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..!!

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.

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.

If you want, we can continue the discussion, if you prefer, we can take it on mail also.

CheerS!

you can choose not to reply

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???

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

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.