-
Asked by smirza to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 13 Mar 2013.
-
Susanna Martin answered on 13 Mar 2013:
from my understanding, if you are born blind then you wont ‘see’ in your dreams but you’ll still dream about your experiences and other sensors, and I would imagine that if people described things to them then they might have ideas about how things would ‘look’. For people who go blind later they would continue to dream but perhaps they might also experience the other senses in their dreams.
Something to do with senses which I think is a really cool area of psychology is Synaesthesis, this is where your senses are muddled so perhaps you might see a colour but associate a taste with it. Or when you hear people talking then you start to imagine colours. Have a look on youtube and you can find some people talking about the condition, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cmRcnlL1kA
-
-
Michael Craig answered on 14 Mar 2013:
Wow, good question. It depends on how long the person has been blind, so someone who were blind from say 20 years old, they’d dream in images and sounds just like everyone else. But if someone is blind from birth a fascinating thing happens, they still dream just as much, but they don’t dream in images or colours, they have ‘auditory dreams’. This is where they dream in sounds, so it may be voices, or sounds of cars, planes, dogs, cats. The dream is build out of all these sounds, so they could be dreaming about the exact same thing as me or you, but just without images and only sounds. People who lose a sense e.g. sight often become more reliant on their remaining senses, this could mean their auditory system is a lot better than mine or yours and they may pick up on a lot more sounds than we do as we rely on our eyes to be our main sense in e.g. detecting danger, these people dont have that so they would have to listen for danger.
Cool question,
Michael
-
Ben Brilot answered on 15 Mar 2013:
You know what, I had no idea what the answer to this was, but thanks to Michael and Susanna (and your great question) I’ve learnt a really interesting thing today.
-
Jen Todd Jones answered on 15 Mar 2013:
I feel the same as Ben, these are great answers. I didn’t know what happens when people are born blind but there is an interesting case called Anton-Babinski syndrome you should look into (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrome).
This sometimes happens after a stroke or other damage to the vision areas of the brain at the back just above the neck, and makes a person completely blind but they insist they can still see. They think they can still see because their eyes are absolutely fine and do communicate something with the vision area at the back of the brain, but the connection between the vision area and the language area is broken – so the person cannot describe what they are seeing, so they make it up! It’s a disturbing feeling to not understand what is going on around you, so patients with this problem will tell you all sorts of things they can see that are not really there because they cannot make sense of the world. Scientists think that this may be part of a loop related to dreaming, and dreaming is this important link between seeing and understanding what is seen and doesn’t involve moving which is why we don’t move when we sleep!
Jen
Comments