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Has psychedelic use totally screwed up anyone else's vision?

Hilopsilo

Hilopsilo

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Jun 30, 2016
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Not sure when it started happening, probably just gradually as I've tripped over the years, but my sober vision is just kinda fucked. Just buzzing with so much visual snow, pointless tracers, afterimages and other grainy noise I guess. On top of that, I have pretty bad eye floaters; looking at the sky or a plain blank wall is just so much shit going on. When I take my contacts out at night, and its almost completely dark in my bedroom, staring into my closest is just a cluster fuck of static, pixelation and movement.

It's basically this plus lots of eye floaters, and much worse in the dark: http://innovativeeyecare.com.au/blog/visual-snow

Looking into this its said to be part of HPPD, but HPPD seems to be more a psychological thing, this is purely visual. A lot of my friends have this as well, and I honestly think this is something that people should be more aware of before delving into psychedelic drugs, that it is quite likely that use over the years will permanently alter your vision. It's not incredibly serious, like awakening some underlying mental health issue, but its very annoying and I wish I could just turn it off and see how a blank wall used to look lol.

It's not going to stop me from tripping, and i don't think theres anything to do about it. I once looking into what I can do about eye floaters and noped out of that surgical process real quick.

Anyone else have this issue?
 
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I began developing such issues long before I took my first trip. I first truly took note in high school but probably had symptoms in middle school. Tripping often and at high doses has intensified the problem but then it recedes to my personal "normal" after a solid break.
 
between birth and 4 months, vision is a mix of random seeming movements of colors and intervals of shapes from fine grain to large...
between 4 months to 8 years approximately we learn to ignore the random seeming mix and focus more on the perceptions from intervals and shapes of forms and figures.
Adolescence and young adulthood usually has good perceptive vision, we compete and cooperate using vision of our consensual universe, we lock in on that.
Later vision degenerates, physically, we develop damage in our eyes, it's natural, we have to adjust to many damages in cornea, retina, and general changes in focus.

psychedelics reintroduce pre-perceptive vision - and additional persistence effects like tracers, glows, etc.

I think the pre-perceptive partial fragments etc. are not HPPD but they are a reawakening of early childhood's vision.

persistence effects like tracers, glows, etc are HPPD
 
I definitely get visual disturbances when sober in the dark. I also notice stuff more that I remember seeing a lot as a kid... visual static, and things getting really weird when I stare unblinking at a white wall, for example. Doesn't bother me, sometimes it's even really cool. I only started noticing the darkness thing in more recent years, and I've been tripping for 17 years with a period for a few years back in 2006-2008 where I tripped A LOT, far too often.
 
I think the analogue of what you call "pre-perceptive" vision would be non-perceptive vision and not HPPD... but rather visual agnosia, pupnik. But it's a cool theory... it would indeed match the "regression" into childhood in a lot of ways from psychedelics, but then again perception comes slightly before interpretation. There first needs to be a subconscious or unconscious resolution of the visual data coming in.
However, I do wonder what would happen if one were to model the results of LSD fMRI from a couple years ago (showing a lot of harmonization / unification and cross-chatter in the brain) purely onto the visual cortex. The aforementioned theories of this research had a holistic aspect.. I'm not quite sure if this really applies to one singled out faculty and I think it is generally a lot more useful to consider HPPD in terms of feedback loops on various scales and the effect of these phenomena would indeed be pre-perceptive but by definition.

Sorry hilo, I don't have those problems although I do recall some version of HPPD which was to be expected when I tripped at least once a week for a year, but it went away. Massive whirlpools when I looked at white surfaces... I was never bothered by any of that stuff nor was I bothered by misinterpreting spoken world wildly as a result of excessive dissociative use. But, I think this only attests to my case being a minor one apparently... the severity for a big part must lie in the ability to reintegrate and compensate to effectively fix any such issue. Perceptual inadequacies resolved nicely after psychedelics... but from dissociatives it took a longer while to recover, esp cognitively as well.

Unfortunately there isn't a lot of help for HPPD it seems, but I definitely hope you stick to the simple guidelines to just not trip for a long time if it gives you serious perceptual problems.
 
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I've taken hundreds of hits of LSD as well as many research chemical psychedelics and dissociatives. The longest I've had an afterglow from tripping was an entire week with 2C-T-2 and 3-MeO-PCP. I don't have any lasting visual distortions beyond that, personally. It appears HPPD depends on your personal body chemistry.
 
What makes you think that psychedelics are to blame, and not an unrelated vision disorder? Have you seen an optometrist? Personally, I haven't seen any evidence that it is "quite likely that use over the years will permanently alter your vision". In one study which screened ~500 Native American Church members who all used peyote on at least 100 occasions, there were zero reports of HPPD [source]. Reports of HPPD in clinical research on LSD also appear to be rare. For psychedelic drugs to cause permanent vision damage, they would need to do so via some ocular or neurological toxicity, and I'm not aware that any such toxic mechanism has been identified.
 
@Solipsis;
you could easily say common usage of terms includes : (quoting you above)
perception comes slightly before interpretation. There first needs to be a subconscious or unconscious resolution of the visual data coming in.
I suspect many would agree, however, while I see a huge difference with basic sensation and perception, I see no difference between perception (to perceive something as) and interpretation.
Also to perceive anything as something means that an association has arisen, which means it is like something in memory.
Something in memory does not require the term subconscious to be used at all.
pre-perception does not yet have any associated memory linked to it, so it is not yet recognized - perception is recognition.
when consciousness is full of sensations including bits of vision that make no sense (yet) the mental contents of the experience seem strange.
I think it is important to accept the naturalness of sensory mental contents that do not yet make sense, Most of it may never make sense, and that is OK, enough is usually sufficiently familiar that we can get comfortable.
 
Pupnik: I would compare what I mean to the cognitive version of that where first there is a very fast and heuristic but involuntary mechanism which for example can judge a person based on appearance even though you do not want to do that. Then the second slower but deliberate and calculating mechanism responds and you can dismiss that first automatic response. Even so-called guru's are not really able to escape the fact that they have such an initial snap-judgement over which we just have no control, but what one can do is bridge the gap between the responses so as to make it seamless and the first automatic cognitive reaction irrelevant.

Back to perception: All I'm saying is it can be helpful to not call it all interpretation but break it down into different stages, cause not all of it is equally conscious, deliberate and meant.

Infants have a brain that is still ordering and differentiating to reflect the input that is coming in and to eventually be able to make use out of it. And even before that, yes new-borns have really shitty blurry vision I believe.

Your theory has a romantic appeal, and our brains retain a stem-cell like potential to learn to process entirely new input (and amazingly enough the possibilities are endless, there have already been crazy experiments using very abstract sensory patterns that carry data and when the data is more "encrypted" it just takes the brain longer to decrypt it but eventually it can - within reason but that is not due to the limits of this undifferentiated potential but since we have more general cognitive limits, like a data bandwidth and processing power - and afaik we are not at the same stage with boosing those)..

However IMO that does not mean that when our brain is dysfunctional like with HPPD, where we are getting a lot of artifacts which obscure our ability to make sense of the world it is comparable to the infant stage. When we have agnosia and are misinterpreting stuff, the brain actually tends to compensate for this in ways that give us the impression that there is nothing wrong. We wouldn't know any better. An infant has no frame of reference to begin with so it definitely doesn't know any better lol.

I don't think HPPD is well understood yet but it probably has nothing to do with your senses themselves based on the symptoms which point to something less narrow but consistent and more pervasively neurological, something happening in the sensory processing stage not the sensory acquisition. Neither do I think that you necessarily have to consider it in terms of toxicity or damage just like so many psychological problems are not appropriate to define in those terms. Instead there can be a dysfunction or unusually high sensitivity to become dysfunctional in this sensory processing department.
There could be small idiosyncracies that allow for much more persistent disruption of normal sensory processing. The feedback loops probably responsible for things like seeing fractals while the drugs are acting might become engrained in a way and then what could be wrong is nothing more than the way neurons are wired.

I'm not excluding the possibility that the unusual way LSD forces conformational changes in certain serotonergic receptor subtypes may be something that in some people (for example due to a mutation in these receptors) could lead to the receptors snapping back in a way that is not how they were shaped before. Things like that can also apparently happen with GABAergics in which case some antagonists are apparently able to pop them back like hugging someone so hard that you fix their dislocated shoulder.

3-MeO-PCP has such a long half-life and is so lipophilic that you can get a week of after-effects from it alone, although I have never heard about psychedelic effects from a combo staying for just as long.
 
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I would start by not calling HPPD a dysfunction.
IMO it is totally natural associative brain function, if you look at the circumstances that engender it:
A) is there repetition (yes- looping repetition fueled by drug and panic)
B) can it be triggered (yes - it is an associative or learned sequence)
 
It is by definition a disorder (that is what the D stands for) and you only even start to label it as such when the problem impairs your ability to function (and when you check enough boxes in DSM 5/6 8) )

This does not mean that the mechanism behind it can't also present in more benign ways which we do not call a dysfunction or a problem but we may still acknowledge sensory / perceptual artifacts ever since we tripped. The best people to confirm this are those who have actually suffered from HPPD and had it impair their ability to function, but either solved it by the symptoms going away or by looking at it differently, flipping a switch and integrating it and being able to function with it after all.. those have an actual frame of reference for it remitting into a benign version.

But.. people don't initially seek help for the benign version of this, my friend. :) And we would be kind of arrogant to presume that all cases of HPPD can be solved by embracing it, or it may just be too much to ask of a person to give up their "clarity of perception".
 
I am not saying "embrace it".
I am saying address it as a problematic association thing, which it is.
This is done by contriving to address the triggered problem and sit through it's cycle with gentle guidance (can be talk therapy - possibly combined with psychedelic) so that future triggers bring the "sitting with it association" as well as the "problem" so that eventually the problem becomes less of a disruption.

this is how I would work the fundamental association structure of it.
 
pupnik said:
between birth and 4 months, vision is a mix of random seeming movements of colors and intervals of shapes from fine grain to large...
between 4 months to 8 years approximately we learn to ignore the random seeming mix and focus more on the perceptions from intervals and shapes of forms and figures.
Adolescence and young adulthood usually has good perceptive vision, we compete and cooperate using vision of our consensual universe, we lock in on that.
Later vision degenerates, physically, we develop damage in our eyes, it's natural, we have to adjust to many damages in cornea, retina, and general changes in focus.

psychedelics reintroduce pre-perceptive vision - and additional persistence effects like tracers, glows, etc.

I think the pre-perceptive partial fragments etc. are not HPPD but they are a reawakening of early childhood's vision.

persistence effects like tracers, glows, etc are HPPD
Click to expand...

Solipsis said:
I think the analogue of what you call "pre-perceptive" vision would be non-perceptive vision and not HPPD... but rather visual agnosia, pupnik. But it's a cool theory... it would indeed match the "regression" into childhood in a lot of ways from psychedelics, but then again perception comes slightly before interpretation. There first needs to be a subconscious or unconscious resolution of the visual data coming in.
However, I do wonder what would happen if one were to model the results of LSD fMRI from a couple years ago (showing a lot of harmonization / unification and cross-chatter in the brain) purely onto the visual cortex. The aforementioned theories of this research had a holistic aspect.. I'm not quite sure if this really applies to one singled out faculty and I think it is generally a lot more useful to consider HPPD in terms of feedback loops on various scales and the effect of these phenomena would indeed be pre-perceptive but by definition.

Sorry hilo, I don't have those problems although I do recall some version of HPPD which was to be expected when I tripped at least once a week for a year, but it went away. Massive whirlpools when I looked at white surfaces... I was never bothered by any of that stuff nor was I bothered by misinterpreting spoken world wildly as a result of excessive dissociative use. But, I think this only attests to my case being a minor one apparently... the severity for a big part must lie in the ability to reintegrate and compensate to effectively fix any such issue. Perceptual inadequacies resolved nicely after psychedelics... but from dissociatives it took a longer while to recover, esp cognitively as well.

Unfortunately there isn't a lot of help for HPPD it seems, but I definitely hope you stick to the simple guidelines to just not trip for a long time if it gives you serious perceptual problems.
Click to expand...


Good stuff, here. So we all have the ability to "trip" so long as we learn how to remove the filters we've implemented.
 
Kind of that - in Aldous Huxley's view, yet there are actually no "filters" as such, there is learning instead.
we learn to see enough and jump to conclusions (associatively - this is the act of perception, associating sensation or ideas with previous experience).

it is difficult but not impossible to practice bare attention which means finding a way to be pre-perceptive, relaxed, open, observant and tolerant of fragments of sensory experience that are not especially meaningful.
 
sounds avant-garde ;)

I think in part things like ego-death or the perceptual version of that, are glamorized just like "enlightenment" is. You can't really integrate or function with true mystical experiences, there is a limit to the usefulness of experience of things like pure non-duality as well, even if the way you get there and come back can definitely teach you lessons.

To me enlightenment is not that special or uncommon and has mostly to do with integrating a double perspective well: one of realizing what we are (as well as our inability to really define or describe it other than by what it not is), and our perspective of individuality.

Why I am saying this is based on the personal experience I have with mystical experiences and this shift in consciousness and cognition is the part where there is mutual exclusivity. We categorize the world and by defining something in a certain way we close our minds to all of the other possibilities, all the things it is not. Pure potential becomes actualized and useful.

It can be pretty hard for us to not be hypnotized by our programming (the filters / all that we learned)! And I wouldn't expect too much from trying to do the opposite just like during meditation the point is not to try and stop from thinking thoughts. Instead, observe what you are doing / thinking - usually when you observe and realize deeply what we are doing, our level of perspective changes and this is the mind expansion from psychedelics as well. So it is *that* surprising that most similar to tripping is actually heavy meditation such as on a retreat.
I think purely on a cognitive level you remain in another territory where filtering too much or too little gets you e.g. overstimulation, psychosis, agnosia, amnesia

Only mild versions of what we are talking about above are actually interesting (in terms of being preferable & worth searching for or training on) if you ask me: the ability to let go a bit of our preconceptions of what things are, opening ourselves up to the possibility that things are not what they seem at all and we may be very wrong. That doesn't necessarily mean you want to regress to some native state. This is similar to what I think about methods people use to attain enlightenment (if they confuse it with something mystical) which I think don't actually work but realizing that it doesn't work can be effective on its own.

Bathing in meaninglessness won't really get you somewhere but realizing the apparent paradoxical nature of reality (possibly as a consequence of loss of meaning) can by bringing together different perspectives on it and showing that they are complementary and not a paradox at all.

In the same way, having an ego-death experience does not achieve anything in itself - our ego's have a 'role to play' just like everything else - but putting a memo on the pieces when you put them back together can be really useful to make sure that you don't get stuck in one perspective and forget that it is just a perspective which is what we suffer from continuously.

Being relaxed, open, observant etc IMO comes best when you stop deeply wanting to be
 
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pupnik said:
between birth and 4 months, vision is a mix of random seeming movements of colors and intervals of shapes from fine grain to large...
between 4 months to 8 years approximately we learn to ignore the random seeming mix and focus more on the perceptions from intervals and shapes of forms and figures.
Adolescence and young adulthood usually has good perceptive vision, we compete and cooperate using vision of our consensual universe, we lock in on that.
Later vision degenerates, physically, we develop damage in our eyes, it's natural, we have to adjust to many damages in cornea, retina, and general changes in focus.

psychedelics reintroduce pre-perceptive vision - and additional persistence effects like tracers, glows, etc.

I think the pre-perceptive partial fragments etc. are not HPPD but they are a reawakening of early childhood's vision.

persistence effects like tracers, glows, etc are HPPD
Click to expand...


I like that. I always had a hard time falling asleep as a kid/teen. Shutting my eyes and concentrating intensly on sleep often led to petterns/colors/visions in my mind. Looking back, I personally attribute this to third eye type stuff. The more I tripped the more I was like "Hey, what i saw as a kid, is what I see tripping". I don't really have any permanant eye stuff. Maybe floaters and shit? I dunno. I just know, if I did, I would think it's kind of cool. More of an evolution, or bringing my body back to what it is supposed to be like anyway than seeing it as a negative thing.

ya dig? ;-)
 
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