can deaf people ‘hear’ their voice in their heads? in theroy, they should be able to because no air is vibrating in their ears so they arent actually ‘hearing’ the voice they are thinking it. also can blind people see dreams or do they just rest when they sleep.
please excuse my ignorance but they are just a few questions that have been on my mind and it would be great if you can help me out 
I’m assuming that you mean “deaf people who were previously able to hear and blind people who once had sight.” I would suspect that people that have lost senses have a recollection of them and can recall what their voice sounds like (in the case of deaf people) and what the color blue looks like (in the case of blind people). People who are born deaf or blind don’t have any frame of reference so they don’t experience sensations like you or I. My SO worked with some blind children as an art therapist once and taught them about colors using other senses: to let the kids experience red, she had them touch something warm, to let them experience blue, she put ice in their hands.
Sure we can hear voices. Cool, huh?
Perception is a funny thing. In “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, Oliver Sacks tells the story of a guy who had brain damage that caused him to completely lose his sense of smell. He had a terrible time adjusting, and had trouble eating because much of our sense of “taste” is really smell.
But then one day he came in and told the doctors that he was cured…he could now smell food, everything tasted right again! But when they did a brain scan they discovered that he wasn’t “really” smelling things. His smell center was completely dead, no actual signals were being processed. He was really just “imagining” he smelled the foods. I mean, he really experienced the smells, it’s just that they were generated within his brain rather than in his nose. His brain filled in the missing information.
If someone becomes deaf or blind later in life, they sometimes find that their brain fills in the information that is “supposed” to be there. If they lip-read someone they will often “hear” the person’s voice in their heads. This happens to a lesser extent with hearing people too. If you are watching someone’s face as they speak it is often much easier to understand them. Your brain adds the information you get from lip-reading…but you don’t consciously process the information, it just seems that the person is speaking more clearly if you can see them speak.
Sometimes older people don’t realize how deaf they have become because they are able to understand speech when they look at people and can’t believe that their hearing isn’t giving them the information.
handy’s response leaves quite a bit of the answer out.
Believe it or not, true total deafness (defined as no measurable hearing sensitivity in either ear on a standard audiological test battery) is actually fairly rare. Most deaf people have some degree of residual hearing…but there is a tremendous amount of variation with regards to how well a person may be able to utilize their residual hearing for the purpose of understanding speech. In addition, a deaf person may be able to perceive their own voice with hearing aids (and sometimes without hearing aids, if they raise their voice, for bone conduction is surprisingly good at conducting sounds to the inner ear), but the quality of what they perceive can vary considerably.
I’m a rather odd example of this: my left ear has a severe hearing loss, and my aided word recognition in that ear is unusually high. My right ear has a profound hearing loss, and my aided word recognition in that ear is exactly zero: no matter how loud the speech signal is made in that ear, the sound remains so garbled that the speech is unintelligble.
While my own personal experiences wouldn’t hold true for everyone, I would expect that many deaf persons, at the very least, perceive some vibrational energy if they speak, and many may even perceive significant portions of their own speech while wearing hearing aids.
My level of hearing is similar to Atreyu’s.
We hear sounds including our own speech but like you, what we hear wouldn’t sound much like what we sound like to some other person because bone conduction makes our voices sound much lower pitched to ourselves. Lip reading accounts for much of my speech comprehension. If I can’t see the speaker’s lips, I understand very little to noone of what is said. Speaking louder often doesn’t help.
I’ll add myself as an example as well -
I have profound loss in both ears, but remarkably high discrimination (ability to recognize amplified sounds for what they are.)
I do hear my voice in my head, as my hearing loss is conductive (not nerve), and as atreyu mentioned, the conduction of sound via bone works well for me.
You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway - I do ‘hear’ in my dreams, though. I’m oralist (I talk and lipread rather than use sign laungage normally), and I’ve always been that way, so what I hear plus what I see (lipreading, visual cues about what a sound is) plus any other factor involved* is how I understand. I suppose I think I hear a heck of a lot more than I really do, but in my dreams, I don’t struggle to understand.
-sic
*this is a very shortened version of how I explain 'what do you hear, anyhow?"
A friend rented an apartment to a deaf couple.
One day when I was visiting her,the tenant came to pay his rent.While she was making out the receipt the tenant cut some major cheese-but didn’t seem to note the sound-and went blissfully on his way,leaving behind a genuinely shocked landlady,and a ROFLMAO guest.
Maybe they all blame it on the dog.I don’t know if he could hear his voice,but he sure couldn’t hear his gas.
Steven Pinker (I think) talks about “mentalese” in his book The Language Instinct. It’s the internal language that we think in, and is supposedly (i.e. theoretically – I’m not sure how to test it, although doing so could be really interesting) identical across speakers of different languages.
There are instances in which I (being non-deaf) seem to be thinking in English, rather than in mentalese. For example, the poem “Jabberwocky” is almost certainly stored in my brain in English, and if I recite it silently to myself, the voice is in English. Most of the day-to-day thinking, though, like “Oh, that car is trying to change lanes,” or “Hmmm, I wonder what’s on TV,” is in mentalese.
So… do native speakers of ASL or other sign languages see signs in their heads? I would be very surprised if they didn’t, but I think the question is relevant to the OP.
– CH
I am only partially deaf - barely any hearing loss as such in my left ear, worse in my right, but my recognition is shot to hell. I can hear you speaking to me, but unless you face me, speak up a little and make sure it’s clear, I have little to no idea what you are actually talking about.
I am aware that I can hear myself when I am speaking, and to me, it hasn’t changed. To me, I still sound exactly the same as I always have. But since my hearing has degenerated further, I have begun to slur my words slightly and now have an actual lisp which wasn’t there before. I wasn’t even aware of it, it was pointed out to me by someone concerned I needed my hearing checking out again. The lisp is just laziness, as in my head I sound just fine, and as long as I pay attention and enunciate clearly, it disappears. So this would suggest to me that, although I am unaware of it, I am not hearing my own speaking voice as clearly as I used to.
My parents are both profoundly deaf - my father since birth, my mother since she was three (with no recollection of the time previous to that due to severe meningitis). They hear nothing at all; nothing. You can scream in their ears and there is no response.
As far as I can know without being inside their heads, they have no concept of sound except as physical vibrations (like being able to feel a wooden floor vibrating when loud music is played). I have tried to explain sound to them, but they just don’t get it - there is no frame of reference.
So no, they don’t hear voices, because they have no concept of what it is to hear something other than in a theoretical sense. They see or feel them, and think visually. Often in sign language - when my mum is thinking hard, her hands move. I don’t know what their thought was like before learning sign language and I suspect we’ll never be able to understand.
One theory might be that their “internal voice” might be experienced not as hearing in the tradition sense, but as facsimilies of the vibrations they experience when they talk. It is an interesting question - something I’ve pondered myself over the years.
Come to think of it, the OP was confusing. Is the question ‘do Deaf people hear voices (like crazy
people)’ or ‘can deaf people hear their own voice when they speak (I haven’t met a mute deaf person yet)’?
Yes, to both. the confusing one is the second one. Bones can function as another ear, thus they
can hear their voice that way-bone conduction hearing (It would have to be pretty loud), but they don’t hear it the same
way hearing people hear, it’s pretty fuzzy. You can plug your ears & try it yourself.
It depends on the type of loss. I think the post explaining the SENSATION of vibration explains it the best. One of the tests for hearing is to put the earphone BEHIND the ear, against the skull. If you show the same loss with that test, your hearing loss is a nerve deafness.
Deaf or hearing impaired people may hear SOMETHING of their own voices, but they generally speak louder than most people, because they (duh!) can’t hear themselves. I’ve been told to tone it down, my voice carries above all others. And if I have a headcold, I’m practically screaming.
If you talk to a hearing-impaired person, please, make sure you FACE him or her. Enunciate your words carefully, but don’t yell unless the person asks you to speak up. If you aren’t understood, try to rephrase your question/statement in a different manner. For instance, if you said, “Do you know where Sheri is?” then ask it differently, “I’m looking for Sheri, have you seen her?” Give the hearing-impaired person a few beats of “lag time.” We often have to “process” what we heard into normal conversation. And try not to laugh very hard when we pop up with something that has NOTHING to do with what is being discussed. You should hear it from OUR end!
Don’t look down, or hold your hands in front of your face, or chew gum when talking to someone who is hearing-impaired. If you REALLY get stuck, write it down on a piece of paper.
And don’t treat us like an idiot. I’ll match IQs with anyone!
~VOW
I interpreted the OP as meaning “Do people who are born deaf have the ability to think with actual words, not ever hearing any spoken word before?”
Does that make sense? Am I way off base with this guess?
I read an essay by a writer who had gone blind in middle age. He said that his dreams became progressively less and less visual.
mkmiller99
, if you ever talk to a Deaf person, you can see that they use their lips that form words perfectly- even if
no sound comes out of their mouth. This is for born Deaf or early Deaf. This would seem to indicate
to me they have a concept of whatwords are. I have never met a mute deaf person, they CAN talk
to some point.
Also, for those who want to appear PC, do not use ‘hearing impaired’ use 'Deaf or Hard of Hearing"
to describe ppl who don’t hear well.