Can a blind person think in pictures?

Agree with Liana. I also have worked with blind people and they use this *eye-poking* as a form of stimulation. I have also tried it on my own eye balls..great visuals! I don't know if this still happens, but years ago blind people were taught the *concept* of colours by using hot or cold objects ie red being a hot stone and blue or white being ice or some other cold item. This must have been very confusing though as how can you possibly explain any other colours?

as seen in the film *mask* linz.... doesnt happen any more as far as i know i once tried to tell a student that hot was a red colour. felt like a right ninny.....

Thanks for that eye poking tip, I will mention it in philosophy, see if anyone explodes or guns down badgers.

you mean you've got badgers attending your philosophy class? well, i must say, i find that pretty surprising. where are you studying, the university of Narnia?

i think that though the congenitally blind have access to the concept of colour - they can understand that colour has an effect on the eyes in the same way that tone does on the ear - their understanding of it can only be analogous. they can understand that blue might be to the eye what middle C is to the ear. and that is all. to this extent, ideas come from experience, because one can have no idea about colour if one does not have some similar sense (that one does have experience of using) that one can lay against it as a comparison. a congenitally blind person may dream in colour, i suppose, if there is some residual activity in the eye, but, if not, will dream in sensations and sounds, i imagine. Plato would disagree. in The Republic, he suggests a divine ground of ideas, which we have innate access to using our logos (reason). he suggests that the physical (and moral) world is merely a copy of the 'real' world of ideas. chairs are imitations of the 'idea' of a chair. also according to Plato, this world is continuously visited by souls, which are in a perpetual state of motion. this transmigration of the soul means that a congenitally blind person would be able to 'remember' colour from a former life, even though (s)he had no direct access to it here.

I like this Plato chap...

Yup, Plato was a laugh :P. He believed that all knowledge isnt learnt its remembered. That our souls, when non-corporeal, are in this other... dimension thingy where they have access to the universal idea rather than a specific example which we have i.e. in the real world there are no true straight lines but from looking at all of these almost lines we get remember what a straight line is. We are supposed to forget all of this when we are born and get a new body because these experiences are so traumatic they leave us muddled and confused. When we grow we get experiances of these things and those experiences help clear up some of the muddle. If I remember correctly his example was a table, how do we recognise one when we see one. Its because all of the specific examples of a table all remind us of this 'ultimate' table. I personnally think its a load of crap. Descartes also believed in all of this rubbish but he was stoned most of the time. He reffered to it alot in his meditations, look at meditation 5 if you have the book. Thats also the one with the really groovy ontological argument.

what, cogito ergo sum?

Thats the one, possibly one of hte ew things he said which is difficult to doubt. He only did it because solipsism was fashionable at the time and he wanted to kiss the donkey's of all the religious blokes because he wanted everyone to listen to his science stuff and figured they would like it if he did some philosophy on the side to prove that the world existed etc. Obviously science is a bit of a waste if the world didnt exist.

Thats the one, possibly one of hte ew things he said which is difficult to doubt. He only did it because solipsism was fashionable at the time and he wanted to kiss the donkey's of all the religious blokes because he wanted everyone to listen to his science stuff and figured they would like it if he did some philosophy on the side to prove that the world existed etc. Obviously science is a bit of a waste if the world doesnt exist.

I don't know about pictures but I'm sure that a blind person can see colours - make one mad enough and the will probably see red.

It is quite possible that the blind see colour it's just that since they have no vision in the 'outside' world no one has been able to point to it and say this is red or blue etc. Since the blind have no reference then we have no starting point to pass on our agreed concept of colour. All this pre-supposes congential blindness. One last thing if you had been brought up to call red, blue - and in later life found yourself in an arguement with someone who pointed out that red was red how could this arguement be settled? A rose by any other name....

I taught blind, deaf, and deafblind people fulltime for ten years. In my experience, congenitally blind people have no idea of "colours" per se. There are behaviours displayed by blind people, which are commonly called blindisms, and one of these behaviours is "eye poking" If you push your finger(s) against your eyeball when your eyes are closed, so applying pressure on the optic nerve, it will create fantastic patterns, like exploding fireworks in the otherwise total darkness. I can only imagine that blind people do this for visual stimulation, so i would say that yes, blind people can see colour. They just arent able to describe it in terms of "red" or "blue" etc. As for whether they think in pictures.... i dont know.

I can see you've done a bit of 'eye poking' yourself Liana.

i beg your pardon?