What is the dream experience for a person born deaf blind?

May 30, 2006 7:59 PM

Does a person born deaf blind experience dreams? My curiousity has always wondered if a person who is born deaf blind has the ability to experience dream? What would dreaming be like if you never have been able to see or hear anything around you. Is a dream a purely visual thing for us sighted ones? Any research sites or personal stories on this topic?
posted by randomthoughts to religion & philosophy (12 comments total)

They do dream but their dreams are not the same as yours and mine.

Dreaming is a side effect of maintenance activities which take place in the brain while we sleep. Dreaming is the subjective experience, but it's also a side effect. I think that the best guess right now is that what's really going on is maintenance of long term memory.

People who are deaf and blind from birth still need that brain activity to take place, so there will still be some sort of dream-like operation happening, and it will be experienced subjectively by the person while they sleep. But since their memories are different, so will be the dreams.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:04 PM on May 30, 2006

I am far from qualified to speak to this, but I'd like to hazard a thought. I would think, as a deaf-blind person is perfectly capable of having memory, so too would he or she be capable of having dreams. Dreams themselves aren't made of sensory stimulus, per se (again, I hazard) -- we just reconstruct them that way because it makes the most sense to (most of) us to do so.
posted by TonyRobots at 8:06 PM on May 30, 2006

Of course they dream, why wouldn't they? I suppose their dreams would involve other physical sensations. I know I can feel things in my dreams.
posted by delmoi at 8:26 PM on May 30, 2006

I would think the experience would be way different. We dream while we are in Rapid Eye Movement sleep stages (REM sleep). My understanding is that the part we remember is just the last few moments of that cycle while we are waking up. Our brain tries to make sense of the sensory inputs we experience at that time and usually strings together a more or less confusing narrative in an attempt to make sense of all of that. Therefore, without that stimulus, its hard to say what is experienced.
posted by Ironmouth at 8:39 PM on May 30, 2006

I bet they can "hear" in their dreams sometimes too. Have you ever had that feeling in a dream that you just knew something, even though it wasn't necessarily so? I bet the same is with deaf dreams and "hearing". For instance, sometimes I have a dream where I'm in a building and I just know it's my old house, even though it looks different.

I'll ask my friend though. Her parents are both deaf.
posted by BioCSnerd at 9:06 PM on May 30, 2006

In high school, I had a friend who lost her hearing at age 10. I asked her if she could remember sounds or if she heard sounds in her dreams. She said that she hasn't heard anything since she was 10, although sometimes she'd feel like she could hear in her dreams because she understood what people were saying without actually hearing them.
posted by acoutu at 9:24 PM on May 30, 2006

Mentioned off to one side in my psych/AI classes years ago was the fact that if a large portion of the brain set aside for some activity at birth - such as the visual cortex - goes unused, those neurons get cannibalized for other uses. Supposedly, this is why blind people are better able to distinguish different sounds - they have a larger portion of their brain dedicated to processing aural stimulus and a severely atrophied visual cortex. If I remember correctly, the reverse is not true: the limiting factor in your vision is not the amount of brain hardware thrown at visual processing (which would constitute suicide from a natural selection standpoint), but rather the eye itself.

Because of the above, a blind/deaf person isn't going to have visual or auditory dreams - the portions of the brain responsible for turning stimulus into anything meaningful from a semantic perspective are just completely missing. Without them, you could say that the brain simply has no concept of what vision or hearing even would be like. People like to make human mind-computer analogies, so here goes - your awesome music & flashy 3D screensaver isn't going to display shit when you have no videocard or soundcard whatsoever.
posted by Ryvar at 9:34 PM on May 30, 2006

Sorry, the above applies to people BORN blind, BORN deaf, and BORN blind/deaf. That was a huge distinction to leave out.
posted by Ryvar at 9:35 PM on May 30, 2006

It has been suggested that the parts of the brain normally responsible for sight and hearing, are re-routed in blind and deaf people respectively to process other input.

Important studies of adaptation in the brain were begun in the nineteen seventies by, among others, Helen Neville, a cognitive neuroscientist now working in Oregon. She showed that in prelingually deaf people (that is, those who had been born deaf or become deaf before the age of two or so) the auditory parts of the brain had not degenerated or atrophied. These had remained active and functional, but with an activity and a function that were new: they had been transformed, "reallocated," in Neville’s term, for processing visual language. Comparable studies in those born blind, or early blinded, show that the visual areas of the cortex, similarly, may be reallocated in function, and used to process sound and touch.

As dreams are generally believed to be fundamentally connected to the processing of daily input and seem largely remembered in terms of standard input (sight, then hearing, then smell), it seems reasonable to deduce that the deaf-blind use their input - touch, sense, smell etc. to construct their dreams.

I'm sure there are better links to be dug up, but see also,
How do visually impaired people dream?
Straight Dope: In what language do deaf people think? What are the dreams of the blind like?

The latter link notes: "Helen Keller, who became blind at the age of 19 months, claimed to have "visions of ineffable beauty."
posted by MetaMonkey at 9:41 PM on May 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

Do the blind "see" in dreams? Depends on whom you ask.
posted by Gyan at 9:56 PM on May 30, 2006

This is an intruiging question.

I would like to ask a deaf person and a blind person what their dream experience are like.
posted by SwingingJohnson1968 at 10:26 PM on May 30, 2006

It's also worth noting that there are a wide variety of scales of blindness and deafness. A blind friend of mine talked about the differences between "blinks, bats and blurs" at his school. The classification scheme involved people who had no light sensitivity, light sensitivity but no sense of shape, and extremely poor senses of shape. Likewise, there is a wide variety of deafness ranging from people who can functionally understand speech with assistance, to people who have no auditory sense of sound. People can be born anywhere along these ranges.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:33 AM on May 31, 2006