Those who were blind at birth and those who went blind later don't "see" the same thing in their dreams, according to our partner The Conversation.
In other words, people born blind have similar overall dream experiences but do not dream “in pictures”.
This analysis was conducted by Kevin Duffy, professor in the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences at Dalhousie University (Canada)
Perception of the world in humans is primarily through sight.
Nearly half of our brain is devoted to processing visual information, and most of the brain networks responsible for vision are established early in life.
This means that, from birth and throughout our lives, we accumulate experiences and memories that are highly dependent on vision.
We associate most of our interactions with visual images rather than experiences from our other senses, such as hearing or smell.
For those of us with normal vision, dreams are filled with the visual images we experience during our waking life.
To understand what blind people experience in their dreams, we need to distinguish the experiences of those who were blind at birth from those who became blind later in life.
Just as lively and imaginative
Human beings born without sight are not able to gather visual experiences, so they understand the world entirely through their other senses.
As a result, people born blind develop an amazing ability to understand the world through all of the experiences and memories that come from these non-visual senses.
The dreams of a person who has been blind since birth can be just as vivid and imaginative as those of a person with normal vision.
They are, however, unique because their dreams are constructed from the non-visual experiences and memories they have collected.
While a person with normal vision will dream of a familiar friend using visual memories of shape, lighting, and color, a blind person will associate the same friend with a unique combination of experiences from their senses. non-visuals that act to represent that friend.
In other words, people born blind have similar overall dream experiences, but they don't dream in pictures.
The dream experience of someone who has lost their sight later in life is very different from that of someone who has never had a vision.
People who lose their sight later in life have the ability to pick up many visual experiences that can appear in their dreams and in a very similar way to a sighted person.
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Interestingly – and perhaps expected – the dreams of people who become blind later in life become less visual as the time spent without vision increases and they accumulate more visionless experiences.
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This analysis was written by Kevin Duffy, professor in the Department of Psychology and Neurosciences at Dalhousie University (Canada).
The original article was published on
The Conversation website
.
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Declaration
of Interest
● Kevin Duffy has received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
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