
How Deaf People Think - srean
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/07/how-deaf-people-think/
======
esoteriq
Long-time lurker here - this is one of the first articles that I've felt
compelled to respond to. I have a unique perspective on deafness and language.

I was born profoundly deaf (so deaf that audiologists proclaimed me as the
deafest child ever - what an honor). I learned ASL when I was six months old.
To preface - I was incredibly lucky to have parents who learned an entire new
language for me (they were immigrants, so it was no easy task for them) and
noticed my deafness early. I also got a cochlear implant, which enables me to
hear speech fairly well. Over the years, I've learned how to speak and listen
well enough to converse with most people. I've also managed to maintain my
fluency in ASL - it's a very important part of who I am.

According to my mother, I was able to express my desires (I want orange juice,
my diapers need changing, etc.) as early as 8 months. So, I was able to talk
to my parents at a different level than hearing infants of the same age.

I have plenty of deaf friends who were not as lucky. Some of them had hearing
losses that were not discovered until they were more than two years old. Some
of them just had parents who didn't want to or could not learn ASL. Their
performance, academic and otherwise, has lagged behind their hearing peers. I
find that their thoughts are not as organized as someone who learned language
early on (regardless of form), so some of their actions don't have "common
sense." Frankly, the benign neglect I see with deaf children is shocking and
quite depressing. It makes me grateful for what I had growing up.

This article also made me think about how different my thought process is from
hearing people's processes. Even after years of using speech as my main mode
of communication, ASL still influences my thoughts quite heavily. For example,
I tend to think about spatial matters in ASL - i.e. how a street is laid out.
Also, I tend to think about emotions in ASL, complete with facial expressions.
On the other hand, with more technical issues such as the law (I'm a lawyer),
I'll think in words, even spoken words sometimes.

In all and all, I'm grateful that I was able to learn ASL so early and
transition to spoken language. ASL really enriched my life - culturally and
mentally - and I'm very glad that ASL was my first language.

~~~
cloudwalking
Can you tell us more about the cochlear implant? I've never met someone who
has one (that I know of).

~~~
esoteriq
Sure - no problem. Just to give you some context, I got my implant in 1991,
and technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since then.

Cochlear implants are quite different than hearing aids. Hearing aids just
amplify sounds. Cochlear implants actually directly stimulates your auditory
nerve via a surgical implant, mimicking sound. Normally, sound waves pass
through your cochlea and stimulate the multiple hair cells, triggering
different "sounds" (as interpreted by your brain). Since the cochlear implant
stimulates the auditory nerve more directly, once a person is implanted, the
person loses all of his or her residuary hearing. Obviously, only people with
profound or severe hearing losses are allowed to get a cochlear implant.

My cochlear implant has two components - the inner and external portions. The
external portion is the speech processor and it looks somewhat like a hearing
aid without the ear mold and it has a magnetic part that attaches to your
head. The speech processor converts sounds into electrical signals that goes
through a magnet that is attached to my head. The electrical signal will pass
through the internal parts of my cochlear implant (the implants itself) and
stimulate the nerve, causing me to hear sound. I should add that the
conversion process filters out most background noises and focuses on
frequencies used for speech. As a result, I can't really appreciate music
because with the limited frequency range of the cochlear implant, music sounds
all muddled to me.

Of course, that's the technical part. I can hear, but I can't hear anywhere as
well as a hearing person. I still have a lot of difficulties hearing in a
noisy situation, such as restaurants, bars, etc. I can't really differentiate
between certain sounds such as b/ps, g/hs and the like.

I can, however, converse with most people. I have an "accent" because I
learned how to speak relatively late - 8 years old. I have met people who got
their implants when they were two or three and they barely have an accent.

One thing I should also add - most people who receive a cochlear implant need
special training to use it. Since I was one of the first 500 children to
receive a cochlear implant after the FDA approved it for children, I underwent
intensive speech-and-listening training. I had to learn how to listen since I
had no frame of reference for sound. I'm sure you can imagine how hard it is
to get a six-year old to sit still and practice listening for hours at a time.
It took me two years before I could start learning how to speak. I didn't feel
comfortable speaking in public until I was thirteen or so.

Of course, the process is quite different for someone who heard before they
got an implant because he or she has a frame of reference. After talking to
younger implant recipients, I get the impression that the technology and
training methods have improved, so the whole process isn't as onerous anymore.

Hopefully this wasn't too much information and if I misstated something
(probably biology-related) I apologize in advance! If you have more questions,
feel free to ask!

~~~
skybrian
Do you consider getting an upgraded implant someday, or is that not practical?

~~~
esoteriq
You know, I was thinking about this recently. Since the operation is quite
expensive (tens of thousands of dollars), insurance coverage is a must. It's
hard to get insurance coverage for a new internal component if mine is still
functional. Also, today's technology - in terms of the internal component - is
not that much better than what I got in 1991. For example, right now I have 22
channels, but the best that one can get today is 24 channels. The improvement
is relatively small for the amount of hassle that I would have to go through
to get that improvement - surgery, recovery time, etc.

Like all surgeries, cochlear implant surgery has risks. I don't want to take
heedless risks, so I'm content with what I have for right now. Although I
think I would get the surgery if the implant was 100% internal - no more
external parts!

------
sarenji
I'm so deaf I can't hear much of anything, even with hearing aids. I never
learned American Sign Language. I lip-read terribly. I also have an inner
voice. I read at a grade level above hearing peers. I understand puns.

How did that happen?

I learned Cued Speech[1]. It's not mentioned anywhere in this article. It's a
system that, summed up in a few words, uses signs for phonemes. Because of
this, I could learn English _within_ English. And when I took Spanish classes,
I learned Spanish _within_ Spanish.

I also dream in verbal words. Even after I learned ASL, I still dream
verbally. The words are always quiet, a bit muffled -- this is how I heard
things early in life, with hearing aids (I have a cochlear implant now).
Occasionally I see captions, as if it's a TV show.

A last note. In the article it mentions little d and big D deaf; the way I
learned it is that little d deaf people are deaf people in general, and big D
deaf is the Deaf culture and community.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cued_speech>

------
sp332
Those born deaf and _not_ taught sign language might not learn a language to
think in at all. [http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-
languag...](http://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/)

 _I walked up to him and signed, "Hello. My name is Susan." He tried to copy
that and did a sloppy rendition of "Hello, my name is Susan." Obviously he
didn’t know what he was doing. It wasn’t language. And I was shocked. He
looked Mayan and I thought, well, if he knew Mexican sign language, he
wouldn’t try to copy. That’s not a normal thing to do, even if you don’t know
the language._

~~~
grourk
Those born deaf and not taught sign language will invent their own sign
language. There are no human cultures without language.

Spoken (or signed) language is natural for humans, and developed as a form of
telepathy. I can get a thought that's in my head into your head over a great
distance transmitted over noisy media in a short time with a few words. But
the thought in my head isn't in the form of an extremely ambiguous language
like English or ASL or whatever I happened to learn as a child. It's the other
way around: the thoughts come first.

Check out The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker for a nice overview on the
scientific understanding around this.

~~~
jbrennan
The book _Adam's Tongue_ by Derek Bickerton chronicles one view of how
language evolved in humans and in doing so, evolved humans along with it. It's
pretty fascinating.

The book explains how our brains wouldn't really have the "thoughts" you speak
of without having had language in the first place. I'm not sure precisely how
this fits in to children who can't speak and who were never taught to sign,
but my guess is it would introduce considerable mental stumbling blocks.

------
IsaacSchlueter
Good article. One correction, however:

 _One of the big differences between ASL and many other sign languages is that
ASL primarily uses only hand gestures, whereas most types of sign languages,
such as BSL, rely heavily on facial expressions and other physical expressions
outside of hand and finger gestures._

ASL places a lot of importance on facial expressions and body position to
express tense and grammatical concepts. Many signs are a combination of a
mouth morpheme and a hand gesture.

If you just do the hand-shapes, fluent signers will probably be able to
understand you, but it would be the equivalent of mispronouncing words in a
spoken language, or constructing sentences awkwardly.

~~~
seiji
I agree. Saying ASL only uses hand gestures is like saying speaking only uses
vibrations of molecules in the air. The world would speak like those strange
text-to-speech animated bear videos.

ASL + Expression: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OL33OEW6QA>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmKnQjBf8wM>

------
bhickey
I had two deaf grandparents.

My grandmother lost her hearing to meningitis around age 12, while my
grandfather went deaf through his work as a machinist (presumably in his 20s).
Her deafness was profound -- the only time I ever saw her react to sound was
when balloon burst beside her. His was a bit better and could interpret some
sounds with a hearing aid.

Neither of them knew ASL, but were fluent lip readers [They met at lip reading
class!] To some extent I believe that my speech was influenced by their
deafness. To make myself understood I needed to face them and an enunciate.

Stories aside, this article is a bit strange:

    
    
        It is quite common for deaf people, when they are
        dreaming, to not only communicate in their dreams using 
        sign language, but also to communicate telepathically 
        and sometimes even verbally even though they may not 
        know how to speak verbally in the waking world.

~~~
srean
I have heard that babies do not realize that their thoughts are private and
they assume that thinking by itself is a form of communication. I have always
been skeptical of it and never understood how would anyone even figure that
out or verify it. The paragraph you quoted gives me an anchor point and
suggests it might be true.

I have a friend who was _very_ nervous about speaking in English, but he
dreamed fluently in it. We knew because he talked a lot, rather continuously,
in his sleep. Extrapolating that I can imagine a deaf person dreaming verbal
communication.

~~~
a-priori
_I have heard that babies do not realize that their thoughts are private and
assume that thinking by itself is a form of communication._

I haven't heard this one before, but it wouldn't surprise me. Children up to
age 7 or so can't appreciate the fact that other people's experiences are any
different from theirs (egocentrism). This is why kids will do things like bury
their faces and say "you can't see me!". They don't understand that just
because they can't see you, you can still see them.

It's not a big stretch from there to them believing that if they hear their
internal monologue, that other people hear it as well.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>This is why kids will do things like bury their faces and say "you can't see
me!". They don't understand that just because they can't see you, you can
still see them.

In the game of peekaboo (peepo, or whatever you call it) an adult pretends to
be hidden by putting their hands over their eyes, they say "peekaboo" (or
whatever) and reveal themselves as if appearing suddenly - this game is often
played with very young (pre-vocal) children.

I wonder what the relationship is, whether the kids really feel internally
they are hidden or if they mimic that which is presented to them? It seems
straightforward, but perhaps it's an emperors new clothes thing - the kid
thinks initially that the person isn't hidden (though their identity is) but
comes to learn that they should think the person is hidden, that's what the
game is.

Obviously it's complex, hiding your facial features from a myopic infant will
make you appear no longer to be a person (or at least not the person they
recognise, "where's Mummy gone all I see now is a blur", and then revealing
those features is a surprise. One has effectively disappeared and reappeared
just like an adult watching someone put on camouflage and disappear in to and
return from undergrowth when that person didn't really leave your field of
view.

>It's not a big stretch from there to them believing that if they hear their
internal monologue, that other people hear it as well.

I think it's a huge leap.

Not that one shouldn't take it as an hypothesis, just that assuming hidden
brain functions act on hidden sense data in a particular manner base on
equivalence of senses seems like it would need a lot of effort to demonstrate.

This is the sort of leap people make in assuming thought in animals - "that
dog smiled he must have a sense of humour an internal conscious function that
responds to humorous situations just like I have".

------
BoppreH
I think the issue is similar with bilingual people. Since I started speaking
English, my thoughts regularly switch from one language to another, especially
when I can't remember the word I want in that language. It's also a great
exercise during the learning process.

But what caught my attention in the article was the link between language and
self-awareness. I think it makes sense: the more complex ideas you can convey
to other people, the more complex ideas you can convey to yourself too.

Maybe that's what make us different from the other animals?

~~~
riledhel
ever dreamt in English? until you reach that point, dreaming in a foreign
language, you didn't really _grasp_ the other language.

~~~
BoppreH
Now that you mentioned, I don't remember a single instance of a person
speaking in my dreams. But I can't figure out if it was just a lack of
language as general or if people communicated telepathically.

Either way... that's unsettling.

~~~
wahnfrieden
I've definitely had dreams with people speaking to me, but even in a language
I'm learning -- the strange thing is that I can remember struggling to parse
and comprehend what they were saying, as if their level of speaking ability
was a bit higher than my own.

------
srean
There has been some very nice discussion on deafness here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2111278> I picked up helpful tips from
there.

I have limited hearing on one side and lost it fairly late (in my teens). So I
do think in a verbal language, however I also picture/visualize things and not
always speak to myself in words. This has a weird consequence that, if I am
unexpectedly asked to explain the thought process sometime, I have to struggle
for words. One perennial but minor difficulty is telling time, as sense of
time is mostly visual to me, I do not tell myself the time. But I do not know
if this idiosyncrasy is deafness related or not.

~~~
Mz
You don't have to be deaf to think in pictures. My oldest son thinks in
pictures. He also has no sense of time and some other issues. I don't recall
if these two things are specifically related. Temple Grandin thinks in
pictures and wrote a book with basically that title ("Thinking in Pictures").
My son has to translate spoken words he hears into pictures to understand them
and then translate pictures in his head into spoken words. This need for
translation means he sometimes has the kinds of misunderstandings with people
that you typically see from someone who speaks English as a second language.
(And, in fact, he was a late talker -- and was basically pushed into it by mom
enrolling him in preschool.)

These days, there is a fair amount of literature on things like lack of time
sense and thinking in pictures. Here is what my son once said about living
with no sense of time:

<http://www.kidslikemine.com/b8timeblind.shtml>

------
delackner
Can anyone confirm this last (supremely fascinating) quote at the end of the
article?

" In sign languages such as BSL, you’d use your hand gestures, facial
expressions, etc. to express things like that the walk was on a dirt road; it
was nice out; and you enjoyed the walk, with it all expressed simultaneously.
This non-sequential nature of sign languages allows for faster and more
detailed communication, but has the drawback of being ridiculously hard to put
into print, though attempts have been made. "

~~~
andrewce
Confirmed. Adding such sensory detail to narrative descriptions is pretty easy
to do in American Sign Language (I can't speak for BSL or others, though
French Sign Language is pretty close to ASL, from what I understand).

I'm no longer good enough with ASL that I can do all that simultaneously (I'm
a native speaker as a result of 8 years at a school for the deaf, but use
spoken/written English all but one or two days out of the year).

------
terhechte
This is very similar to what Socialogist George Herbert Mead proposed in his
grand theory of "Social Behaviorism" (1934):

    
    
       "Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view 
       that the individual is a product of society, or more specifically, 
       social interaction. The self arises when the individual becomes an
        object to themselves. Mead argued that we are objects first to 
       other people, and secondarily we become objects to ourselves by 
       taking the perspective of other people. Language enables us to 
       talk about ourselves in the same way as we talk about other people, 
       and thus through language we become other to ourselves.[16] In joint 
       activity, which Mead called 'social acts', humans learn to see themselves 
       from the standpoint of their co-actors. A central mechanism within 
       the social act, which enables perspective taking, is position 
       exchange. People within a social act often alternate social 
       positions (e.g., giving/receiving, asking/helping, winning/losing,    
       hiding/seeking, talking/listening). In children's games there is 
       repeated position exchange, for example in hide-and-seek, and Mead 
       argued that this is one of the main ways that perspective taking develops." 
    

(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herbert_Mead>)

He proposed that organisms first experience or see themselves as an object (or
perceive themselves at all, thus stepping over the instinct-border) when they
use their voice and hear their voice at the same time and see that others
react to that voice too. Even though it is very theoretical it makes for good
and interesting reading.

------
jamesbressi
A must read--both the article AND discussion here.

This article and the discussions below are truly one of the more fascinating
topics to be had.

It is always great to read amazing topics submitted to HN (which is a large
portion of the point here, right?) and to read comments for better
understanding and discussion (which is the other potion here), but to have
both an intriguing article matched with equally thought-provoking and
explorative discussion is a complete intellectual gem.

------
6ren
There's a thought here that part of our fundamental intelligence is cultural,
and without that language, our brains are seriously incomplete.

What is even more amazing (and somewhat relieving in its robustness) is that
human communities develop language spontaneously. There's the famous case of a
school of deaf children in Nicarangua, who, lacking teachers, spontaneously
developed their own language. Apparently, with complex grammar and so on.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language> I find this profoundly
hopeful, in what it shows about people. Also
[http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/2...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/22/new-
nicaraguan-sign-language-shows-how-language-affects-thought/) (via sp332's
link)

Even in this article, there is mentioned "homesign" or "kitchensign", though I
imagine it is very limited, and would tend to lack abstractions, complex
grammar and so on, being used by a small (ie family) group, for domestic
purposes, and while the child is very young.

------
pnathan
This is fascinating. Of particular note to me is the conception that sign
language operates in parallel, rather than in sequential. Written language is
sequential.

In the computer domain, parallelism is, in my experience, best expressed in
circuit diagrams and sequence diagrams. This is in the picto-ideagraphical
realm, which is the realm of sign languages.

Of course visual programming languages have a long and distinguished history
of living in a niche. But I wonder if there is a radically awesome visual
programming language expression out there that is sufficient.

------
jamesbkel
Great book if you're interested in further reading

[http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Hands-Language-Reveals-
About/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Hands-Language-Reveals-
About/dp/0743247132)

------
TravisLS
There was an excellent episode of Radiolab about this subject. If you have the
time or inclination to listen to an hour long podcast, I highly recommend
"Words": <http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/>

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Similar discussion from eight months ago here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365>

Extremely interesting subject, extremely interesting discussion, with many
great insights.

------
beefman
>This non-sequential nature of sign languages allows for faster and more
detailed communication, but has the drawback of being ridiculously hard to put
into print, though attempts have been made.

I sense opportunity...

