Do blind people dream in color? I’m not asking about someone who could see at birth and then lost their sight but someone who has always been blind.
I’d wonder if they dreamed in shape/value/color at all, given that they’ve never seen anything. I wonder if there is even a way to tell?
Not exactly what the OP asked but a good start:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/534/what-are-the-dreams-of-the-blind-like
I really dont know. Shapes I would say a bigger possibilty based on by feeling the shapes of their surroundings gives them a mental picture of whats there in front of them.
/v@l] [!3/V+!+, I presume you are sighted. When you dream, do you see anything in infrared or ultraviolet?
You’re making a big jump here. Think carefully about what you asked. It seems to me that you are presuming that they do “see” images of some kind, and you’re wondering whether those images are in black and white, or in color. But that presumption itself should be questioned. For which see zoid’s link.
Is there anybody (not blind, I mind) who doesn’t dream in color? I sometimes heard that some people claim they dream in “black and white”, but doubt that such people actually exist.
That’s a bit of a tangent, but it seems to me that the OP has already been answered.
Blind people do not dream in pictures at all, the same way you do not dream in sonar echolocation.
Didn’t we have a thread like this just a few weeks ago? Congenitally blind people do not dream in visuals; why would they?
One possible reason would be if our inner workings are genetically wired to provide the ability to “see” mentally produced images even if the real world experience has never happened. Possibly we are so “image processing” wired that our other senses like touch partially map into the same inner representations as if someone had used their eyes (not to the same degree, but you get the idea, representations of shape, size, position and movement).
This is just a “it’s possible” - no clue if there is any evidence whatsoever for it.
How about a related question then …
If someone who was blind from birth had visual cortex stimulated electrically, cells that in sighted people correlated with the experience of lines, or shapes of some sorts, what would they experience?
Certainly the congenitally blind do have activity within visual cortex, albeit not organized by experience influenced activity during development; some of which is recruited by other modalities. They use that cortex when processing some tactile inputs, for example, and related cortex for developing internal spatial maps of the outside world. What is that experienced as in the congenitally blind?
People who became blind during lifetime can surely dream in colors and prefer to sleep than be awake cause that’s the moment when they can see. But people who are blind since birth have dreams of people and shapes but not of colors that much. But those with great imaginations do find a way to differentiate into colors. A blind chess player was studied about his moves and it was realized that much of moves on the chess board were made on assumption of different colors for every adjacent square around.
Even if, hypotheticall speaking, blind people did in fact dream in color… how would they know that was what they were doing?
A few nights back I dreamed in iambic pentameter. When I woke up, I could recite about the last 30 seconds worth. It scanned A-OK, but it was pretty much nonsensical. I’m no Shakespeare – even in my wildest dreams.
Also, does anyone know what percent of the blind have been completely blind from birth? It seems to me that fairly early blindness is not too uncommon but that there are few causes of true congenital blindness. And of those I am hazarding to guess many may be of a cortical cause, meaning that the visual cortex to experience the activity experienced as vision is either not there or at least not functional.
OK - that’s funny!
Last night I dreamed I was a dolphin. I was echolocating like a mo-fo!
I missed this before. A few decades back almost everyone said they dreamed in black and white. Now hardly anyone does. They all say its in color. See my link at #14.
The moral, of course, is that people are quite clueless about describing their own subjective experience.