It sounds like it's unclear if they perceive that "visually".
Are there any cases where blind people have recreated an environment they explored this way? (like how an artist could make a drawing of it) I guess that's at least twice as hard…
Yes. Some blind people report being able to see things with sound and MRI scans show their visual cortex lighting up [1,2,3]. A 2019 paper [4] showed that the visual cortex of a blind echolocating person is lighting up in a comparable way to that of a sighted person.
All my life I’ve left the lights off if I get up during the night. I sneeze like crazy at bright lights so I leave them off to avoid waking myself up at 3am. I swear I’ve developed some kind of echolocation sensitivity in the process.
For what it’s worth, for me, it’s not much different than moving around my various places with my eyes.
Like most people, when I see an obstruction with my eyes I don’t train my eyes on it and make a conscious decision to avoid it, I just “avoid it”. And when I know I need to go through a door, or down a hallway, it just kinda happens as if i had seen it with my own eyes. I don’t over concentrate on it any more than I would if the lights were on and I could see clearly.
The only “image” navigational image in my brain is an original Wolf3D screenshot.
It’s the same when I get up at night, even in a strange place. The shuffling of my feet on the floor is the sound I use fwiw.
