overthinking echoes

You know the difference between an echo and reverberation? An echo is a single sound reflecting back with enough volume and delay to be perceived as separate from the initial source. A reverberation however is when the hearer is bombarded with a number of reflected sounds and the result is an inarticulate jumble. In life it is a fairly common occurrence to feel an echo of the past; as something we have done is reflected and comes back to us, usually at a slightly different volume. This can be good, like a promotion at work, or it can be bad, like when a big lie catches up with you. This is a westernized version of Karma and the basic principle behind the Christian “reap what you sow”.

Echoes can teach us a lot about ourselves and about basic morality but this is not their greatest advantage. Sonar uses echo to learn about the surface which reflects the sound waves. It can be used to learn the distance, speed of motion, and shape of a given object which is not able to be seen otherwise. Similarly the echoes of our past which reach us can tell us many things about the person or group of persons who is reflecting our previous action. I am annoyed with myself for not giving this serious thought before. In thinking about the various echoes I have felt over my life I can, in retrospect, now piece together information about those who facilitated the echo and can see ways which I could have responded that would have been more appropriate or advantageous.

Then there are also a number of animals which we could consider in this discussion. The bat and the dolphin both use this principle on a regular basis in order to probe the world around them. Is this a plausible way for us to learn about those who surround us? Is it ethical to deliberately incite someone merely to gauge their reaction and learn things about them which they would never admit? Surely you risk putting them off and alienating yourself from certain individuals but is the payoff worth the risk? What can we truly learn about people using this understanding of psychological sonar? I believe you can gain insight into prejudices which the subject would never readily fess up to, insecurities they are trying desperately to hide, idiosyncrasies which point to deeper issues, and eventually you can begin to predict the persons response to various stimuli based on this information.

But then a problem arises. We each perceive the world through our own various prejudices, insecurities, and idiosyncrasies which are, for us, imperceptible. Surely this will affect the data we receive and taint our ability to accurately predict the reaction of a subject. This does not nullify all of our results it merely shifts the way we should look at our results. Perhaps we should take from an echo two possibilities. Every prejudice/insecurity/idios

yncrasy we believe we uncover also has an antithetical prejudice/insecurity/idiosyncrasy which we may be exhibiting to various degrees. For example if a submarine uses sonar to find that a given object is moving at 20mph and the sonar itself does not take into account the speed of the submarine, it is then left to those who interpret the results of the sonar to subtract the speed of the submarine. If the sub is moving at 10mph then the object itself is only moving 10mph in the opposite direction. If the sub itself is moving at 20mph then the object is stationary.


This is how we deal with echoes but every once in a while we experience reverberations. We are suddenly bombarded with echoes which are indistinguishable due to the sheer number being felt. We can sometimes still make out which action caused this but often the messages which can be clearly articulated in echoes are imperceptible in reverberation. This is confusing. These moments of reverberation leave our heads spinning and often end in depression. These times give us very little in the way of information. We can learn very little about ourselves or others during these times and perhaps the best we can do in these situations is damage control; weather the storm.