Global Survey New: Color Blindness Improvement w/Psychedelic Use

Breaking News: 11/8/2020 Researchers just days ago published and made available breaking ground research on Psychedelics in a medicinal manner – the news of Oregon becoming the first state to legalize and decriminalize the use of Psilocybin Mushrooms this is of great interest. At University of Cambridge, UK, they found that of 23 respondents who had improved color blindness in the National Drug Use Survey that had improvements 15 of them indicated they had used psychedelic substances when such effect occurred.

The fact their vision came back under the influence of a schedule one influence isn't a surprise as in 2016 Right eye vision returned after a 21 loss of it – only due to another schedule one – I can see again. "These were singular mentions of novel psychedelic substance use with which this effect occurred, " said the researchers, " This included substituted 2C family drugs such as 25I-NBOMe and 2C-C and several novel substituted tryptamines such as 5-MeO-DMT and 4-HO-MET. Responses did not indicate that a specific drug induced changes in color blindness with a greater frequency than other drugs.

With increasing interest in the use of psychedelics and many already indulging it's imperative more science is gained. Research such as the following article give us insight to lay foundation and in many cases advance the work of M.A.P.S. and others throughout the years.

"There are several limitations to the study. The data consisted of self-reported anecdotes of variable quality, some of which proved hard to interpret, thus making accurate quantification and standardized interpretation difficult. The reports were self-validated both as to the nature of the color blindness and whether this phenomenon was experienced. Color blindness is not a unimodal disorder and different forms of color blindness may have been affected differently."

Improved colour blindness symptoms associated with recreational psychedelic use: Results from the Global Drug Survey 2017

Show all authors JEC Anthony, A Winstock, JA Ferris, Nov. 2, 2020

Abstract

It is well documented that psychedelic drugs can have a profound effect on colour perception. After previous research involving psychedelic drug ingestion, several participants had written to the authors describing how symptoms of their colour blindness had improved. The Global Drugs Survey runs the world’s largest annual online drug survey. In the Global Drugs Survey 2017, participants reporting the use of lysergic acid diethylamide or psilocybin in the last 12 months were asked,    We have received reports from some people with colour-blindness that this improves after they use psychedelics. If you have experienced such an effect can you please describe it in the box below, say what drug you took and how long the effect lasted. We received 47 responses that could be usefully categorised of which 23 described improved colour blindness. Commonly cited drugs were LSD and psilocybin; however, several other psychedelic compounds were also listed. Some respondents cited that the changes in colour blindness persisted, from a period of several days to years. Improved colour blindness may be a result of new photisms experienced in the psychedelic state aligning with pre-existing concepts of colour to be ascribed a label. Connections between visual and linguistic cortical areas may be enhanced due to disorder in the brain’s neural connections induced by psychedelics allowing these new photisms and concepts to become linked. This paper provides preliminary data regarding improved colour blindness accompanying recreational psychedelic use which may be further investigated in future iterations of the Global Drugs Survey or in a stand-alone Global Drugs Survey-managed psychedelics survey.

Introduction

‘Mescaline raises all colours to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times he is completely blind’ (Huxley, 1954: 14).

I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a coloured [sic] world, which does not exist outside of human beings. – Albert Hofmann

These two quotes are a small fraction of the historical literature describing how psychedelics greatly alter one’s ordinary perception of colour. Such altered perception has been previously assessed in a lab controlled setting; finding changes in spectral patterns and hue discrimination, which also varies between different psychedelic drugs (Hartman and Hollister, 1963). This challenges our current understanding of the role of photoreceptors in central colour processing. However, restrictions around research involving these drugs made further studies into these phenomena more challenging.

We had received reports from several people who participated in our research that after taking a psychedelic, their previously colour-blind perception of the world was changed. One participant said,

All my life I suffered from red-dichromacy/protanopia … after psilocybin I viewed Monet’s San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk, a painting which I had previously seen as a dull mass of brown and blue. All of the colours I was previously unable to see were there on the screen, and the emotion that I felt made me unable to speak for about half an hour.

Similar comments were made on online forums such as Reddit, ‘I’m colour blind, and I’m convinced shrooms [sic] allows me to see all colours vibrantly’ (Anonymous, 2015). These reports suggested that some individuals were experiencing improvements in their colour blindness.

Normal colour vision is trichromatic arising from comparisons between the differential excitement of three types of colour-sensing cone in response to certain wavelengths of light. Colour blindness is an inherited X-linked genetic disorder in which sufferers usually have one less cone type in the retina. This results in a reduced ability to compute spectral differences between certain colours depending on the wavelength of light the lost cone was most sensitive to. Psychedelics will not alter the inherent colour sensing ability of the optical machinery in the retina; however, they may affect central processing of the colour signal from the retina thus affecting colour blindness.

Previous studies have found that psychedelics can alter the way depressed patients respond to emotional faces, particularly fearful ones (Roseman et al., 2018), and a recent systematic review has highlighted that psychedelic use has been associated with permanent changes to personality in both the acute and long term (Bouso et al., 2018). This demonstrates the established potential of psychedelics to affect our central processing of emotion and we were interested as to whether psychedelics could assert similar effects by improving colour vision in colour-blind people.

Colour-blind synaesthetes have reported experiencing ‘alien’ photisms in relation to certain numbers (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001) showing that the brain can alter the colour experience beyond input from the optic nerve. A recent case study has reported a patient who has experienced synaesthesia for over seven years since ingesting 75–150 milligrams of 2C-B (Yanakieva et al., 2019), indicating that some psychedelic experiences can produce long lasting changes in perception. In both cases, the input to the brain from the sense organs is unchanged; however, it demonstrates the profound and persistent influence that central processing can have on the sensory experience.

The Global Drugs Survey (GDS) runs the world’s largest online drug survey and has been running annually since 2012. To address whether psychedelics improved colour blindness in recreational psychedelic users, a question was added to the Psychedelics section at the end of GDS2017 asking colour-blind participants if they had noticed changes in their colour blindness association with their use of psychedelics. The aim was to gather preliminary data regarding this phenomenon with the intention of exploring this further in future iterations of the GDS, if responses suggested changes occurred at a significant prevalence.

Methods

Data were compiled from the GDS. GDS has been running annually since 2012 (naming convention refers to year the data are released, not the year of collection) and runs the world’s largest annual online drug survey. The survey uses an anonymous cross-sectional design. The GDS2017 ran for seven weeks between the second week of November and end of December 2016 involving 119,075 participants after sample cleaning. Direct participant recruitment occurred through media partnerships in over 20 countries including outlets such as Vice, The Guardian and Zeit-on-Line, with secondary recruitment occurring via sharing of the content on social media such as Facebook or discussion forums such as Reddit (Barratt et al., 2017). Multi-institutional ethics approval was obtained from the Kings College London Research Ethics Committee 11671/001: Global Drug Survey, University of Queensland (No. 2017001452) and The University of New South Wales (HREC HC17769) Research Ethics Committees.

As part of GDS2017 a series of questions were included at the end of the Psychedelics section, to probe the effects of recreational use of psychedelics on colour blindness. Participants reporting the use of LSD or psilocybin in the last 12 months were asked,

We have received reports from some people with colour-blindness that this improves after they use psychedelics. If you have experienced such an effect can you please describe it in the box below, say what drug you took and how long the effect lasted.

The information obtained was received in the form of ‘open-ended’ qualitative anecdotes. The survey was translated into 14 main languages including German, Italian, French, Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, Hungarian, Flemish and Polish.

Responses were categorised as follows:

1. Colour blind and colour change (EXPERIENCED)
2. Colour blind and no colour change (NOT EXPERIENCED)

For a response to be marked ‘experienced’, the respondent had to imply a marked difference in ability to distinguish between colours; however, this effect didn’t have to extend beyond the period of intoxication. Since the question was asked, ‘If you have experienced such an effect’, implying both colour blindness and improvement, respondents weren’t required to positively identify as colour blind. Several respondents reported experiences of increased colour intensity; however, these were marked negative as this did not prove an increased ability to discern between colours.

An ideal ‘experienced’ response (ID 19670) was, ‘LSD, I’m red/green colour blind and the effect lasted the following 3 or 4 days’.

An ideal ‘not experienced’ response (ID 13385) was, ‘I have deuteranopia, but unfortunately I didn’t sense any change in my colour perception on psilocybin. (I also figured this out using example images for people with colour blindness)’.

Graphs were constructed using RStudio (RStudio Team, 2019).

Results

The question received 382 responses from 10 different countries of which 47 responses could be categorised with regards to the question. Of the categorised responses, 23 experienced and 24 didn’t experience improved colour blindness symptoms (Figure 1). Despite the low number of categorised responses, there was a sufficient number of respondents reporting improved colour blindness to suggest that, in some people, recreational psychedelic use may improve colour blindness

Read the whole study: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2050324520942345

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