Is it possible for a deaf person to imagine a song?

[Midas]

This is a really interesting discussion with much intelligent debate and just one problem: deaf people can (and do) experience auditory hallucinations. Even people deaf from birth. It happens in schizophrenia and other conditions, and there are a lot of studies published on the subject. As to how it can happen... well, that's why there are so many studies! You'd think it was impossible, and there is debate about it amongst the psychologists and neurologists (are these hallucinations or pseudo-hallucinations; are patients reporting hallucinations of people speaking or are we misinterpreting what they are telling us: that sort of thing)...but the simple reality is, for more than 40 years I have been working with the mentally ill, and I regularly encounter profoundly deaf people who hear voices!

 

[hypnagogue]

This is a really interesting discussion with much intelligent debate and just one problem: deaf people can (and do) experience auditory hallucinations. Even people deaf from birth. It happens in schizophrenia and other conditions, and there are a lot of studies published on the subject. As to how it can happen... well, that's why there are so many studies! You'd think it was impossible, and there is debate about it amongst the psychologists and neurologists (are these hallucinations or pseudo-hallucinations; are patients reporting hallucinations of people speaking or are we misinterpreting what they are telling us: that sort of thing)...but the simple reality is, for more than 40 years I have been working with the mentally ill, and I regularly encounter profoundly deaf people who hear voices!

Are these people deaf from birth? If yes, how do you know that it is really an auditory hallucination? What studies are you referring to?

 

[zoobyshoe]

This is a really interesting discussion with much intelligent debate and just one problem: deaf people can (and do) experience auditory hallucinations. Even people deaf from birth. It happens in schizophrenia and other conditions, and there are a lot of studies published on the subject. As to how it can happen... well, that's why there are so many studies! You'd think it was impossible, and there is debate about it amongst the psychologists and neurologists (are these hallucinations or pseudo-hallucinations; are patients reporting hallucinations of people speaking or are we misinterpreting what they are telling us: that sort of thing)...but the simple reality is, for more than 40 years I have been working with the mentally ill, and I regularly encounter profoundly deaf people who hear voices!

In his book Seeing Voices, Neurologist Oliver Sacks has a long footnote about this on page 6. It's too long to quote here but he posits that the manner in which the deaf experience hallucinations of "voices" is quite different than what the hearing experience just as the interior monolog of the deaf is different than that of the hearing:

"Clayton Valli, a deaf sign poet, when a poem is coming to him, feels his own body making little signs-he is, as it were, speaking to himself, in his own voice."

A person born deaf would quite simply not understand any spoken language if they could suddenly hear, or if they had an accurate hallucination of the sound of spoken language. What the deaf-from-birth experience when they have the hallucination of being addressed by disembodied "voices" is certainly, therefore, the hallucination of the physical and mental and emotional reactions they have to being communicated with by sign language or lip reading without the accompanying visuals. Sacks says they don't claim to actually see disembodied hands signing or lips moving, and the deaf who experience these hallucinations are hard pressed to explain what it is they actually are experiencing, but, since they understand what's being said to them, and often sign back to the hallucinations addressing them, we can be sure they are not experiencing the hallucination of sound. There is no sound based language they are in a position to understand. Occasionally you run across mention of hearing psychotics who hallucinate the sound of people speaking in a foreign language they don't understand, and, they don't, indeed, understand what's being said.

Sign language isn't what you might suppose it is. It has a vital spatial component that spoken language does not:

The essential grammatical information of American Sign Langauge (ASL) is conveyed through changes in the movement and spatial contouring of the hands and arms.

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=801139&coll=portal&dl=ACM#abstract

I saw Ursula Beluggi, one of the authors of that paper, and a pioneer researcher in how the brain processes sign language, interviewed on television a few years back, and she emphasized how the nuances of sign are essentially spatial. It is not a word for word analog of spoken language and how a sign speaker treats and manipulates the space in which they sign is, she says, a vital component of what is said.

That being the case, when the deaf experience the hallucination of being addressed we have to assume this includes the reception of spatial imformation, the physical feeling of spatial relationships, that hearing people just don't experience and which a deaf psychotic would be hard pressed to explain to a hearing person.