At some times, for various reasons, people hallucinate someone talking to them. It can be due to a mental illness such as schizophrenia, or in a dream or dreamlike state, or the result of hallucinogenic drugs, or whatever. The ears have nothing to do with this: It’s all in the brain. And the language parts of the brain are definitely involved, because the voices say intelligible things, not just random noise.
How does this work for deaf people? Their brains are the same as those of hearing people, so I assume that they’re just as prone to hallucinating language. But obviously, they wouldn’t interpret the experience as “hearing a voice”. Do they have a visual hallucination of signing hands? Do they subconsciously move their own hands in the signs? Something else?
I’m specifically interested in the case of a person deaf from birth, whose first language is a sign language, who doesn’t know any spoken languages, and who doesn’t read, but I’m curious about other permutations as well.
I wonder if they make up something else?
They see people talking without signing all the time. So maybe they substitute some imagined thing for that. The mouths move, but the words just come to mind. When I hear people talking, I do not see written words in my mind. There is also the aspect of lip reading. No signing required. Do the deaf convert the lip movements to hand signs in their minds? Or just see and fell the things being said?
We visualize and feel what people are saying. Pictures and feelings. Not the physical movements of their mouths as an intermediate thing to consciously decode.
Words are things separate of the mechanical means to produce them. Immediately converted to so many things. So very easy to misunderstand, within and without.
OK, so they usually describe the experience to hearing folks in terms hearing folks would understand, but what they’re actually experiencing could be (for instance) a visual hallucination of disembodied hands. OK, that’s suitably creepy.
I was wondering about this question because a D&D game I’m running includes a deaf character, who’s been communicated with telepathically, and who is very unnerved by the experience. The book didn’t give details, but I got to wondering (and my players might get to wondering, too) just what exactly it was that she experienced. Obviously our world doesn’t have telepathy, but I figure it’d manifest in the same way as hearing voices.
OK, so they usually describe the experience to hearing folks in terms hearing folks would understand, but what they’re actually experiencing could be (for instance) a visual hallucination of disembodied hands. OK, that’s suitably creepy.
I was wondering about this question because a D&D game I’m running includes a deaf character, who’s been communicated with telepathically, and who is very unnerved by the experience. The book didn’t give details, but I got to wondering (and my players might get to wondering, too) just what exactly it was that she experienced. Obviously our world doesn’t have telepathy, but I figure it’d manifest in the same way as hearing voices.
Kind of like singing with headphones on. You don’t know how bad you sound, but what does it matter if nobody else hears? And it’s correct until proven otherwise.
OP mentions permutations…I’m not a D&D player but here are some thoughts. I hope I don’t get too far astray.
I can see an “instant conversion from a stimulus” sort of happening naturally. E.g. when you first learn to play guitar you get very deliberate when you see a chord change coming. After awhile, you just play it when you see the name without even having to look at your fretboard. Lip readers probably anticipate very well, too, and learn the vocabulary that others use a lot.
The old idea goes that if you lose one sense, others compensate and become stronger. Say you were blind; what would it be like to have better hearing than other humans?
I read that dogs may get excited when they hear you pull up in the driveway. Not the neighbor pulling into your driveway to turn around…not a strange car from outside the neighborhood. You, your car. They don’t see you; they hear its slipping fan belt and muffler that is just starting to fail and squeak coming from the front passenger area spring. If your car broke down and a friend brought you home, they’d have to see you before getting excited.
And there’s synesthesia for some. For awhile there, many years ago I was experiencing something odd in the mornings. Lying in bed, asleep, I would see the alarm sounding. In other words I was asleep, it rang, and while my eyes were still closed I saw noise, like a ball of writhing static worms. Turn off the alarm and no more ball of worms.
The animal kingdom might also provide some inspiration. As I understand it, we were “blind to our own blindnesses” when it came to figuring out how the hell pigeons could navigate so well; it turns out they can sense electromagnetic fields that humans can’t. You’re trying to explain music to a deaf person; what sense might they have that we couldn’t understand?
What about things we’ve lost? Recognizing and reacting to pheromones—we started walking upright. Smell? IIRC the analogy I once saw was to the effect that dog’s sense of smell : human’s sense of smell :: normal human vision : legally blind vision. Bloodhounds, anyone?
Body language? Animals know when there’s going to be a fight from posturing, expressions on the face. I’ll confess I don’t always see how ticked off people are getting till boom! Maybe if we couldn’t hear what’s going on the benefit would be better ability for spotting those things.
If there were such a thing as telepathy, maybe it would make it possible to transmit the hearing experience (or other experience that the sending person has but the receiver ordinarily doesn’t) directly into the mind?
If so, I expect that would make it quite an unnerving experience for a lot of people; not only those lacking a sense entirely and aware of it, but also those who are bad at some sort of perception and don’t ordinarily even realize it. I’m imagining, for instance, one of those people who can look at or be in an entire forest and think ‘there’s nothing out there’ because it’s not a city, being contacted by a skilled naturalist telepath familiar with that particular ecosystem. All of a sudden you’re aware of huge numbers of things you usually don’t notice at all –
if it worked like that, then somebody deaf from birth would become aware, through the telepath’s mind, of not only a specific voice but all the sounds the telepath is hearing. Even if that awareness came with understanding of the sounds, I’d think it would be quite a shock; and if it came instead as the ‘blooming buzzing confusion’, not to an infant who arrives primed to make sense of such sounds but to an adult whose mind is set in other patterns: I’d think that would be unnerving, all right.
Oh, OK, this is a different question than I thought.
I remember reading about how people who are blind from birth still have a normal level of activity in the visual cortex. Their brains map out a picture of the world around them based on other sensory input, much the same way seeing people envision a place based on descriptions. And that’s using the same neurons seeing people use to actually see and remember sights. So the software is all in place, it would seem, for blind people to experience a visual hallucination or receive a telepathic vision. I would assume the same for a deaf person.
But it would be interesting, as thorny locust points out, to know whether that input came with all the contextual knowledge of the person communicating it. What “feels” right to me, in that situation, is that the deaf person wouldn’t get much more actual information than what was contained in the message, but they would get an emotional vibe, similar to how you can pick up on someone’s feelings from their tone of voice. But hey, maybe telepathy is cooler than that. Maybe it’s more like reading a Wikipedia article where every word is hyperlinked to a database of everything that person knows about that subject, and you can peruse at your leisure.
I recall a post on these very boards…fifteen years ago, it seems. Oog…where vl_mungo said:
So, there’s one case report, for you, at least.
But it might just be easier (especially if telepathy/magic is involved) to go the Lovecraftian approach, a la The Colour Out of Space, and have the character struggling with the completely alien form of sensory imput that she’s inexplicably, maddeningly able to both experience and comprehend. Perhaps struggling to relate the experience to someone else, with just enough clues that the 2nd party is able to realize she’s describing sound.
I had one patient years ago who as an adult had become completely deaf (from a medical illness). He subsequently developed a psychotic illness and heard voices.
What surprised me wasn’t so much that he was hearing voices but that he didn’t think it unusual that he could suddenly ‘hear’ again after all those years of silence.
You can’t describe something alien, literally beyond your sensory capability that you can somehow still perceive, either, but ol’ Howard Phillips did a passable job of faking it on a few occasions.
But, luckoly, you don’t need to go THAT far…I’m seeing a few accounts online from people recounting what it was like to have Cochlear Implants or Hearing Aids (for profound impairment) switched on for the first time, and the experience of “learning to hear.”
One muses over the philosophical/neurological quandry of how the man could ever really know he’s not “hearing” but having “a perception of the sensation of sound” without any possible frame of reference, how much of this may be semantics, or experiencing the artifacts of neuroplastic rewiring as a captive observer, or simply because this was experienced through the filter of late Cold War-era electronics…
