much crisper picture of the world, underlie the Sonic Eye, a helmet that replicates bat echolocation.

"We were wondering whether humans needed special neural wiring to echolocate, or whether a human brain could do it with the same audio info that's available to a bat with ears designed for ultrasonic sounds," says Stanford theoretical neuroscientist and co-creator Jascha Sohl-Dickstein.