Dolphin Boy
The Fascinating History of the Child Who Mastered Echolocation
If there were ever a human counterpart to the wonderful animals we know as dolphins, it would have been young Ben Underwood.
Dolphins naturally need little in the way of introduction. With their powerful flippers, amicable antics, and cerulean skin that shines in the sunlight, are among the most widely-recognized mammals on the planet. Unsurprisingly, dolphins were admired and worshipped by human civilization for thousands of years.
Minoan culture, for example, revered the graceful beings. Greek mythology wasn’t far behind; the latter was known for its stunning artwork of dolphins breaching the ocean’s surface, many of which were depicted with either a deity, a man, or a young boy riding on their backs. Further south in the Amazon there exists a type of river-dolphin known as boto, which, according to indigenous tribes, are also shape-shifters with the capability of impregnating human women.
Dolphin myths and legends encapsulate the globe. Their intelligence seems incalculable, and stories of their benevolent behavior toward humans, fellow dolphins, and even creatures of other species overwhelm the Internet. There’s almost no way to describe the dolphin as anything other than magnificent.
My mother, Angelika, recounts a story of her childhood in which she was swimming off the shores of Hawaii. She wasn’t out in the surf for long before a group of hammer-head sharks materialized. They proceeded to menace the area and blocked my mother’s path back to the beach, but she found a sand-bar to rest upon until rescuers were able to approach. The reason the hammer-heads never got any closer to my mother: reportedly, there were dolphins in the vicinity.
Cetaceans are not only ‘self-aware’; they’re as social as human beings. They swim in pods with as few as twelve individuals to as many as more than a thousand in what are commonly called ‘super-pods’. If there are injured or elderly members in the pod, one or two dolphins will hold back and remain with them. When a pod member is struggling for air, ‘assistants’ use their powerful bodies to lift the ailing creature to the water’s surface to breathe, even offering the same help to other cetacean species (in this case, pygmy sperm whales were the recipients of this buoyant graciousness).
The way dolphins communicate has been studied inside and out since the 1940s. Pod members use clicks, whistles, and grunts to convey messages, such as where food might be located, whether or not enemies are near-by, and which pod members are in heat and looking for mates.
Their master-language is echolocation, the primary means by which dolphins find food sources and navigate their surroundings. Dolphins have such well-developed hearing — both in the water and on land — that they can survive well with impaired vision, or even blindness.
At the tender age of 2 years, California-born Ben Underwood embodied all of these endearing, intelligent characteristics, and he wasn’t even a dolphin! What was it, then, that made such a tiny little boy into a ‘superhuman’?
For reasons we will never know, young Ben was born unusually frail and vulnerable. By the time he turned two, Ben’s devoted mother, Aquanetta, was faced with grim-looking pediatricians who uttered a dreadful diagnosis: her precious toddler had retinal cancer. While it could be treated, there would never be a cure. Furthermore, the type of retinoblastoma little Ben suffered from was extremely rare. Only about 200 to 350 children are born with this sort of retinal cancer every year, so the treatments and medications available to Ben’s family were remedial at best.
At just three years old, the cancer became so severe that surgeons were left with a drastic decision. They would have to remove both of Ben’s eyes if he were to have any real chance at living.
For Aquanetta, this stark new reality could have been the catalyst that often forces the families of severely-ill children to fragment and separate.
But there was something special about Aquanetta’s little boy. Ben proved not just that he could thrive, but that he could flourish. By his fifth birthday, he was living the life of both an urban pre-schooler and that of a free-swimming, cerulean dolphin; and furthermore, Ben had taught himself.
In just a few short years, Ben Underwood was using echolocation to explore his home, school, and environmental surroundings. By using his tongue to make dolphin-like clicking sounds, he could figure out what sorts of objects were near, how many they numbered, and exactly how far away they were.
In the manner of cetaceans, Ben ‘clicked’, waited, and listened for the echo that followed, which would normally be suppressed by the non-echolocating human brain. He became so adept that in no time, he was using his honed skill to do everything ‘normal’ kids could do while growing up: riding a skateboard, playing football, using roller-blades, biking, running, and even playing basket-ball.
Echolocation seems entirely foreign to the human brain and how it functions, but Ben made it work. And while it’s as rare as the retinal cancer that claimed Ben’s eyes, people have actually employed the technique since the 17th century.
So how, exactly, does human echolocation operate?
Vision and hearing are closely related, namely in the way that both can process energy’s reflected waves. The auditory sense processes sound waves as they travel back to the hearer from their source, bounce off of surfaces, and ultimately enter the ears. For blind individuals who have mastered echolocation, echoes are hugely important ‘packages’ of information which convey spatial details, like the location of an object, its dimension, and its density.
Where dolphins are concerned, the process is similar, though in water sound waves travel almost five times as fast as they do in open air. This aspect of echolocation comes in handy for cetaceans swimming in dark or murky waters. A dolphins’ eyesight in these cases can be reduced to almost nothing, but as it turns out they don’t usually need it: echolocation allows the dolphin to locate and hunt even fast-moving prey as easily as if the sun were shining. Her echolocation skill works best when her target is between fifteen and 656 feet in front of her.
People lacking sight learn to actively create sound via the tapping of a foot, cane, clicking the tongue against the palate, or snapping the fingers. Then, by interpreting the echo, an individual learns an object’s dimension; that is, whether it is short and wide or tall and thin. Thereafter they can further extrapolate if the object is likely to be a pole, a tree, a fence, and so on.
Human mastery of echolocation may be phenomenal, but dolphins (unsurprisingly) are still better at it. A dolphin’s trademark whistle and chirps are low-frequency sounds by which she communicates, but she can also emit high-frequency vocalization. Her beautiful cetacean music can reach frequencies of up to 120 kHz, whereas humans can detect sound with frequencies of anywhere from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Dogs, whose hearing is many times better than that of a person’s, distinguish sounds of up to 45 kHz. Cats fare slightly better; they can detect sounds of up to 65 kHz.
Daniel Kish, whose own eyes were removed at the age of only thirteen months, has stated that he believes Ben Underwood was one of the most prolific human echolocaters to have ever lived. World Access for the Blind is a non-profit organization started by Kish, through which he explores the wilderness with both sighted and non-sighted people. He teaches the individuals in his programs that they can learn the art of echolocation even while enjoying such activities as hiking and mountain biking.
Ben Underwood’s masterful techniques shocked and inspired the world through appearances on CBS News, Oprah, Ellen, and 20/20: Medical Mysteries. His YouTube videos have earned millions of views, to the point that even twelve years after his death on January 1, 2009, many of them are going viral all over again as new generations of people discover Ben’s extraordinary life.
And now?
When Ben died after metastatic cancer began to overwhelm his brain and spinal cord, the world lost a brilliant beacon with skills as perfect as those of the dolphins he represented. When a child dies, there is a massive sense of broken-heartedness and an undeniable feeling that the world isn’t fair, for is it not the unspoken ‘way of things’ that a mother must pass long before her children ever do?
Ben died at home, encircled by his adoring mother Aquanetta and the people in life who loved him. Gordon has no doubt that her boy is ‘up in heaven with the Lord’. For my part, I like to believe that Ben’s incredibile skill eventually led him back home to the whimsical, graceful, and care-free life of the dolphin, where he can sing, click, breach, and blast through ocean waters like a torpedo beneath a shining sun. None but an omniscient being can really say for sure, but might not swimming with dolphins as a dolphin also be a kind of heaven?
There’s one last take-away from Ben Underwood’s playbook that we might well consider during a dreadful global pandemic.
According to Aquanetta, young Ben knew the gravity of his final weeks and days — and he was not afraid to die.
Sources: Wikipedia, LiveScience, KCRA3, Dolphins-World, Visioneers, Inspire My Kids, Real Clear Science, Smithsonian Magazine
