What do visually handicap people "see" in their dreams?

[wahboy]

Hello all,

I have a student who asked me the above question and I still have not found the answer.

Can someone who has a visually handicapped friend find out the answer for me?

Thanks.

Wahboy

[Mez]

Huh?
What are you classing as visuaully handicapt?
Someome who is handicapt is no different to you or I, and im sure their dreams vary from person to person.....

[vinz]

Hmmm... relax Mez. I don't think there is any derogatory intent in the post.

It's an interesting question. If blind people (what's wrong with calling a rose a rose, if there is NO derogatory implications) can't see in the real world, are their dreams "visual"?

Come to think of it, do all normal people dream in pictures? My dreams are visual. And I'm pretty much a visual person. I think in "pictures". I've read that some people think in "words"?

[Shadow]

This is interesting thread. I never think of such question my self.

From yahoo answer:

No, they wouldn't. Visual stimulus is necessary for the wiring of the brain centers that process and interpret vision. The way the brain works is to develop, early in life, a huge number of neural synapses (connection points between neurons that are used in cell-to-cell signalling). As you grow and learn, these synapses are pared away to make the brain function efficiently, and that's the central basis of long-term learning. However, if the brain or any part of it fails to get infromation from hard-wired inputs, then that part of the brain will atrophy (at best, fringe areas of a cortical region might be adopted by adjacent cortical regions for different processes). But the take-away message here is that the brain needs visual stimulus in order to devolp the cortical regions that process vision. In the use-it-or-lose-it sense, the brain will not waste energy building and maintaining processes that aren't used. The optical cortex would never know how to function as an optical cortex in a person born blind. Link

Drawing on a sample of 372 dreams from 15 blind adults, this paper presents two separate analyses that replicate and extend findings from previous studies. The first analysis employed DreamSearch, a software program designed for use with dream narratives, to examine the appearance of the five sensory modalities. It revealed that those blind since birth or very early childhood had (1) no visual imagery and (2) a very high percentage of gustatory, olfactory, and tactual sensory references. The second analysis found that both male and female participants differed from their sighted counterparts in the same ways on several Hall and Van de Castle (1966) coding categories, including a high percentage of locomotion/transportation dreams that contained at least one dreamer-involved misfortune. The findings on sensory references and dreamer-involved misfortunes in locomotion/transportation dreams are interpreted as evidence for the continuity between dream content and waking cognition. Link

This article provides a critique of a recent inaccurate claim that the congenitally blind literally "see" in their dreams, which flies in the face of findings that were established in 3 careful previous studies. It first shows how this claim arose through a blurring of the distinction between actual seeing through the visual system and imagery that preserves spatial and metric properties without specific reliance on the visual system. It then discusses the 3 mistaken reasons for this blurring. This correction is important beyond the specific issue of seeing in dreams because the original findings lend important support for a cognitive theory of dreaming by showing that the imagery necessary for dreaming develops between ages 4 and 7. Link

It should answer most if not all of your question

[vinz]

So the next question is: What are their dreams like?