The people blind They experience this from birth Dreams in a sensory world in which vision does not play a leading role and senses like Touching, hearing, tasting and smelling play a central role.
For them, the lack of vision does not mean living in darkness, but rather perceiving reality and dreams from a different perspective Dream scenarios consist of multiple sensory stimuli and deep emotions.
The study of dreams in people without visual experience challenges conventional ideas about perception and imagination. Scientific studies have shown that despite the lack of visual stimuli, the The human brain is capable of generating dream experiences detailed and full of sensory nuances.
The integration of multiple sensory information allows us to build inner worlds while we sleep, according to various studies cited by National Geographic.
Research conducted since the 1980s has shown that the dreams of both people who are blind from birth and those who are sighted They have similarities in composition and structure.
In both there are sounds, touches, movements and intense emotions.and dreams typically prolong waking cognitive experiences. An analysis published in International Journal of Dream Research has confirmed that For people who lack vision from birth, dreams are even more multisensorypredominant touch, sound, smell and taste.
This work also discovered a largest number of nightmares among people who are blind from birthwhich could be related to a greater frequency of threats in their daily lives.
At the beginning of the 21st century, a discovery sparked debate. Research with Electroencephalography (EEG) during sleep of people with congenital blindness showed patterns of Alpha attenuation in the occipital regionstraditional visual activity.
After waking up, some participants described images and graphically represented their dreams. According to experts, the human figures drawn by blind people had differences such as: higher frequency of earsregarding the drawings of clairvoyants.
These results suggest that the mental representations in the dreams of blind people They could be created by activating the “visual” cortex through auditory or tactile stimuli, integrating information from the other senses to build internal representations.
However, these conclusions were controversial because they contradicted previous studies from the 20th century and left open the debate about the possibility of generating mental images without direct visual experience.
In 2019, a study using polysomnography concluded that people with Congenital blindness causes rapid eye movements (REM) while sleeping, although less often than sighted people.
In contrast, those who later became blind show almost no eye movementsalthough they reported dreams with more visual elements than the group that was blind from birth. That’s what these data suggest The REM phenomenon is not associated with visual scanning of the dream environmentaccording to the findings cited by National Geographic.
Research in 2024 added new data on the emotional content of dreams in blind people. The study found that it is more common than Experiencing dreams about non-physical interactionswhile clairvoyants report a greater frequency of dreams about misfortune.
These differences reflect how life experience and senses influence the development of the dream world.This shows that lack of vision does not limit the complexity or emotional intensity of dreams.
Accordingly National GeographicResearch over the past few decades shows that people are blind to dreams from birth They fundamentally rely on multisensory integrationmore than visual information.
The brain combines auditory, tactile, olfactory and taste stimuli Create internal scenarios full of experiences and emotionsThis shows that the ability to dream does not require direct visual perception.
The studies reviewed by National Geographic They emphasize that even without sight, people with congenital blindness develop dreams that are just as complex as those of sighted people, with the addition of senses and memories, resulting in a deeply emotional and multisensory dream experience.
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