a hero who is blinded at a young age

by radioactive chemicals that peaked

his other senses to superhuman levels,

as well as granting him a radar sense.

The question is how much can Daredevil

"see" despite his blindness

[MUSIC]

Welcome to Comic Misconceptions.

I'm Scott.

And the Daredevil Netflix series has definitely

been drawing more attention to the Man Without Fear.

I, for one, am glad about that.

Daredevil is a great character and not just

because he definitely created the Teenage Mutant Ninja

Turtles, as I've talked about before,

but because his powers raise some interesting questions

about the ideas of human perception.

But first, a little background on the character.

When Daredevil debuted in "Daredevil Number 1" from 1964,

we see the accident that blinded him.

A young Matt Murdock was saving an old blind man

who was crossing the street from being

hit by a runaway truck carrying containers

of radioactive materials.

A container fell out of the truck,

and the radioactive chemicals washed into his eyes,

leaving Matt blinded.

But the story doesn't end there.

As Matt grows up, he starts to realize that his other senses

have become very sensitive.

And that allows him to perceive and navigate

the world in a different way than those who can see.

And he uses these new abilities to fight crime as Daredevil.

He can hear faint sounds, including people's heartbeats,

and to tell if they're lying.

His fingers have become so sensitive

that he can read newspapers just by feeling the impressions

of the ink on the page.

And his sense of smell and taste have also

been heightened, as well.

And if we look at real life cases, this sort of thing

is not too far off.

Radiation aside, studies have shown

that people missing one sense, like sight or hearing,

actually do compensate with their remaining senses.

Blind people, like Matt Murdock, can learn to process other

information from hearing, touch, and smell in ways that seeing

people can't.

The reason for this isn't that blind people's ears and noses

go through a physical change that allows them to hear

and smell better.

They're still working with the same hardware.

They just haven't upgraded software in their brains.

You're born with a part of your brain called

the visual cortex that is responsible for processing

all the visual information you take in.

So if you are blind, what happens to your visual cortex?

Does it just simply sit there, taking up room, not

really doing anything valuable?

Interestingly, no.

Your brain will actually rewire itself

to make use of the visual processing

center in different ways.

For example, studies have shown that blind people can recruit

their visual cortex for other processes,

like hearing, touch, and even vocabulary, which could come in

handy with Daredevil's day job as a lawyer-- needing to throw

around lots of big words.

Essentially, the brain will restructure itself to further

augment the remaining senses.

And this phenomenon is known as cross-modal neuralplasticity.

How's that for big words?

Before I go any further, I feel the need

to point out a few things.

Number one, I am far from an expert in any of this,

but I put links to where I've gotten this information

from in the description.

And number two, the research for this is still going on.

So anything I say in this video could

change as new studies are done and new information is

discovered.

But OK, back to how Daredevil can "see."

So the part of his brain used for seeing

is now being taken over to process

other sorts of information through hearing and touch.

And that's helping Matt Murdock navigate the world around him

in a different way, but still a pretty effective one.

There are a few caveats here, though.

Firstly, for this sort of thing to happen to its fullest

ability, you would need to be blinded young

while the brain is way more plastic and still able

to reorganize itself.

With Daredevil, this is definitely

the case since the accident that blinded him happened

when he was a youngster.

Another issue is that cross-modal reorganization

could cause problems if Daredevil ever

got his sight back.

If this happened, he probably wouldn't

know what to do with all that new visual information that's

coming into his brain.

He'd have to stop fighting crime and learn how to process it

all-- and relearn how to fight crime differently

than he has been doing for years,

which could be frustrating.

He would likely be worse off since his brain is so used

to his blindness.

Matt getting his sight back has happened

a few times in the comics, but usually through magic

so I guess we could just assume that magic also

rewired his brain to that of a seeing person, as well.

I don't know.

Now, interestingly, cross-modal plasticity

can also be a link to acquiring synesthesia.

Synesthesia literally means joined perception and comes

in all kinds of different flavors.

Sometimes, literally.

It's when two or more senses are perceived simultaneously,

like hearing a sound and then instantly and involuntarily

sensing a smell or taste or color

or a physical feeling that goes along with it.

Essentially, input from one sense

triggers another automatically.

For the most part, synesthesia is genetic.

And you can't acquire it if you don't already have it.

However, there is research to suggest that blind people do

start to acquire a kind of synesthesia

as their brain restructures itself

due to the loss of sight.

Some blind people say that they see flashes of light

when they listen to music, for example.

Daredevil definitely seems to be a synesthi.

This one panel in "Daredevil Number 9" from 1999

shows him playing on the piano and sensing the sounds

from the different chords as colors, smells, and tastes,

saying things like how C major smells like old boxing gloves,

E major is a coppery taste, and E minor

is the glow of neon in the dark.

Whether he was born with it or acquired

it due to his brain reorganizing itself,

or maybe even that comic book magic that

is the radioactive material he absorbed.

It is unknown.

But it's another little tidbit about the character

that I find neat.

So we've covered Daredevil's heightened senses

that allow him to "see" the world around him

in a different way and his apparent synesthesia that

allows him to "see" sounds.

But what about his most important power?

His radar sense.

The radar sense is possibly the most confusing part

about Daredevil, in my opinion.

Over the years, there have been many different interpretations

of it in the comics that range vastly.

And there has yet to be a truly standardized description

and explanation for this power.

In fact, there's a great seven part article

I'll link to you below on theothermurdockpapers.com that

chronicles the changes made to Daredevil's radar

sense over the years-- things like how it works,

what exactly is it capable of, and even different artists'

renditions of it in action.

I will give you the "Cliff's Notes" version, because it

is incredibly inconsistent.

Sometimes, it can see through walls and other solid objects.

Other times, it gets obstructed by plants and gas clouds.

Sometimes he sees extreme details,

and other times it's more like basic outlines and shapes.

Sometimes it's linked to his sense of hearing,

like a form of echolocation.

In "Daredevil Number 167," we see

it described like that of a bat.

It says, quote, "He emits probing, high frequency waves."

Waves, which break against any solid object and breaking

send back signals audible only to Daredevil.

From these signals, his brain instantly

forms silhouette images of everything around him.

In this manner, he "sees" in every direction.

Lots of air quotes today.

Other times, he describes his radar sense

like touch with a, quote, "sort of tactile facet to it."

There have been a few instances where he relates it

to feeling objects around him, saying

that it's like reaching out and touching everything at once.

And still other times, it's described

as a completely new, independent sense that

isn't affected at all by sounds or smells or touch.

He once said that his radar sense

allows him to be aware of his surroundings

when all of his other senses fail.

Now because of these and many other seemingly inconsistent

qualities, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is going

on here with the radar sense.

Though, it is probably safe to assume that it's not literally

radar, but rather that's simply a metaphor that helps us seeing

people understand it better.

In fact, maybe that's the problem.

Maybe the writers and artists and readers

like us will always have a hard time determining

precisely what the radar sense is like, because we

don't have one.

So we're left trying to make sense of it

with vocabulary that doesn't exist.

In his book, "Through the Language Glass,"

author Guy Deutscher talks about the fascinating connections

between language, culture, and thought.

It's really interesting, and there's also

a Radio Lab episode I'll put in the description

if you want to listen to it.

In it, they talk about how just having a word for something

kind of unlocks your ability to notice

or consciously perceive that thing.

The example they give is the color blue.

So most cultures throughout history

didn't have a word for the color blue

until very late in the game.

And some cultures still don't have a word for it.

So they aren't able to determine the difference

between blue and green.

Their eyes can still physically register the color blue,

but their minds aren't aware that it's

any different than green, because they

haven't categorized their colors in the same way that we have.

Homer, for example, never used the color blue

when writing "The Iliad."

Instead, he would describe this sea as, for instance,

"wine dark."

There simply wasn't a word for blue

at the time he was writing.

So describing it as wine dark is something

that made perfect sense to the culture at the time.

Now how this applies to Daredevil, I think,

is that Matt Murdock-- and, therefore,

the writers and artists telling the story--

have to try and explain the radar sense in terms

that we understand it, even though it might not be entirely

correct or even satisfying.

So Daredevil relates his sense to sounds and touch,

and radar, obviously, so that we can

try to understand it at least a little bit better.

Think of it like an infrared camera.

We can't see infrared with the naked eye,

so special cameras have to take the data

and turn it into visible light that we can see.

In a similar way, the images that we

see in Daredevil comics that show how the world looks to him

might not be accurate, but is instead just

an artist's interpretation of what it might be like.

Interestingly, Stick, a blind master martial

artist who trained Daredevil, explains

that all humans have this radar sense naturally

built into our brains, but we rely too heavily on vision

and end up pushing it aside, never fully

being able to access it without intense training.