Can blind people dream?

Question

Blind People Dream in Visual Images

Blind people do dream but mainly as visual images. For those who are born with vision and then later blind, it is not surprising that they experience visual sensations while dreaming. Dreams are drawn from memories stored in the brain and circuits of the brain that develop as you experience the outside world. Thus, even though a person who has lost vision may currently be blind, his brain is still able to utilize visual memory and The Associated brain circuitry that was formed before the blindness. For this reason, he can dream in visual images. Even more surprising is the discovery that the born blind are also dreaming in visual images.

Visualization of Blind People

The human visual experience involves three steps: (1) converting light patterns in the eye to electrical impulses, (2) transferring these electrical impulses from the eye to the brain, along the optic nerve, and (3) decoding and assembling these electrical impulses into the visual experience experienced in the brain. If any one of these three steps is significantly impaired, it will lead to blindness. In the vast majority of cases, blindness is caused by problems in the eyes and in the optic nerve, not in the brain. In a few cases, people usually recover some vision due to brain plasticity (i.e., the brain’s ability to reconnect itself) due to problems in the brain leading to blindness. Thus, people who have been blind since birth still technically have the ability to experience visual sensations in the brain. They just have nothing to send electrical impulses with visual information to the brain. In other words, they are still able to have a visual experience. It’s just that these experiences don’t come from the outside world. Dreams are an interesting field, because dreams do not come directly from the outside world. Therefore, from the point of view of rationality, it is possible for the blind to dream in a visual image since birth. However, just because blind people have the neurological ability to experience visual sensations does not mean that they are actually doing it. Scientists must conduct research to determine whether a blind person has actually been dreaming in a visual image since birth.

At this point, you may be thinking,”Why don’t we just ask the blind to be born if they dream in visual images?”The problem is that when you ask someone this question, they will always answer no. They don’t necessarily answer because they don’t actually have visual dreams. They say no because they don’t know what a visual image is. A girl with vision can visually recognize apple fruit, because at some point in the past she saw apple fruit and ate it, thus being able to connect the image of apple fruit with the taste, small, shape and touch of apple fruit. She was also able to connect images with the word”Apple”.In other words, Apple’s visual image became a trigger for all the memories and experiences she had previously experienced with apples fruit. If a girl has never personally experienced a visual image of an actual apple fruit, then the image of seeing an apple fruit in a dream for the first time has nothing to do with anything in the real world. She will not realize that she is seeing an apple fruit. As a metaphor, let’s say you’ve never tasted salt. No matter how many people describe salt to you, you do not know what the experience looks like until you personally experience it. Suppose you are alone and you come across a very salty bag of crisps in an unlabeled bag. When you eat chips, you experience the taste of salt for the first time, but you will not know that this is what you are going through, because you have no other previous experience or connection with it. Similarly, people who have been blind since birth do not have the experience of connecting visual sensations with external objects in the real world, nor do they relate to the vision described by the visual person. Therefore, it is useless to ask them.

Scientific Scans on Blind People

Instead, scientists have conducted blind brain scans of people, because at birth they were sleeping. Scientists have found that these people have the same type of visual-related electrical activity in the brain during sleep and people with normal vision. Moreover, since birth, blind people move their eyes while sleeping in a way that harmonizes the electrical activity associated with vision in the brain, just like people with normal vision. Therefore, it is very likely that since birth the Blind did feel the visual sensation while sleeping. They just don’t know how to describe the feelings, even conceptually connecting these feelings in any way with what the Seeing person describes as visual.

Having said that, brain scans during sleep since birth for the Blind are not the same as brain scans for the short-sighted. Although people who have been blind since birth do dream in visual images, they tend to do less than people with weaker vision. On the contrary, their dreams are more frequent and more intense sound, smell and touch.

We should remember that a blind person has never seen the experience of images from the outside world since birth and therefore never formed a visual memory connected to the outside world. Therefore, the visual components of their dreams can not be formed by visual memory or related circuits. On the contrary, the visual sensation must be generated by the electric wave motion within the brain. This means that since birth the Blind may not experience detailed visual images of actual objects such as apples fruit or chairs in a dream. Instead, they may see the color of a speck or speck float or flicker. These spots may even be meaningfully related to other senses. For example, the dream of driving a police car siren from left to right may be accompanied from left to right at the same speed of the color spots of the visual feel. In short, the current evidence suggests that since birth the Blind do dream in the image, but we do not know exactly what they saw.

In a related note, a brain scan found that all human dreams were born before the visual images they were. The darkness of the womb causes us no one to experience an actual vision before we are born. Thus, the fetus is comparable in experience to an adult who has been blind since birth. For this reason, it is not surprising that the fetus also dreams in visual images.

Credit:https://wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2020/02/11/do-blind-people-dream-in-visual-images/

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