The faster you go on a bike or in a car, the more things appear to visually stream past. Your brain synthesizes this “optic flow” to estimate your speed relative to a cognitive map of your surroundings. Bats face an ******* ogous navigation task as they fly through their environments, except they rely on acoustic inputs as they echolocate in the dark. How they synthesize the myriad individual echoes into a coherent perception of speed relative to surroundings has been a mystery.
A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reported evidence that echolocating bats are using acoustic