does anyone else want to get a blind person to try d or other crazy strong psychedelics? one from birth though who has never been able to see.

i think they would be touched if they get transported into space and to see.

Welcome
I assume it would be much more breathtaking than for the average person. What kinds of visuals they would get, who knows. I recently found out that blind from birth people don't go through REM which adds to the mystery of it all. What I do know is that they would have a hella hard time trying to verbally describe without having a reference to anything else.

i think somebody that has lost their vision might be more impressed..

We have actually discussed this before.
Studies were done with LSD. People blind from birth do NOT have " visual hallucinations" while people blind latter in life do. Proper seeing and visual cortex functioning requires input. A lot of learning goes into seeing. It is quite complex and involves associations with language and thus recognition of objects, patterns and boundaries. But even raw visual experience requires sensory input (experience) to properly function. If you are interested look in a neuroscience text book and look at the development of the visual cortex in a newborn.

What would be very interesting to do would be a study utilizing subjects with specific localized neural damage in visual associated cortices (as well as other areas) and administer hallucinogens. Thus we may be able to correlate specific type or forms of hallucinations (or subjective response) with specific regions of the CNS. This study combined with PET, and other imaging studies would be very useful. Some work has been done with subjects with disease induced hallucinations.

I'm not sure if tim leary and ken kesey did a good thing.... these substances obviously hold some kind of scientific utility ..... its a shame that they have been so badly stigmatized by a culture war.

Bufoman- i always enjoy your incredibly intelligent scientific observations. thank you for the education!

TheInfiniteAbyss- i LOVE your signature! hilarious and so very true....

Thank you. This had been something I was interested in for years before I actually stumbled upon the articles. Truly fascinating. Psychedelics have a lot to offer neuroscience.

So do blind people have hallucinations of smell and sound?

Do normal people experience sound and smell during a DMT trip? If so, is smell and sound magnified by the drug, as vision is, or do sound and smell remain at conscious levels of intensity?

I think neuroscience would be in another dimension of knowledge & applications if psychedelics had not been demonized by the gov. back in the 60's and experimentation in humans was allowed to continue.
Shit, it was barely even allowed to get started...

And I agree, as much as "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" inspired me to "go Further", I still feel like Keasey & Leary unfortunately did just as much to help tighten the gov's grip on these materials, as anything else they achieved.

Think about it subjectively.
From the government's square point of view, use of psychedelic drugs quickly caused these grown, educated, professional men to "drop out" of normal society and start either playing dress-up & acting like children (Keasey's Merry Pranksters), or performing self experimentation with these "insanity drugs", on ones own body (Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery).
That is lunatic-style thinking from the point of view of the suit & tie set. Especially back in the 50's-60's when the ties where even tighter around their necks.

Keep in mind that until the 60's, psychedelics & their effects were not widely known in western civilization, they were something only the "underdeveloped savages living in the jungles down south" dealt with.
And only because they had not heard of god yet. (jeez...)

Think about western society in the late 50's, early 60's. Black & white & straight as a line! Remember "Refer Madness"?!?!
Now enter the LSD sub-culture, day-glo reds & greens & blues, weaving those previously straight lines into crazy, detailed artwork!!
"No jobs, dirty & the music these weird hippies make!! That's not music!!!"
Before the cultural revolution of the 60's, it was Perry Como & Laurence Welk etc... Waltzing music...
When psychedelic music hit the air waves, it had to sound like Satan himself had started a band, to the ears of the square-masses!!!

Its no wonder the Gov. saw these chemicals as dangerous, seeing as how the people who where taking psychedelics regularly, where realizing how full of shit & meaningless "$quare $ociety" really is & were learning to live (happier & more realized) without it!!



Yes, a full-on "breakthrough" is a total transformation of all of your senses to another...dimension/reality/hyperspace...whatever it is, you are there completely, just as you are here, looking at you computer screen right now.
I do not get huge scent hallucinations, but I do get them from time to time. I would have to assume a blind person would have much stronger scent hallucinations, since usually if a person looses their sense of sight, their sense of smell, taste & hearing are amplified to take its place.

My hearing is definitely amplified & transformed while under the influence of DMT!!
If I have any music playing when smoking DMT, I put the volume level at a point where its almost inaudible to my normal hearing. As the effects of that first toke of spice start to seep into my senses, my hearing is instantly amplified & I can hear the music just fine, sometimes it's even too loud!!

However, I much prefer to be in complete silence when smoking DMT because there is this beautiful, tryptamine music that one can hear if done in complete silence. Its a kind of hypnotic, double-voiced (one higher pitched, one lower pitched...) singing/chanting that speeds up & slows down randomly, while also independently changing pitch. The "voice" is accompanied by a chime-like ringing, its all very hypnotic & somehow aids in the transition through the veil.
It's so hard to explain...

I would imagine a blind person would have a much more detailed version of these kinds of aural hallucinations, indeed.
People who are blind from birth, usually get their perception of the space & depth of the room they're in & the location & size of things in that room, by listening to the differences between the original sound & the discrete echos of it, pinging off of the walls surrounding them.
So I wonder if the aural hallucinations picked up by a blind person using DMT, would translate into a perception of the DMT "space"?
Or would it be more of a void of space (with nothing physical to echo off of), more so than a person with normal vision could ever experience?

Fascinating topic indeed!!!


WS

Anyone ever heard of this tribe somewhere in the Andes that puts certain chosen ones in a pitchdark cave, from birth until their teens? I forgot their name. They also handled little sticks with chalk all day long and are convinced they are saving the world. Weird!

As soon as the first light hits the eyes, an irreversible process is triggered that trains the visual cortex/brain. If, after first light exposure, you go back to total darkness, you'll go blind! This process needs constant light input to develop properly.
Interesting experiment these Indians are doing by postponing this moment of first exposure for years. Maybe a bit immoral...

Sometimes I wonder if hyperspace visuals are so 'visual'. With eyes closed you 'see' things that are impossible to see in our 3d world. The visual cortex was never trained to process stuff like that and yet we perceive a coherent hyperdimensional world. A lot of information is processed by our consciousness during the trance... how, and where does it come from? It's more or less like switching to another virtual reality...