Blind and Visually Impaired Community
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What do you experience when you think quietly? (self.Blind)
submitted by Lemmiwinkidinks
This is kind of a strange question, but it all started when someone posted that he found out that some people do not have an internal monologue. Apparently, some people see shapes or colors associated w the words they’re thinking about, but they don’t actually hear their(or any) voice inside their head. This got me thinking about blind people and how your brains work.
If you were once able to see and now are blind, do you still visualize your experiences? Do you assign a “look” or aesthetic to certain things? Do you hear a new voice and automatically give them a face?
Those of you who were born blind, when you think back in your memories, what is it like? Do you hear all of your thoughts or do you have some kind of tactile system to help recall memories? Also, dreaming... what’s that like??
Please let me know if this is insensitive or anything, the last think I’d want to do is be rude to anyone.
Thanks so much y’all!
If you were once able to see and now are blind, do you still visualize your experiences? Do you assign a “look” or aesthetic to certain things? Do you hear a new voice and automatically give them a face?
Those of you who were born blind, when you think back in your memories, what is it like? Do you hear all of your thoughts or do you have some kind of tactile system to help recall memories? Also, dreaming... what’s that like??
Please let me know if this is insensitive or anything, the last think I’d want to do is be rude to anyone.
Thanks so much y’all!
retrolental_morose 4 points 3y ago
I don't have an "internal voice". my thoughts are and, to the best of my memory always have been, silent.
When reading I don't often hear characters in my head - unless I've previously seen portrayals of the characters on film, television, radio etc. I don't hear the voices of people I know when reading their emails or other messages either.
I don't think my dreams are particularly verbal. I do have strong memories of specific voices from my childhood, particularly memorable film/tv dialogue, etc.
I was born blind.
When reading I don't often hear characters in my head - unless I've previously seen portrayals of the characters on film, television, radio etc. I don't hear the voices of people I know when reading their emails or other messages either.
I don't think my dreams are particularly verbal. I do have strong memories of specific voices from my childhood, particularly memorable film/tv dialogue, etc.
I was born blind.
Lemmiwinkidinks [OP] 1 points 3y ago
Wow. This answer seriously made my husband and I pause. We both are curious though, regarding your lack of “internal voice”, while also not having any kind of visuals to allow you to see words like some people do when they think to themselves. So, my question now is, what is it like when you think? When you think to yourself “hmm, I wonder what I should have for dinner” what is that like? You don’t hear your own voice even?
To give you an idea at how perplexed I am, I just sat here for a few minutes and tried to think words, but tried to do it without hearing them in my mind. I’m worried I may have blown a fuse in my brain bc that was impossible! I’d think I was going to do it, then my voice would come in. I tried again and heard someone else’s voice since I was trying not to hear my own. Same thing, repeated. Lol
Also, thank you for clarifying that you were born blind. Something else I’d love to ask, (if you don’t mind answering of course) is ... do you have a physical or audible interpretation of colors? I know some people will say think of white as being cotton bc it’s soft. I’ve is blue, crying is also a form of blue. Something hot and yelling could represent red. Is there anything like that that you have or have used? I’m sorry if this is a weird, rambling message. I’m just so glad that people answered my question!
Thank you again for taking the time to think over my question and offer a very thoughtful and well thought out response. As I told the other person who replied, I’m dying to read my question to my 5 year old son and then your answers. I’m not sure he’ll understand the concepts all that well, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to get it.
To give you an idea at how perplexed I am, I just sat here for a few minutes and tried to think words, but tried to do it without hearing them in my mind. I’m worried I may have blown a fuse in my brain bc that was impossible! I’d think I was going to do it, then my voice would come in. I tried again and heard someone else’s voice since I was trying not to hear my own. Same thing, repeated. Lol
Also, thank you for clarifying that you were born blind. Something else I’d love to ask, (if you don’t mind answering of course) is ... do you have a physical or audible interpretation of colors? I know some people will say think of white as being cotton bc it’s soft. I’ve is blue, crying is also a form of blue. Something hot and yelling could represent red. Is there anything like that that you have or have used? I’m sorry if this is a weird, rambling message. I’m just so glad that people answered my question!
Thank you again for taking the time to think over my question and offer a very thoughtful and well thought out response. As I told the other person who replied, I’m dying to read my question to my 5 year old son and then your answers. I’m not sure he’ll understand the concepts all that well, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to get it.
retrolental_morose 1 points 3y ago
This is a fascinating discussion, so please, don't hold back on the weirder thoughts.
I'd not given much thought to the way I think before, and have not really come up with much of a decent way of describing it.
You know how instrumental music can be melody without words? Well, I suppose my best descriptor is that my thoughts are words without sound. If I want to I can "picture" (or re-hear, almost) how things sounded: my own voice, voices of others, remembered clips from things I've seen on TV etc. I also get music stuck in my head sometimes, whether that's classical music or lines from songs. But if I think to myself, no. There's no associated mental or inner voice or perceived sort of inner sound. Of course when people speak to me in my dreams I hear their voices - not that they'd necessarily say things they would to me in the waking world.
Interestingly, this holds true for when I read, either with text-to-speech (which I have set at about 600 wpm) or with Braille. Of course I hear the TTS voice when it reads to me, but the voice doesn't linger in my head when I remember what I have "read" anymore than the shapes of the Braille dots reside on my fingertips after I have finished with them. If you ask me to picture a letter, I picture the Braille (my daughter would often ask in her younger days "which way does a d go?" and my immediate and automatic response would be "the other way round to an f", which doesn't work for print (a Braille d, f, h and j have a degree of symmetry). But I don't picture anything more than letters (or contractions, which are braille patterns used to represent commonly-used groups of letters such as "the" and "tion"), and then only when making a conscious effort to think about what they look like. I have always imagined that I have to store things I read mentally in a different way (if I have used text to speech I have not physically read them, and if I have read them I have not processed them by ear, but I need to keep the data in my head regardless of the input method). How scientifically justifiable that is I have no idea, but if I pull up a mental line of dialogue from a Shakespeare play or extract from a memorised part of a textbook the words are just ... in my head, neither sound nor Braille nor anything visual. I can imagine how they would feel beneath my fingers or with what inflection or mispronunciations they would come out of the speech synthesizer if I try, but both of those require a conscious transformative thought process.
Colour is one of those things that I feel like I get wrong because I have to fake it. I imagine colour, to me, is like the sound a dog hears through a whistle that Humans cannot perceive. One of those things that I know to exist and to be accessible to a number of people that I am just not one of. I have learned the mnemonics for colours of the rainbow, I understand the science behind wavelengths of light and darker colours absorbing heat from light, and how colour can change (foodstuffs going bad, for example, or sun bleaching hair or skin).
But day-to-day, colour is not part of my world. I have to make a deliberate effort to check what colour clothes I am wearing if I need to know for some reason. I couldn't tell you, without a degree of thought, what colour hair my daughter has, what colour my pet dog is, etc. When she was younger she found it amazing to instruct our smart bulbs to change colour and that I could perceive no difference. If on getting ready for school she asks me to take the green water bottle rather than the red, I have to trust that nobody has rearranged them since I washed up and put the green at the front, then the orange, then the pink, purple then red.
Concepts of colour - the idea of multicolouredness, shades of colour, contrast between colours and the fact that some colours "go well together" and some don't are all things I have had to learn, and am still not sure I have right. Little things - like when having a game of cards with friends and a rule applies to only red cards means I have to process a little further than others, whereas if a rule only applies to queens or even-numberd cards, I feel I am at no disadvantage. The colour of the card is simply not a part of the card to me.
Sorry for the eeven longer rambling answer. It's interesting to have to think about concepts so fundamental to my existence.
I'd not given much thought to the way I think before, and have not really come up with much of a decent way of describing it.
You know how instrumental music can be melody without words? Well, I suppose my best descriptor is that my thoughts are words without sound. If I want to I can "picture" (or re-hear, almost) how things sounded: my own voice, voices of others, remembered clips from things I've seen on TV etc. I also get music stuck in my head sometimes, whether that's classical music or lines from songs. But if I think to myself, no. There's no associated mental or inner voice or perceived sort of inner sound. Of course when people speak to me in my dreams I hear their voices - not that they'd necessarily say things they would to me in the waking world.
Interestingly, this holds true for when I read, either with text-to-speech (which I have set at about 600 wpm) or with Braille. Of course I hear the TTS voice when it reads to me, but the voice doesn't linger in my head when I remember what I have "read" anymore than the shapes of the Braille dots reside on my fingertips after I have finished with them. If you ask me to picture a letter, I picture the Braille (my daughter would often ask in her younger days "which way does a d go?" and my immediate and automatic response would be "the other way round to an f", which doesn't work for print (a Braille d, f, h and j have a degree of symmetry). But I don't picture anything more than letters (or contractions, which are braille patterns used to represent commonly-used groups of letters such as "the" and "tion"), and then only when making a conscious effort to think about what they look like. I have always imagined that I have to store things I read mentally in a different way (if I have used text to speech I have not physically read them, and if I have read them I have not processed them by ear, but I need to keep the data in my head regardless of the input method). How scientifically justifiable that is I have no idea, but if I pull up a mental line of dialogue from a Shakespeare play or extract from a memorised part of a textbook the words are just ... in my head, neither sound nor Braille nor anything visual. I can imagine how they would feel beneath my fingers or with what inflection or mispronunciations they would come out of the speech synthesizer if I try, but both of those require a conscious transformative thought process.
Colour is one of those things that I feel like I get wrong because I have to fake it. I imagine colour, to me, is like the sound a dog hears through a whistle that Humans cannot perceive. One of those things that I know to exist and to be accessible to a number of people that I am just not one of. I have learned the mnemonics for colours of the rainbow, I understand the science behind wavelengths of light and darker colours absorbing heat from light, and how colour can change (foodstuffs going bad, for example, or sun bleaching hair or skin).
But day-to-day, colour is not part of my world. I have to make a deliberate effort to check what colour clothes I am wearing if I need to know for some reason. I couldn't tell you, without a degree of thought, what colour hair my daughter has, what colour my pet dog is, etc. When she was younger she found it amazing to instruct our smart bulbs to change colour and that I could perceive no difference. If on getting ready for school she asks me to take the green water bottle rather than the red, I have to trust that nobody has rearranged them since I washed up and put the green at the front, then the orange, then the pink, purple then red.
Concepts of colour - the idea of multicolouredness, shades of colour, contrast between colours and the fact that some colours "go well together" and some don't are all things I have had to learn, and am still not sure I have right. Little things - like when having a game of cards with friends and a rule applies to only red cards means I have to process a little further than others, whereas if a rule only applies to queens or even-numberd cards, I feel I am at no disadvantage. The colour of the card is simply not a part of the card to me.
Sorry for the eeven longer rambling answer. It's interesting to have to think about concepts so fundamental to my existence.
rp-turtle 1 points 3y ago
I was not born blind and had relatively normal vision until I was almost an adult. Therefore, my answers to your three questions for those of us who weren’t born blind are yes, yes, and yes. Overall, nothing has really changed in the way my brain operates visually except that daydreaming and dreaming while I sleep is a bit more vivid. It looks like if you turned the saturation level up on a video or picture you took with a camera. Like the colors all look a bit more embellished instead of realistic in my head now. Otherwise, everything is pretty much the same. Now, I am a very visual person and I’ve always been a very visual person so my brain hasn’t decided to stop being so visual since going blind quite yet. From what I understand, the longer you are blind after losing vision, the less visually your brain continues to process information. I imagine that differs to some degree for each person. However, I will add that my dreams have become more immersive. Before going blind, my dreams were probably 90% visual and then 10% all the other senses. Now my dreams are probably 70% visual and 30% of the other senses. For example, when I wake up in the morning, I remember my dreams using more of my senses. That’s been a very gradual long term shift that I’ve noticed. I hoped this helped. I loved the weirdness in the other comments on this post too.
DefiantDecay 1 points 3y ago
I bet you'll be less visual as time goes on. I think 100 percent visually but I'm loosing my vision. Maybe after i forget what things look like I'll be able to handle it better it'll be interesting to experience
ukifrit 1 points 3y ago
There is never silence in my mind. It is kinda annoying tbh.
Duriello 1 points 3y ago
I've been completely blind for 6 years. My inner voice sounds like a female whisper and is accompanied by visual representations of shapes and diagrams when I try to think logically. All my dreams are sighted, and sometimes I find myself questioning why I'm doing things like a blind person in them when I'm perfectly able to see. I don't imagine voices when I'm reading because I use a speech synthesizer with my screen-reader meaning I don't actually read anymore. One peculiarity about my subconscious is that it projects whatever it thinks is the real world around me into my visual cortex almost as if I could actually see. These hallucinations started when my glaucoma became unstable and my vision began to dim and lose contrast perception, and they are much clearer and sharper in my left eye (which lost vision first) than in my right eye.
Lemmiwinkidinks [OP] 1 points 3y ago
Thank you so much for this articulate answer. I read this aloud to my husband and we both were able to understand what you’re trying to convey. This is so interesting to me. My son is 5 and very interested in people who are ‘different’. Not so much bc of their difference being a “bad” thing, as he sees it as a cool thing about this person and he wants to know all about it. Or, I’ll explain what the issue is (they’re blind, so they have a cane. They’re deaf, so they use sign language, etc) and instantly he’s coming up w some kind of invention to make life easier for those with whatever the particular issue is.
I’m not sure that he’ll quite understand these concepts, but I’m excited to share my question and your answer with him. Thank you so much, again, for taking the time to really think about my question and give me an answer.
I’m not sure that he’ll quite understand these concepts, but I’m excited to share my question and your answer with him. Thank you so much, again, for taking the time to really think about my question and give me an answer.
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