Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Echo Location?

On a show I have been watching recently by Stan Lee who is famous for comics such as X-Men, Daredevil, and much more has a show called Stan Lee's Super Humans. This show is about real people who posses "super" human abilities. This is one I found particularly interesting on echo location. Echo Location is the ability animals such as bats and dolphins use to see and communicate. Stan Lee has set out on this quest to find people with abilities that are considered super human and relate to his comic characters. For those who don't know, Stan Lee's character Daredevil is a man who is blind but uses sensor sight or echo location to see his surroundings. Many say that this is not possible, or it is fiction and made up and rightfully so when one considers what it takes to see. From his movie many thought this is cool but this is fiction for daredevil and it is just part of his super human ability. Well, there is proof on several shows, Stan Lee's included.




This is a clip from a different show showing how someone is really using echo location. pretty fascinating when you consider that the human eye is made up of three coats, enclosing three transparent structures. The outermost layer is composed of the cornea and sclera. The middle layer consists of the choroid, ciliary body, and iris. The innermost is the retina, which gets its circulation from the vessels of the choroid as well as the retinal vessels, which can be seen in an ophthalmoscope. Within these coats are the aqueous humor, the vitreous body, and the flexible lens. The aqueous humor is a clear fluid that is contained in two areas: the anterior chamber between the cornea and the iris and exposed area of the lens; and the posterior chamber, behind the iris and the rest. The lens is suspended to the ciliary body by the suspensory ligament (Zonule of Zinn), made up of fine transparent fibers. The vitreous body is a clear jelly that is much larger than the aqueous humor, and is bordered by the sclera, zonule, and lens. They are connected via the pupil.[2] 
 he retina has a static contrast ratio of around 100:1 (about 6½ f-stops). As soon as the eye moves (saccades) it re-adjusts its exposure both chemically and geometrically by adjusting the iris which regulates the size of the pupil. Initial dark adaptation takes place in approximately four seconds of profound, uninterrupted darkness; full adaptation through adjustments in retinal chemistry (the Purkinje effect) are mostly complete in thirty minutes. Hence, a dynamic contrast ratio of about 1,000,000:1 (about 20 f-stops) is possible.[3] The process is nonlinear and multifaceted, so an interruption by light merely starts the adaptation process over again. Full adaptation is dependent on good blood flow; thus dark adaptation may be hampered by poor circulation, and vasoconstrictors like alcohol or tobacco. The eye includes a lens not dissimilar to lenses found in optical instruments such as cameras and the same principles can be applied. The pupil of the human eye is its aperture; the iris is the diaphragm that serves as the aperture stop. Refraction in the cornea causes the effective aperture (the entrance pupil) to differ slightly from the physical pupil diameter. The entrance pupil is typically about 4 mm in diameter, although it can range from 2 mm (f/8.3) in a brightly lit place to 8 mm (f/2.1) in the dark. The latter value decreases slowly with age, older people's eyes sometimes dilate to not more than 5-6mm. (compliments of wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye). So the movies in this case seem unlikely but it is an actual possibility for humans to use echo location.

1 comment:

  1. Great post! I've seen this before, and think it's fascinating.

    Try not to cut and paste whole paragraphs from wikipedia, though. If you do, set the quotation apart using blogger's quote marks, and tell us from the beginning you're quoting.

    Or, better yet, paraphrase the key parts for us.

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