Hearing loss support - Does Central Deafness Cause Dreams to be "Quiet"?

Author

Does Central Deafness Cause Dreams to be "Quiet"?

Radium

2006-04-06, 11:30 am

Hi:

Is it true that patients who are deaf due to damage to the auditory
parts of the brain have silent dreams?

I am curious because the parts of the brain that "hear" when we are
awake maybe the same parts that give the "audio" to our dreams.

Thanks,

Radium

Medman

2006-04-09, 1:27 am

Hi Radium:
It depends on when you had the hearing loss. If you were deaf from
birth, then the brain would have no experiential reference and you
probably would have no "hearing" associations in your dreams**.

If you had a hearing loss after having a normal (or even limited)
speech experience (i.e. as a child) then the subconcious would indeed,
be able to "pull" hearing memories and associated actions (pictures)
and give you an audio reference in your dreams. However, the sounds
(and experience) stored in the cerebral cortex in short and long term
memories that are not captured and stored by the subconscious, would
not be referenced when you dream.

**Note: Deaf people (from birth) who have been on record at being able
"get out their body" and either astral travel or soul travel, do
indeed, experience sounds on the purported "inner planes", but such
sounds have no reference to the sounds stored in short or long term
memory or the subconscious.

Fascinating subject, but there is no reserach in this area due to the
problematic methodologies of recording inner experiences.

Radium

2006-04-09, 1:27 am

Medman wrote:
> Hi Radium:
> It depends on when you had the hearing loss. If you were deaf from
> birth, then the brain would have no experiential reference and you
> probably would have no "hearing" associations in your dreams**.
>
> If you had a hearing loss after having a normal (or even limited)
> speech experience (i.e. as a child) then the subconcious would indeed,
> be able to "pull" hearing memories and associated actions (pictures)
> and give you an audio reference in your dreams. However, the sounds
> (and experience) stored in the cerebral cortex in short and long term
> memories that are not captured and stored by the subconscious, would
> not be referenced when you dream.
>
> **Note: Deaf people (from birth) who have been on record at being able
> "get out their body" and either astral travel or soul travel, do
> indeed, experience sounds on the purported "inner planes", but such
> sounds have no reference to the sounds stored in short or long term
> memory or the subconscious.
>
> Fascinating subject, but there is no reserach in this area due to the
> problematic methodologies of recording inner experiences.

I am not referring to congenital deafness. I am referring to deafness
resulting directly from damage to the parts of the brain dealing with
auditory perception, be it in dreams or when awake. Like a negative
auditory hallucination. Hallucination of being totally deaf. In this
scenario, the ears and the auditory nerves work perfectly but the
acoustic parts of the brain malfunction in such a way that the patient
is totally deaf both when awake and in dreams.

I think that the auditory parts of the brain that are active when we
are awake also provide the audio for our dreams. So I guess -- but
definetely don't know -- that central deafness [i.e. deafness caused by
a brain disease] would cause the patient's dreams to be on "mute"
regardless of when he/she became deaf. Kind of like watching a movie
w/out the audio.

Again, its just my guess.

Auditory perception [real or hallucinatory] is due to change in
activity in the hearing areas of the brain. Right?

Once again, I think that in this interesting scenario, the patient
would be deaf to all audition whether from the ears or from the
subconscious. So even if the person has clear auditory memories, he/she
can only remember them [and even think about them in great detail and
recognition] but not re-perceive them. As I said before, I imagine this
to resemble watching a movie with all signals -- excluding the audio --
being intact.

Now, I could be mistaken. Perhaps the parts of the brain the perceive
sounds from our subconscious maybe totally different in location than
the parts of the brain that perceive true sounds from the ears.

Medman

2006-04-10, 1:27 am

Hello Radium; Sorry for not understanding the question. However, you
did find the answer yourself when you said :

"Auditory perception [real or hallucinatory] is due to change in
activity in the hearing areas of the brain. Right?

If these areas of the brain are damaged or non-functioning, then
regardless of how good your ears are, you would not hear.

Radium

2006-04-10, 1:27 am

Medman wrote:
> Hello Radium; Sorry for not understanding the question. However, you
> did find the answer yourself when you said :
>
> "Auditory perception [real or hallucinatory] is due to change in
> activity in the hearing areas of the brain. Right?
>
> If these areas of the brain are damaged or non-functioning, then
> regardless of how good your ears are, you would not hear.

Does this mean that the dreams would also be silent?

Peter F

2006-04-16, 1:20 am

"Radium" <glucegen1@excite.com> wrote in message
news:1144641017.837244.47010@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
> Medman wrote:
>
> Does this mean that the dreams would also be silent?
>

So, the question is: Which of all the neurons that receive auditory
information
(starting with the cells sound detecting cells in the cochlea) are required
to
be activated to give rise to (approximately every DIFFERENT aspect of) what
we clumsily
collectively refer to as "hearing"?

Consider this following phenomenon:

Occasionally, some musically gifted individuals start to "hear" an entire
piece
of never before heard music inside their mind. Some of these people have
a capacity to remember and write down what they heard (like e.g. W.A. Mozart
had/did).

Just imagine the subconscious (non aware) processing (preliminary
patterning)
- involving auditory information transmitting neurons - that must have gone
on prior
to such experiences (or *actentively consciousT*) hearing"!

Apropos which:
There is a widespread similarly sloppy defining/understanding behind
most uses of the word "consciousness".

That is why it will ultimately be required and approporiate to
qualify in which sense the word is being used (which would have
to depend on in what context and with what intention it used).

I sometimes use a T-tag to write "consciousnessT" to
thereby imply a more precise-than-usual definition of the word,
when I think it is appropriate and/or bother to do so.

[The T-tag might have been any other letter or even a totally different
looking new word;
but, to me, the T-tag suitably symbolizes that I have provided (or
recognized a by Science,
via not the least by A.R. Luria, me suggested) a Tolerance Principled
complementary definition of ~Consciousness~.]

P