This article explores whether blind people can dream visually. While most studies suggest that those blind from birth lack visual experiences in dreams, some research indicates that people who lost their sight later in life may still dream in images, and even congenitally blind individuals report experiences resembling vision in their dreams.
Although blind people cannot see, they often still possess the brain regions that enable vision. Does this mean that blind people can dream in visual images? In some cases, they can. A 2014 study found that people who were not born blind but had lost their vision later in life sometimes reported visual experiences in their dreams. These dreams likely drew from memories from when they still had sight.
However, the earlier a person had lost their vision in life, and the longer they were blind, the less likely they were to see images in dreams, the study noted. 'A person blind at age 7 or before who has been blind for, say, 20 years, loses virtually all visual experiences in their dreams,' study co-author Maurice Ptito, a visual neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, told Live Science. When it comes to people who are congenitally blind — those born without vision —'dreams tend to rely more heavily on other senses such as hearing, touch, taste and smell,' Monica Gori, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, told Live Science. Most studies suggest visual experiences are generally absent in the dreams of those who are blind from birth.'However, there are a few dream studies that have challenged this notion,' Ivana Rosenzweig, head of the Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre at King's College London, told Live Science. Related: Why can't we remember our dreams? For instance, a 2003 study in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences reported that people with congenital blindness who were scanned with electrodes on their scalps as they slept had evidence of brain waves associated with vision. A 2023 study from Rosenzweig and her colleagues, which analyzed 180 dreams of seven congenitally blind people, also found reports of vision-like descriptions
BLINDNESS DREAMS VISION COGNITIVE SCIENCE NEUROSCIENCE
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