system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Eli5 how thousands of bats can live together without getting confused from other bats echolocation noises?
gpt
Afaik the answer to this is not fully known, but we know that a combination of factors are involved:

1. Bats are capable of distinguishing between their own 'voice' and that of others, similar to how we can. Hearing their own voice is far more disorienting than hearing others' voices.

2. The brain is capable of rejecting information from sources that wildly contradicts its current world model. Even if you play them back their own voice, if the information contained in those echoes does not even remotely correspond to reality, the bat is capable of filtering it out as irrelevant noise.

The best way by far to disorient a bat is to play it back a recording of itself, slightly delayed. (This is also one of the best ways to shut up a human, incidentally)