Interestingly enough as a young boy who lived in the basement where power outages were frequesnt, and the light switch was 40 feet from my bedroom,
echolocation would have been ideal. One day I saw something like this on Discovery channel and started trying it. Today I can use echolocation both
passively and actively to navigate through darkness......to some extent. Allow me to explain. Human echlocation for those of us who can still see is
a bit less advanced than that of a blind person. When a human loses a sense, the part of the brain devoted to that sense begins to process another
sense, since I can still see, my ability to sense is less than that of a blind person. Like riding a bicycle, you can still learn to echolocate, but
it requires that you get your brain in gear for it.
Human echolocation seems to get confused with seeing with sound, it is not. If I were to be navigating a dark staircase using echolocation, I would
still trip on the roller skate on a stair, with echolocation, I would simply know that there was a slope ahead of me, and deduce that there was a
staircase.
Likewise, if there were thumbtacks scattered on the floor of a room and I was using echolocation to navigate, I would sense the layout of the room,
but not be able to detect the objects on the floor.
So now I bring you to understanding human passive and active sonar. Active sonar is like what the dolphin is doing, clicking, putting out quick pulses
of sound waves and listening for variations to produce a 3d "picture" for humans, we cannot focus the active pings like a dolphin and simple radiate
sound waves, this makes it much harder to detect where sound is bouncing back from.
Passive sonar in humans is different. If I were standing in front of a void like a staircase, I might hear things like the sound of my breath or feet
echoing, even a few yards. If I were standing in front of a wall, I would feel the vibrations of my movement bouncing back.
While echolocation is pretty much useless for most humans, it sure kept me from stubbing my toes in the dark basement as often.
It's value lies in range finding mostly, figuring out how far away
something is. Sound reveals at about 1116 ft/sec, and knowing that, if i pinged a canyon wall ahead of me, and the sound returns after about 2
seconds, i can roughly deduce that the wall is just under a quarter mile away. At longer range palate clicks start to get lost, and a good hand clap
or a sharp barking vocalization at the higher end of the audible frequency spectrum works well. Higher pitched sounds return sharper and louder than
low sounds. If you pay attention to echoes and can hear with both ears this should take you a few minutes to learn how to do 
