blind dreams

[Tarantism]

hey you crazy cats...

i was wondering earlier...do blind people dream? i wonder if there has ever been a study on this....

i would think at first guess that they cannot dream because they do not have any memory of colors or shapes to dream about. or maybe their dreams only involve memories of the other senses....hmmm....

[InfiniteNow]

Originally Posted by Tarantism

hey you crazy cats...

i was wondering earlier...do blind people dream? i wonder if there has ever been a study on this....

i would think at first guess that they cannot dream because they do not have any memory of colors or shapes to dream about. or maybe their dreams only involve memories of the other senses....hmmm....

Why of course they do. Dreaming is related to much more than vision.
Blind people may see in their dreams, even if it is conceptual imagery.
Deaf people may hear in their dreams.
Paralyzed people may walk in their dreams.
Virgins may have sex in their dreams.

Dreaming is about sensory experience without the sense. That's the poetic piece. It's also about memory and conversion of experience to longer term storage.


Here are some links. Keep asking questions.

Do blind people dream?

Dreams: Do the Blind Literally "See" in Their Dreams?

Hurovitz et al.: Dreams of the Blind

The seeming inconsistency of visual references in the dreams of two congenitally blind participants, when looked at in the context of their overall dream series, suggests that these references were metaphoric in nature, making use of the conceptual metaphor "knowing" or "experiencing" is "seeing." This conclusion is supported by [other research] findings of an unexpectedly close relationship between vision and touch, both of which rely on edges, junctures, and contours to make discriminations and develop an overall conception of an object.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Tarantism

i was wondering earlier...do blind people dream? …

The general consensus is that yes, both people born blind, and people who become blind either in childhood or later, dream. People who have never experienced sight appear to dream mostly without it, but occasionally report visual images in dreams, though researchers are divided on if they experience “true” or “metaphorical” images. People who could once see appear to sometime or usually experience visual images in dreams.

i wonder if there has ever been a study on this...

”Dreams of the Blind by Richard Catlett Wilkerson” (archived version) is considered a good reference on the subject, and references a small bibliography.

[Boerseun]

As far as I understand it, blind people do dream up visual images. Simple reason for this is that although the eyeballs don't work so well, they were born with a perfectly functional visual cortex and 'sight center' in the brain, that interacts with the rest of the brain - so much more when asleep. It might dream up shapes and visual input that will strike no resemblence to reality, but it does seem to simulate perfectly workable visual input when the brain is asleep.

[ErlyRisa]

hmmm agreed - just because you pull the webcam out of the usb port doesn't mean you have uninstalled the driver.

--and... have you never experienced a smell only dream?

--I speculate that the reasoning behind smell only dreams, is because we usually don't associate too much visual or auditory information with a smell., it's directionless so can't be equated to the right imagery logically vie a workable algorithm.... but on the other hand, vivid dreams, can include smells, and even touch.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Boerseun

As far as I understand it, blind people do dream up visual images. Simple reason for this is that although the eyeballs don't work so well, they were born with a perfectly functional visual cortex and 'sight center' in the brain, that interacts with the rest of the brain - so much more when asleep.

Originally Posted by ErlyRisa

hmmm agreed - just because you pull the webcam out of the usb port doesn't mean you have uninstalled the driver.

While Boerseun’s and ErlyRisa’s reasoning makes sense, there’s evidence that the analogies are not entirely accurate when applies to humans and other animals.

Among many experiments performed by David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1950s and 60s were ones involving depriving kittens of the use of their eyes (by suturing their eyelids closed) during the critical period of “neural plasticity” in which the brain is apparently “taught to see” by nerve signals from the eyes. Later, when the kittens eyes were allowed to open, they remained effectively blind. Microelectrodes inserted in the kittens’ visual cortexes demonstrated that, although the eye (retina) neurons were sending impulses to the brain, the usual brain neurons were not firing. In complementary experiments, Hubel and Wiesel sealed the eyelids of cats past the age of critical neural plasticity, and observed that their visual cortexes continued to function almost indistinguishably from the when their eyes were open. After reopening these older cats’ eyes, they appear to have normal visual skills.

Using ElryRisa’s analogy, although their webcams were plugged back into the kittens’ USB ports, the driver for them failed to install. The visual system of housecats, and presumably of human beings, are not the same as those of computers.

Hubel and Torsten received the 1981 Nobel prize in Physiology for their work that included these experiments.

Their results suggest that a person born blind – that is, who didn’t have at least some use of their eyes prenatally or as an infant - lacks the neural structures to experience vision, and are therefore either doesn’t experience sight in dreams, or experience a sort of cognitively constructed “metaphorical” idea of what they imagine the experience of sight to be like. It also suggest that people who become blind even early in childhood can experience sight in dreams in a neurotypical manner.

[freeztar]

Originally Posted by CraigD

or experience a sort of cognitively constructed “metaphorical” idea of what they imagine the experience of sight to be like.

When listening to Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions" album, I have to wonder (sorry) about the validity of a "metaphorical" experience or idea.

Can we really call it metaphorical?


On an aside, What about the womb?

[ErlyRisa]

anyone heard the saying -> "blind people dream in b/white"

--what are the reasonings for us and the animal kingdom in general perceiving colour.... and why have we limited our range of perception to the 'visible spectrum'

---has it something to do with the signature of light that is emminating from the sun + the atmosphere of earth that gives 'the right' intensty to a particular spectrum? - and if even if we are limited by this spectrum -> why the colour? ,,, are their a certain proportion materials in our environment that reflect 'common' frequencies (colours) that our evolution has decided that these ranges of frequencies should be associated as colours....

eg. oceanic env : grayscale : blue/violet ,vs rocks/sand grayscale: red (opposing ends of spectrum, one for common light, other for objectifying obstacles/pionts of interest)
-over time, did the 'resolution' increase to include the range of colours inbetween? -those that could see the sand as 'inbetween' red and blue ,denoted it as yellow?

--is this the key to evoluion.... diatic conversion - split.(bipolar trinity) -> it think so!!

eg. DNA strand vs RNA strand --> is the virus the 'engineer' of higher organisms? --it seems like the virus is a 'fundamental' algorithm, like an autosophy script that interacts with data around itself.... maybe the first eyball was nothing more than bacteria being engineered by a virus to 'see'(instanciate interactivity with light).