English Deutsch Français Italiano Español Português 繁體中文 Bahasa Indonesia Tiếng Việt ภาษาไทย
All categories

There have been the cases of feral children/child abuse where the outcome resulted in the permanent inability of learning human language, higher emotional development such as feeling compassion, etc.
MRI scans of these children's brains showed underdeveloped areas that controlled these functions. Can a human stay alive with a brain that has been damaged by depriving all 5 senses, leaving just the parts of the brain that run bodily functions?
Or will this be too much of a system shock that the brain deteriorates, causing death?

2007-03-26 00:35:47 · 2 answers · asked by cpc26ca 1 in Social Science Psychology

2 answers

Deprivation of all five senses should cause the brain to atrophy and the person would die. It has been proven that a human being cannot live if derpived of touch.

2007-03-26 00:41:12 · answer #1 · answered by ? 6 · 2 0

You are comparing two situations here:
it has been proved that most feral children have been abandoned due to innate disorders such as retardation, so they don't help that much.
But even if this wasn't the case, being deprived of sensory perception due to physical disorders (deafness, blindness, etc) would be different than being deprived of physical contact with other humans, such as so called feral children. Herzog's documentary "In the realm of shadows and silence" (I think that was the name) about deaf-dumb-blind children you can see that deprived of three senses, touch becomes desperately necessary. But in another Herzog film, based on the life of Kaspar Houser, you see certain inability to cope with social life regardless of time after being reinstalled in it.
So, theoretically, someone born deprived of all senses would probably show no mental activity since it would lack any source of information. But someone forcefully isolated from human contact (as in Guantanamo) would certainly suffer brain deterioration.

2007-03-26 11:12:24 · answer #2 · answered by Fromafar 6 · 0 0

fedest.com, questions and answers