Playing it by ear
From: R&D Magazine - 08/29/2013

As blind people can testify, we humans can hear more than one might think.
The blind learn to navigate using as guides the echoes of sounds they
themselves make. This enables them to sense the locations of walls and
corners, for instance: by tapping the ground with a stick or making clicking
sounds with the tongue, and analyzing the echoes reflected from nearby
surfaces, a blind person can map the relative positions of objects in the
vicinity. LMU biologists led by Professor Lutz Wiegrebe of the Department of
Neurobiology (Faculty of Biology) have now shown that sighted people can also
learn to echolocate objects in space, as they report in the biology journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.rdmag.com/news/2013/08/playing-it-ear

Links:
Echolocation versus echo suppression in humans (Abstract)
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1769/20131428.abstract

Lutz Wiegrebe
http://neuro.bio.lmu.de/members/systems_neuro_grothe/wiegrebe_l/index.html