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The Boy Who Sees with Sound
Posted on Thursday, July 20, 2006 (CDT) by Thoth
 There was the time a fifth grader thought it would be funny to punch the blind kid and run. So he snuck up on Ben Underwood and hit him in the face. That's when Ben started his clicking thing. "I chased him, clicking until I got to him, then I socked him a good one," says Ben, a skinny 14-year-old. "He didn't reckon on me going after him. But I can hear walls, parked cars, you name it. I'm a master at this game."
Ask people about Ben Underwood and you'll hear dozens of stories like this – about the amazing boy who doesn't seem to know he's blind. There's Ben zooming around on his skateboard outside his home in Sacramento; there he is playing kickball with his buddies.
To see him speed down hallways and make sharp turns around corners is to observe a typical teen – except, that is, for the clicking.
Completely
blind since the age of 3, after retinal cancer claimed both his eyes
(he now wears two prostheses), Ben has learned to perceive and locate
objects by making a steady stream of sounds with his tongue, then
listening for the echoes as they bounce off the surfaces around him.
About as loud as the snapping of fingers, Ben's clicks tell him what's
ahead: the echoes they produce can be soft (indicating metals), dense
(wood) or sharp (glass). Judging by how loud or faint they are, Ben has
learned to gauge distances.
The technique is called
echolocation, and many species, most notably bats and dolphins, use it
to get around. But a 14-year-old boy from Sacramento? While many blind
people listen for echoes to some degree, Ben's ability to navigate in
his sightless world is, say experts, extraordinary. "His skills are
rare," says Dan Kish, a blind psychologist and leading teacher of
echomobility among the blind. "Ben pushes the limits of human
perception."
Kish has taught
echolocation to scores of blind people as a supplement to more
traditional methods, such as walking with a cane or a guide dog, but
only a handful of people in the world use echolocation alone to get
around, according to the American Foundation for the Blind. A big part
of the reason Ben has succeeded is his mother, who made the decision
long ago never to coddle her son. "I always told him, 'Your name is
Benjamin Underwood, and you can do anything,' " says Aquanetta Gordon,
42, a utilities-company employee. "He can learn to fly an airplane if
he wants to."
Ben plays basketball with
his pals, rides horses at camp and dances with girls at school events.
He excels at PlayStation games by memorizing the sounds that characters
and movements make. "People ask me if I'm lonely," he says. "I'm not,
because someone's always around or I've got my cell phone and I'm
always talking to friends. Being blind is not that different from not
being blind."
Ben was just 2 years old
when doctors discovered his retinal cancer. Ben's first Braille
teacher, Barbara Haase, believes the boy's ability to see during his
first two years helped him develop "a sort of map of the physical
world," she says. Growing up, Ben got help from his brothers Joe, now
23, and Derius, 19, and sister Tiffany, 18. (His father, Stephen, died
in 2002.) "They taught him how to find the seams on his clothes so he
puts them on right side out, stuff like that," says Aquanetta. "But
they didn't overdo it."
Aquanetta sent Ben to
mainstream schools, where professionals on staff gave him individual
attention and taught him to overlook taunts from classmates who waved
their hands in his face or snatched food off his tray. "The hardest
thing for me to accept is rejection," says Ben, who starts ninth grade
in the fall. "I can tell when someone rejects me in some way." At home
his mother let him play with no restrictions. "If he fell, she would
just say, 'Oh, he fell,' and he'd get up and try again," says his
kindergarten teacher Ann Akiyama. "I've seen him run full speed into
the edge of a big brick column and get back up. He was fearless."
Ben learned how to read
Braille and walk with a cane, but when he was 3, he also began teaching
himself echolocation, something he picked up by tossing objects and
making clicking sounds to find them. His sense of hearing, teachers
noticed, was exceptional. "One time a CD fell off his desk and I was
reaching for it when he said, 'Nah, I got it,'" says Kalli Carvalho,
his language arts instructor. "He went right to it. Didn't feel around.
He just knew where it was because he heard where it hit." Haase took
walks with Ben to help him practice locating objects. "I said, 'Okay,
my car is the third car parked down the street. Tell me when we get
there,' " she says. "As we pass the first vehicle, he says, 'There's
the first car. Actually, a truck.' And it was a pickup. He could tell
the difference."
Ben was 6 when he decided
he wasn't going to use a cane – he calls it a stick – to get around.
"You go to school and you're the only one with a stick, what's the
first thing some kid's going to do? Break it in two," he says. "And
then where are you? You're helpless." At times he was even able to come
to the aid of people with normal sight. "I remember taking him to the
park with my son, sister and my nieces, and it got dark," says Akiyama.
"But Ben had figured out the park's layout, and he led the way out. He
was in his element."
Still, Ben's zone of
maximum comfort remains his family's three-bedroom stucco home – where
he lives with his mom and brother Isaiah, 11 – and the quiet streets
around it. Some professionals who work with Ben worry that his
near-complete reliance on echolocation could hurt him when he finds
himself in unfamiliar settings. Haase wishes he would use a cane to
help him gauge, for instance, the depth of a hole. But Ben is sticking
to his guns. "He's a rebellious traveler," says Kish, who despite
teaching echolocation around the world still occasionally uses a cane.
"Ben puts himself at risk."
Others believe Ben's
remarkable abilities will make it easier for him to face new challenges
and conquer new surroundings. "The world is not going to change for
these kids; they need to adapt to it," says Ben's eye doctor James
Ruben, a Kaiser Permanente ophthalmologist. "His mother understood that
plenty of sighted people have miserable lives and plenty of unsighted
people have happy lives."
Last month Ben widened his
horizons even further. "The thing I'm most scared of is water," he
says. "But if I had eyes, it's what I'd most like to see." So on June
25 he took a trip to San Diego's SeaWorld Adventure Park to swim with
dolphins and hear how they use echolocation. Waist-deep in a saltwater
pool, he immersed one ear as Sandy, a bottle-nosed dolphin, swam toward
him. "Man," he said, "she clicks fast!" Ben spent 45 minutes playing
with Sandy, touching her teeth and stroking her dorsal fin. Bob
McMains, supervisor of SeaWorld's dolphin program, says that in his 23
years there, few people have listened so intently to the sounds the
dolphins make. "He's got a gift with dolphins; he's truly unique," says
McMains. "I told him, once he's 18 he's got a job here anytime."
McMains can get in line.
Ben's world may be dark, but the most amazing surprises are just a
click away. He might become a math teacher or a pro skateboarder – or,
as his mother believes, just about anything. And wouldn't that make for
a truly amazing Ben Underwood story? "I tell people I'm not blind," he
says. "I just can't see."
Copyright: People.com
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