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Original post by necreia Makes you wonder... do people born blind dream in images?

HMMMMMM... Very interesting.

If so, I wonder if there's some kind of link to primal instinct that is supposedly stored in the mitochondria, or something exotic like that.

Yo dawg, I heard you like dreams, so I put a dream in your dream so you can dream while you dream.

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Original post by owl To spanish (and to me) that translates like: The brain can generate images without *ANY* (visual) information from the outside world.

No, what I'm saying is that the brain could generate scenes that it's never encountered by learning specific rules about visual scenes (i.e. a kind of grammar) and then using those rules during dreaming. In this way, random input could be used to create visuals that are novel, yet within the constraints of experience.

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Original post by DaWanderer Quote: Original post by owl To spanish (and to me) that translates like: The brain can generate images without *ANY* (visual) information from the outside world. No, what I'm saying is that the brain could generate scenes that it's never encountered by learning specific rules about visual scenes (i.e. a kind of grammar) and then using those rules during dreaming. In this way, random input could be used to create visuals that are novel, yet within the constraints of experience.

Agreed.

And I'd postulate that it takes a very, very tiny amount of experience to generate an infinite amount of possibilities (so little that any baby could do it). The idea that you have to have 'rich' experiences sounds like ego stroking.

"Rich experiences make rich dreams."

Phrased succinctly like this, the mixture of figurative and literal in the thought suggests a chapter title from a self-help book. Dream big and get rich quick!

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If you're curious about what the blind might "see" when they dream and you've got a spare hour to watch a video, check out Charlie Rose Brain Series Episode Two: The Perceiving Brain – Sight and Visual Perception.

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Original post by necreia Makes you wonder... do people born blind dream in images?

Actually, people born blind (completely blind, with no sense of light or darkness) only dream in audio.

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Original post by Pipes McGee ...

I think your comment proves that the concept of "near-infinite possibilities from near-zero experience" in dreams is questionably valid, at best.

Here's an academic paper that entirely backs your comment: http://psych.ucsc.edu/dreams/Library/hurovitz_1999a.html

Much appreciated. :)

Now, I wonder what the official name is for the process of "an electrochemical fuckup that leads to random dreams about fucked up Voronoi horses with Dali-style necks". I don't mean dada/surrealism. :)

[Edited by - taby on September 12, 2010 3:59:20 PM]

How could a person who had never seen know whether or not they were seeing in their dreams? The Hurovitz paper doesn't address that question explicitly.

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Original post by LessBread How could a person who had never seen know whether or not they were seeing in their dreams? The Hurovitz paper doesn't address that question explicitly.

I am not an expert on the subject but I imagine based on the little I know that the neural connections required to interpret images are never developed.

There is some area on the brain that is in charge of "reading" the visual information that the eyes get (which I belive is the same area where the visual of dreams get imprinted*). It's like a scanner that is turned on and does the scanning but it's data cable isn't connected to the CPU. Or like sending the scan command with Twain but not handling the buffer reading event. lol

* I posted a thread like 4 years ago about this time when I woke up and the image I was dreaming got superimposed on the real image of my room for a few seconds.

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Original post by owl ...

This is one of my most favourite papers ever:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6828/abs/410583a0.html

The paper discusses how the eye "sees" multiple types of images, and how these images are processed and combined before they even hit the optic nerve / visual cortex. I'm not talking just colour channels, I'm talking like motion detection channels, edge detection channels, etc. One of the major points of the paper is to highlight the fact that there is a tiny little "mini-brain" in the eye that does some pre-brain computation related to the final image that one "sees".

There has even been some GPU-related work to emulate this kind of system in realtime:
http://vrlab.epfl.ch/~stephane/Core/Publications/Papers/2007_MVA.pdf

As for blind dreamers, here's some info that backs up the idea that the visual centre of the brain isn't developed fully until around age 7:
http://lazacode.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=184&Itemid=126
http://www.audioholics.com/news/editorials/warning-3d-video-hazardous-to-your-health/