What do you Think ??
Imagine there is a person, whose any all of the 5 senses (the sense of feel, the sense of sight, the sense of smell, the sense to hear, the sense to taste) don’t function. This person has somehow been kept alive for 18 years. And now, today, he is 18 years old. Now the question is :
From his birth to today, would this person have had a dream, any kind of dream? If yes.. then why and if no.. then why ? and may be what kind of dreams (if yes) !!
Please reply and share your thoughts !!
–Update — 06th Feb 2008–
Just to add on, suppose there was a perfectly normal child, but then he went into comma. What do you think would he dream then ?? Do people in comma dream ??
And also the question was not thought by me. I was asked the same question in a seminar !! 
Hi
I don’t even want to imagine such a situation, but if such a hypothetical situation prevails then, then I think, that person will not have any dream, because he can not feel any thing. Without feel/sensation your mind can not work, because feeling/sensation are the basic input for brain activity.
But it is very interesting topic to discuss.
Subhash Jha
hi kid
No, he doesn’t hav any type of dream. its like u hav a computer but dont hav any input device (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen,power/restart button etc). this computer will not start n work. u cant do any thing wid this PC. its just like a box.
Similarly a child learn things (receives input values) thorugh these senses.
Hope u hav seen Black (sanjay leela Bansali’s film) , that gal doesn’t hav sense of hear, but she learned through sense of feel.
COnclusion is that person u r talking abt will doesnt receive any input, doesnt learn anything, doesnt diffrentiate b/t smells, taste, types of feeling, cant see. Also in ur question 18 years has been past and in this long period brain gets dumb/rusted.
one more thing is that, only thing happened with him naturally is that- when his nutrition level in his body goes down he feel hungary / a type of stomach ach (which we also feel when we are hungary). then (may be – i hope so) automatically his brain moves his body in search of food/meal but as he does have any sense of taste he just eat any thing which he find.
You mean a state machine without any inputs ports, eh?
But do you know that your computer comes pre-programmed with some basic softwares. Even before your CPU begins taking inputs and processing them, it is loaded with a BIOS and a small OS in the factory itself. In this person’s case, the BIOS has no I/O, but the rudimentary OS is still working and it might have booted up correctly after the first and only “power on reset”. It doesnt develop but might still be functioning after 18 yrs, generating some vague information, that you or me might not perceive as dreams, or it might have died 18 years back after generating an error message like “no keyboard found”!
It’s indeed a good question and requires lot of thinking. Apart from answering the question I am trying to add some extra stuff which I could imagine, so be patient.
Ok assume this person can dream/imagine then what he can dream? Definitly he can’t dream/imagine as we do because he has never seen or felt anything. He doesn’t know what is a human being or what is this world?
We knew about 3 dimensions from long time but when we came to know about 4 th dimension then it was difficult to digest for everybody but somehow it was accepted. In same way this person can dream or imagine which we can’t. He may see things or objects which we can’t imagine.
We use only small percentage of our brain but who knows this person with above disabilities may use rest of this unexplored part of brain (why I am saying like this is again inferred from the fact that persons with specific disabilities start developing other senses more effectively than a normal man for e.g. a blind person is more sensitive toward sense of feel and hearing than a normal man) or he may be not knowing that he exists at all!!!. Because according to me “Exists” is a relative term. We say we exist in this world but for this person there is no “world” because he doesn’t know about it and he can’t feel. He won’t know when he is alive, he won’t know when he is dead (if we cut his head also he won’t feel any pain so he won’t know when he died!!!)
So logically or scientifically he can’t imagine or dream (because by no means he can feel his existence so he doesn’t exists for himself, much in the same way when we sleep without any dreams* we don’t know about our existence!!!! for that period of time everything is shutdown for us. if somebody kill us in this state we won’t be knowing about this (provided we don’t wake up when somebody kills us in this state ..
) ).
But spiritually rather I should say unscientifically he could imagine or dream which we can never!!!!!
Don’t beat me up after reading this _______ (fill whatever you like here) type of answer…
And last but not the least:- Usually these types of ideas come to you when u r in toilet and this one is no exception
* Conditions apply **
** Some people may not agree with this statement without dream. So for those persons without dream means when you don’t remember that you had dream last night.
haha.. well , its a well thought answer !!
And I am sure you thought of the answer in the toilet
Actually I did not think of the question myself !! I will update this on the blog itself !!
Thanx for the comment though and keep posting !!
Since we have to think, and thoughts can be flexible and imaginative- i would like to believe this person would have dreams because If he has been kept alive ( even if it is artificially his brain is functioning and our dreams are born in the unconscious part of the brain)- He would dream of experiencing all the senses, then a dream of seeing the world in which he was brought in, second, a dream of hearing all sounds of things, living beings he sees around, third to taste sweet, sour, bitter food and make out the difference, a dream of living a life and not just be kept alive!
It is said that if a person is in coma he is in a state of deep sleep, so he could dream of anything that is there in his unconscious mind- all thoughts he gathered, stored in his memory ( sub conscious/ unconscious mind) could conjure up in form of various dreams… like we don’t remember most of our dreams he too will not remember them when he wakes up!
The 5 senses are our means of communication from the world. If we don’t have them, we are not in sync with anything.
Imagine yourself in a secluded place which has been cut-off from the rest of the world. You don’t get any news and there is no news which goes outside from you.
Since you won’t have any news from the world, for you the world will become stagnant. It will become like a frame. At most, you can do is be imaginative and add stuff to the status of the world.
The brain is the secluded point in this case and it has been cut-off from the world. So to the brain, the rest of the world ceases to exist.
Our dreams are about the things we do with the world (mostly see, feel or hear. It is rarely taste and smell)
Without these there is nothing for the brain to work on, and I personally believe if the person dreams it would only be off memories.
With time, the memories fade.
Point one- If I don’t have any of my five senses active (medically) then sorry to say but, I am dead – if my brain is not functioning I cannot be kept alive even artificially.
Point 2: You want me to imagine myself to be in a Robinson Crusoe kind of a situation (adventurous). On a serious note- lets imagine I have been locked up in a room with no access to the outside world and no one can reach me.. What will I Do? My imagination first few days will be actively thinking of ways to get out. I would be dreaming of escaping or that people are trying to find me. Will be imagining things that would be happening in the outside world. The world still exists for my brain (it is out of my reach but still there).
I even assume that my brain starts recognizing that the my world is now limited to that room or place where I have been secluded but it will still imagine things that I would like to have do in that room. You can captivate me physically not my mind/brain.
Our dreams are born out of our memory but also our imagination, in fact imagination has a much wider role to play in our dreams. (have you never dreamt of anything you wish to have, I do it all the time, honestly some of my dreams are even related to food- I so many times dream that I am biting into a yummy gooey chocolate cake etc or I am sitting in a hilltop in a jungle just enjoying the fresh air and cool breeze and sounds around me, wishful thinking!). Dreams are also born out of fear also- for example I am scared of snakes and so many time I have dreamt of being chased by one or bitten by one.
Also with time some of your memories may fade with time either due to de generation of brain cells or the ones you told yr brain it is not important enough. But most of your memories are have saved in different corners of your brain (subconscious/unconscious parts of the mind) information from here is retrieved only when we dream or if asked something then we try and remember it.
Try talking to an old person (really old say late eighties or in nineties) ask them what they had for lunch a day before they may not remember but ask them about their childhood, friends, how he/she got married, first job etc etc and trust me they will remember everything to the tee- even the year, our long term memory is generally more active than short term! Unless they suffer from a condition called Alzheimers
I understand the point you are trying to make, and I take it well. But I would further like to express some thoughts. Obviously, there cannot be a right or wrong answer. (or if there is one, I am not qualified enough to judge it). The whole point of the question is to understand we all think, ticks our brain.
My additions below.
Well it is a hypothetical question. Only senses have been taken away from a otherwise normal person and then we are trying to debate what will be the status of the brain.
I once read, that if you keep a person in dark for long time, his mental abilities weaken over time. Keeping in dark, we have only taken away (that too, partly) one sense, the one of sight.
Secondly, imagination is again based on some input and some desires. Does one remember any of his life before one was 3 year old. I personally don’t remember anything.
If all the senses were taken away of a 3 year old, how will his brain function.
One will try to get out of a closed room,
1. one realizes that he is in a closed room
2. one realizes that there exist a world other than this room.
Now, will the person in question have this kind of understanding???
can I ask you something? in which seminar were u asked this question? and what was yr response?
you can choose not to reply
to answer further answer this hypothetical question/situation. i wud like to ask some questions-means going back n forth. a limitation of having a discussion on a blog- I understan what you trying to say. this ques can have different ans and each one will be equally vaild since it’s an individuals perspective and will not be wrong!
CheerS!
Well, the whole point of this post is to have a healthy discussion and understand what other points/views and perception people have with their reasons.
If you want, we can continue the discussion, if you prefer, we can take it on mail also.
Hmm.. the Seminar was just a simple college fest. And as such, I am not sure what I said, mostly I think I would have said that he wouldn’t have dreamed of anything.
But later on when I gave more thought to it, I have always found reasons why he would have dreamed of something .. and reasons contradicting and implicating in the process why he wouldn’t have dreamed of anything.
great.. you have my mail id.. lets tk it up.. discussions are always welcome!
Hi Kid!
I read this post only now, and I cannot resist sharing what I feel.
1. You know, it was Aristotle who defined the five senses as we know them today. This was somewhere around 300 BC. Going by the progress we have made scientifically and sociologically, you can understand that there must have been a lot of research since then on all that constitute our senses.
2. In a comment to this post, someone mentioned hunger as a sense. Isn’t pain a sense too? What about the sense of movement? And that is not even closer to the sense of touch.
3. Have you ever been unconscious? Yeah, it is not a state equivalent to coma (which is prolonged unconsciousness in a way), but it is state where you lose the five senses we talk about. I distinctly remember, I was unconsious after an accident I had as a kid and I had a dream in that state.
4. We always talk about the conscious and the sub-conscious mind. And they say, there are more layers in our brain. Can we put every sense of ours in the five-sense bracket?
5. The child in mother’s womb doesn’t have the so-called sense. Yet, scientific research says that music etc soothes the foetus and helps it develop. OK, this point goes off the track!
6. Animals too have senses of their own. May be, the 18-year old you mehtion has developed such kind of senses or other senses we cannot comprehend or perceive.
7. There are several people who will tell you they don’t dream. Do you believe them? I think they dream but they just don’t remember if they did. Doctors will tell you they dream. Try observing them when they are asleep and you may find their eyes moving inside their eyelids.
8. There is another thing. How do you define dream? Do you feel them through your five senses? They used to say, dreams are colorless. I have seen color in my dreams several times. In fact, I never have a b/w dream. So, the way you define dream is also ambiguous at least with respect to the examples you have cited (no sense boy and coma person).
9. In coma, they say, the brain is not actively alert. But it is definitely not dead. As someone rightly pointed out in a comment here that the fact that he is alive suggests his brain is working. And we cannot let go of the possibility of some activity with an active brain.
That was long…. well, the gist is that I believe a person, even in the absence of the typical senses, can dream and even ’sense’ the world in his own way.
Well, interesting observations.. but then.. lets look at the second part of the question, what kind of dreams?
How do we define anything which is living? Trees and plants are living, but not stone!! How did we conclude this? Simply by observing whether plants and stone respond to any kind of stimulus!!
And considering a person whose all senses are disfunctional, would the person respond to the external?
But this is deviating from the point.
The point here, I am trying to make, is If a person does know anything around him, what would he possibly build thoughts of?
Is it not, that in dreams we all experience something which has a relation from the reality? Is it not that scientist have concluded that brain tries to reorganize some of the stuff that we have accumulated in brains!!
So, if the brains have no input, then there is no data to be processed in a dream…
Is my line of argument correct?? I am not sure…!! Unless there actually exists a sixth sense…which I am not sure..!!