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Gareth Jones from Bristol Uni Bat Lab lent me Richard Dawkin’s book “The Blind Watchmaker”, and chapter 2 ‘Good Design’ uses Bats ability to echo locate as an example. Lots of really interesting food for thought in this chapter, –
including an theory to explain how bats recognise their own sonar pulses, amongst the sonar pulses of other bats around. I have been concerned by this issue – … just how do huge flocks of bats fly around without crashing into each other? – how do they recognise their own sonar reflections without getting confused by other bats sonar chirps and echoes?

Dawkins describes how bats deal with this by using a ‘strangeness filter’ – so each bat only listens to the reflected echoes that ‘make sense’ – also using their memories of particular spaces. I’m still slightly unsure about how this can work, and am amazed they don’t fly into each other... must investigate further - I'll make a note to ask Gareth Jones about it next time I see him.

However – I’m interested in how this is is comparable to how we use our senses – seeing and hearing. Our brain regularly fills in missing information from our sensory inputs, and ignores ‘freak values’ so we can make sense of the world – also, we can specifically listen to certain sounds and ignore others by focusing our listening – which is all happening in the brain sometimes called the 'cocktail party effect'.  I don’t know enough about this, and hope to find out more. I’m sure we will have to make some kind of ‘strangeness filter’ to smooth out the information coming in from the distance sensors...