this is a question which is very hard. it probably depends on if you have been blind from birth or have been rendered blind through some kind of accident.

maybe even blind born people "see" on DMT, but they will never be able to put in into our words because they don't have the right words for colors, shapes & other things related to seeing.

does anybody know anyone who is blind and has tried smoking DMT? this would be really cool to find out.

Ha, funny question!

Actually it depends on what kind of blindness each blind person has, or so to speak what is the cause of their loss of vision.

And this really matters because one has to think how vision works and how tryptamine hallucinations are triggered. Basically, your eye receives the visual information, then it conveys it through the nerves to the brain regions controlling vision (like the visual cortex). And this is the important part, because the brain then processes the information and creates a "projection" of the image on a 3D environment. And the latter is exactly what you see. An example of this processing happens when the image that your eyes get (which is reverted due to the fact that your lens is concave) is reverted to the "normal" when your brain projects it "out"

Now, if one's blindness is due to damage in the eyes and/or nerves that convey the information to the brain AND tryptamine psychedelics actually trigger brain regions, then the brain should be able to project the hallucinatory signals to the "out" and this blind person will thus "see" stuff.

On the other hand, if one's blindness is due to brain damage, then he may not be able to "see" the hallucinations or, depending on the type of damage he may not be able to experience their whole spectrum.

As a matter of fact I am dying to find out if blind people can experience the visual orgasm of a dmt trip...

I have taken ayahuasca in a group with a blind person and he had visions, yes, but he lost his sight later on in life due to some sort of degeneration in the eyes, not in the brain

This has always intrigued me. I would imagine that research on this subject would answer many of the questions regarding the sources of these hallucinations. Are they simply based on sensory data, or is it an even higher function of the brain? This would also be a good way to test its relationship to dream-state.

i believe those that were able to see at one time in their life are able to get visuals, there was a blind person in strassman's book. those that have always been blind cannot. This is the same for dreaming also I believe.

it might also be that a blind person who is born blind still receives visuals, but cannot describe them as such because he never knew what seeing was like.

My friends and I have discussed this very thing before. I would love to hear a report from a person blind at birth about a DMT experience.

I bet that they WOULD get visuals, but as another person stated they would not be able to describe them.

Blind people still have the spatial awareness, that in most people is mostly fed with visual stimuli. So blind people still have a perception of the 3-D space around them. I think that on a blind person, DMT will have effects on their spatial awareness and they will have hallucinations in their 'inner eye' in wich the concepts of 3-D space are unfolded. These hallucinations are probably very similar to normal visual hallucinations. Instead of colors, blind people can hear the acoustic quallitiy's of all kinds of stuff; if it's hard or soft. I bet wood sounds different when it's painted, for instance. I think blind people will more often have synestaesia.

Well people blind at birth still have dreams. Rather than being visual, it's just an experience. When they have dreams about falling, it's just as scary as ours. They can still feel the sensation of falling. They'd experience DMT in every way except visually. Although you can have CEV's, I imagine the spice is interacting with your memories of colors you have seen, or your optic nerves directly. Interesting question, someone should do a study for sure, especially if for some reason it did help blind people experience vision.

As a legelly blind person I've come in contact with many who are blind from birth of whom two have received eye sight through medical help. I asked one of them how things looked when comparing his real eye sight to what he saw while blind. He said that everything he now sees does not have as much intensity and brightness as what his mind saw. The other blind from birth person said that the first time he saw anything, he saw his wife's face which scared and repulsed him. He also experienced vivid colors in his blindness, but of course they weren't the same colors as we know them.