Echolocation is a fascinating way that animals like bats and whales find their way around the world.By emitting sounds and decoding the echoes that come back, these species are able to detect what's around them in their local environment.It's something we know that humans can do too – and it takes less training than you might think.A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks.While the technique is already used by a number of people with impaired vision – sometimes using the taps of a cane instead of clicks made by their mouth – those findings suggest that many of us can learn the necessary techniques.Some of the same researchers who made that discovery are part of the team behind a follow-up study published in Cerebral Cortex, looking at how the 10 weeks of training that the 26 participants went through actually changed the physical structure of their brains.Specifically, the team analyzed brain scans of the V1 (the primary visual cortex, processing visuals), and the A1 (the primary auditory cortex, processing sounds). Strikingly, the scans showed that the V1s of both blind and sighted people had developed sensitivity to sound echoes during echolocation training."We show here, for the first time, functional and structural brain changes in primary sensory areas V1 and A1 in blind and sighted people who learn click-based echolocation in adulthood," write the researchers in their published paper."These results are a key finding with respect to previous studies that found plasticity in blind and sighted adult people primarily in higher-order sensory areas."Researchers wanted to see how echolocation training changed the brain – and the differences were similar across blind and sighted participants. (Norman et al., Cereb. Cortex, 2024)The suggestion is that being blind or sighted doesn't affect the brain's ability to adapt in this scenario – that the plasticity doesn't rely on long periods of one kind of sensory deprivation to hone the brain's sensitivity in another area.It's more evidence that many of us can learn echolocation, if we put our minds to it – brains can all adapt well enough (although it's worth noting that some of the specific structural changes differed between blind and sighted people)."This provides strong evidence that the ability of a primary sensory area (V1) to exhibit sensitivity to input from a different modality (here: sound echoes) can be considered a normal characteristic of the typical adult human brain," write the researchers.