What language do you dream in in you are born deaf

[Sarge82nd]

The title is enough

[Nuke]

sign language of course.

[TheDarkStar]

I don't think you have to dream in any language at all.

[SargeRho]

Probably whatever language you learned. Being deaf only prevents you from hearing, not from communicating through language - sign language or written, are both in, for example, english.

[Skyrunner27]

This is like asking what a Blind person sees when they dream. The answer is they don't. You know your brain isn't powerful enough to create faces when you sleep so everyone in you dreams is someone you have seen. So if a deaf person dreamed they would't here anything, but they might as someone said dream in sign language.

[Pds314]

The same way that you visualize the 4th dimension in your dreams.

The point is, the brain is highly flexible, and it isn't born knowing how to process languages or types of information it hasn't learned. Your brain works well for seeing 2d representations of 3d objects, hearing 1d representations of 3d points, smelling 0d representations of 3d points, etc.

Your brain does not work well at all for doing things outside of its experience. If you aren't used to the idea of vibrations in the air being interpreted as abstract communication by organs that are alien to you, you certainly aren't going to make it up.

Likewise, you probably aren't used to taking a jumble of voxel data and somehow interpreting it as a chronology or a 4-dimensional object. That idea seems completely nonsensical to your subconscious, and you would be very unlikely to just make it up and dream about it.

[lajoswinkler]

For most of deaf people spoken words and sounds in general are just impossible to hear correctly. The sounds are very dull and quiet, so the brain can't use that information for advanced communication. Small part of deaf people have absolutely no ability to hear at all (problems with neural connections, brain parts responsible for processing audible information, etc.).

Most blind people differentiate at least light and darkness, but a lot of them simply have such huge problems with eye focusing system that everything is extremely out of focus so they see blobs and patches of colored light so you can't sneak up on them like they're, unfortunatelly, mocked in movies.

What they see depends on the actual damage. If the damage is so severe (people born with no eyes, no retinas, poorly developed optical nerve or dedicated region in the brain), they don't have a clue what sight is. It might seem so scary for us, but if you never get to know something, you can't really miss it, can you?

The same goes for deaf people.

If they're completely deaf or blind, they don't have an audible language in their dreams and no images in their dreams, but there's always a possibility the brain of some of them produces random (we can't even imagine it) "sounds" and "sights" that disabled people just can't even name as such. They simply couldn't recognize that "this is it".

This is a difficult subject for discussion because there are so many levels of disability and so many types of damage to sensory organs, neural connections and processing units in the brain. The latter is incredibly complex.

The complexity grows even bigger if we include the time when the damage occured (congenital, early childhood, early puberty, adulthood...).

The fact is that loss of sight or hearing in young childred represents an obstacle to proper general development so those kids have to be under special care to stimulate their brains. In the past, before health care we take for granted, it was normal for sensory deprived children to grow into mentally retarted individuals. The worst cases were kids without any such sensory input. They would either grow up in a basement, completely alone, or in lunatic asylums, tied to their beds. We can not imagine the pain they endured, with only human contact being occasional forced bathing and the notion that someone brings them food. Such horrors are stil present in today's world in rural parts of poorly developed countries.

Edited October 21, 2013 by lajoswinkler