Discussion- Can Blind People Dream?

[Paul]

Discuss.

EDIT: dont give some stupid 2 word answer.

take into consideration that they are blind, so it might affect their sleeping patterns.

enjoy.

[Daveydude]

Yes they would dream - most definately.

Sleep is comprised of 7 stages. The seventh one is REM, or rapid eye movement, when your brain is more active then any other part of your day. At this point you dream.

Dreams are the result of communications between your working memory (things that happened that day) and your long term memory. The blind person would have dreams, however it is unlikely it would involve and visuals, as they do not know what a visual is and would have a near impossible time comprehending what one would look like. This means that although they would dream, it would be minus the visual factor including all other senses.

[turtleman918]

Blind people would probably dream in taste, sound, Hearing, smell, and touch. they could plausibly dream in sight if at one point in their life they could see. i.e born with sight but lost it over time. People born blind would not be able do dream with sight.

[FeanorAlmighty]

Yes.


(Not a 2 word answer as it's only one word)

[KleinerTono]

i think that they would dream black and white.

some of the visual information is saved in your genes, thats why blind ppl may indirectly know, what something may look like. if your genes didnt have memory about visuals, no one could see or babies would die from information overflooding. the human body knows from birth how to handle visual information and for knowing that it needs examples, like, how humans look like, so a baby can recognize its mother as mother and not a tree oder water.

another thing is, that blind ppl create visuals in their phantasy by touching something.

so yes, blind ppl can partly dream like ppl who are not blind.

[tylerhan2000]

They can dream, but not see their dreams.
Visual stimulus is necessary for the wiring of the brain centers that process and interpret vision. The way the brain works is to develop, early in life, a huge number of neural synapses (connection points between neurons that are used in cell-to-cell signalling). As you grow and learn, these synapses are pared away to make the brain function efficiently, and that's the central basis of long-term learning. However, if the brain or any part of it fails to get infromation from hard-wired inputs, then that part of the brain will atrophy (at best, fringe areas of a cortical region might be adopted by adjacent cortical regions for different processes). But the take-away message here is that the brain needs visual stimulus in order to devolp the cortical regions that process vision. In the use-it-or-lose-it sense, the brain will not waste energy building and maintaining processes that aren't used. The optical cortex would never know how to function as an optical cortex in a person born blind.

[PsYk0Wo1F]

:S WTF so many long words O_O too much confusion

[chenna]

we (humans) know that blind people dream and we do know that they actully see things we just do not know what they see as they can not describe it as they have nothing to compair it to

[Daveydude]

I believe they can not comprehend vision. What they consider visual is near impossible to comprehend without a basis.

They may claim to see visuals, but what they are is more than likely something else.

[raul7legend]

Can't we just ask blind people if they dream? Cut the writing bullshit, lets just ask them XD

[Paul]

:S WTF so many long words O_O too much confusion

that "long writing"

is called hosting an "intelligent conversation"

not frequently seen at this site amongst the LOL, SPAM and  's.

good for a change.

[turtleman918]

:S WTF so many long words O_O too much confusion

that "long writing"

is called hosting an "intelligent conversation"

not frequently seen at this site amongst the LOL, SPAM and  's.

good for a change.

LOL at that and yes this kind of is SPAM


and a lot of people have some pretty good points

[Paul]

:S WTF so many long words O_O too much confusion

that "long writing"

is called hosting an "intelligent conversation"

not frequently seen at this site amongst the LOL, SPAM and  's.

good for a change.

LOL at that and yes this kind of is SPAM


and a lot of people have some pretty good points

indeed.

its nice to see people put some thought into (most) of their posts.

[Spartan]

They can probably see their dreams, they're just not normal dreams, as they've never seen what anything looks like. Also, you should know that dreams are in the mind, found in the Cerebrum. This is where all sight is stored, so if they occur in the same spot and they have to memory of vision, it will be something entirely different. Also, maybe they dont see their dreams, they HEAR them. I know you cant hear your dreams, but you must also remember that people with an impared sence have better sences on the other ones.