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How is vision enhanced by psychedelics?

shulginist

Bluelighter
Joined
Jul 22, 2004
Messages
152
At low-dosage levels (i.e., 1g-2g dried psilocybe 'shrooms), my nearsightedness vanishes and my vision becomes enhanced (I am able to see distances clearly--i.e., all the leaves of a distant tree). How is this achieved? I mean, traditionally, people need glasses/contatcts or corrective surgery to improve eyesight, but this implies a biochemical mechanism can also improve vision.

I mean, theoretically, could some one get a daily presciption to improve eyesight instead of wearing glasses/contacts or having surgery performed??!
 
I know that 'shrooms' cause VERY dilated pupils causing more light to enter. This is my guess as to why everything seems 'brighter.' Because everything seems 'brighter,' I often feel like I can see better. I'm not sure if this is actually improving my vision though (I'd guess not).

Can you see without glasses/contacts when shrooming? How bad is your eyesight (only 20/40 or pretty high, 20/200)?
 
here is a quote from Terence
"Lab work shows that psilocybin eaten in amounts so small that it can't be detected, as an experience, increases visual acuity In the Sixties, Roland Fisher at the National Institute of Mental Health gave graduate students psilocybin and then a battery of eye tests. His results indicated that edges were visually detected more readily if a bit of psilocybin was present in the student's body Well, edge detection is exactly what hunting animals in the grassland environments use to observe distant prey!"
I would also like to know how this works. *puts on glasses* id think that regular low doseing of psilocybin would give quite a tollerance, and thats never good.
 
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Yes, I've heard that quote before, I've never found the article, only every that mention of it... I've found other article by Fisher (published in Science no less) and they were utter rubbish, leading me to suspect observer bias, or at least poorly tested assumptions...

Meanwhile, the increase in twilight vision is easy to explain with pupil dilation, as has been mentioned. How-ever I suspect any real increase in visual accuity may be imagined, I've had the same experience, and with me at least, I can tell its a figment, your brain in hyper driver, putting in too much error correction.
 
I could see leaves of a tree that would have been a fuzzy green blob before. That's not a figment of my imagination.
 
tunedOut said:
here is a quote from Terence
"His results indicated that edges were visually detected more readily if a bit of psilocybin was present in the student's body Well, edge detection is

That sums up.... crisper edges, instead of a blurry distance.
 
BilZ0r said:
I've found other article by Fisher (published in Science no less) and they were utter rubbish, leading me to suspect observer bias, or at least poorly tested assumptions...


maybe so, but at least according to McKenna, Fisher was not a psychedelic advocate at all.

I don't think the visual acuity thing is imagined. My favorite way to dose is to climb up to a nice lookout point and then eat mushrooms. At doses in the 1 to 2 gram range, the 'eagle vision' I get is absolutely undeniable. Just after the peak, I am able to make out details I wasn't able to prior to dosing. MAPS or Hefter should do a good study on this, I'm confident that they'd find definitive results.
 
>>I could see leaves of a tree that would have been a fuzzy green blob before. That's not a figment of my imagination.
>>

How do you know?
Why are you so sure that it is not simply that your brain is filling in the gaps in your vision?

ebola
 
^^ A bit like using the sharpen effect with Paintshop or other graphics programs. Psychedelics aren't really increasing visual acuity, merely allowing the function of vision that 'fills in the gaps' to have more of an effect on the precieved image.

You know that what you're looking at is a tree with leaves, so the sharpen function of your brain is increased by psychedelics. It's to do with our ability to distinguish patterns from visual data input (also why you have more of a tendancy to see faces in random arrangements of shapes, like the grass on a football field, under the influence of psychedelics. It just makes you more inclined to pull abstract shapes into something recognizable - and faces are what we are best at detailing and categorizing). The only way that it would actually sharpen your vision would be by altering the tension in the cilary muscles that control the shape of the lens, and that's a highly intergrated and complex action; it would be very surprising if a drug could specifically adjust the tension in that muscle.

Less definition, on the other hand, would be caused by simply altering the tension in the muscle tension in either direction. There are lots of degree and variety of blurred vision, but more acute vision requires specific, defined alterations
 
If the guy is near sighted then his eyeball is probably too long, and his lens will be fully relaxed when trying to focus on distant objects, there is no way to relax it any more... the only thing which could make him see more clearly is actaully pupil contraction....

If you don't believe us that it's just an hallucinations, get a friend to make you two eye charts, with ever decreasing font sizes... see if you can read any further down one the chart once it is placed outside your focal distance when your high.

As I've said, I get the exact same sensation as has been described, both the "eagle-eye" as well as just increased visual accuity, but the fact remains, it is impossible for a fully relaxed eye to relax any further, as well as the fact that I've felt that I've seen things that people with perfect vision couldn't see (and that infact wern't there).

And I don't care what McKenna said; Ficher's article show almost as much pro-psychedelic bias as McKenna...
 
Thanks for sharing the knowledge, guys! I totally thought it was more than just a visual hallucination.
 
That makes sense to me. I know that things seem oddly crisper and larger, if that makes any sense... say, normal vision is a 4x3 photograph and vision after taking shrooms is like an 8x10. More information, higher contrast, and a wider field of vision. That can be hard for me to take, so every once in a while I just have to close my eyes and relax.... it's too much.
 
This may be relevant:

Neuroreport. 2004 Aug 26;15(12):1947-51.

Psilocybin impairs high-level but not low-level motion perception.

Carter OL, Pettigrew JD, Burr DC, Alais D, Hasler F, Vollenweider FX.

Vision Touch and Hearing Research Center, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia. [email protected]

The hallucinogenic serotonin(1A&2A) agonist psilocybin is known for its ability to induce illusions of motion in otherwise stationary objects or textured surfaces. This study investigated the effect of psilocybin on local and global motion processing in nine human volunteers. Using a forced choice direction of motion discrimination task we show that psilocybin selectively impairs coherence sensitivity for random dot patterns, likely mediated by high-level global motion detectors, but not contrast sensitivity for drifting gratings, believed to be mediated by low-level detectors. These results are in line with those observed within schizophrenic populations and are discussed in respect to the proposition that psilocybin may provide a model to investigate clinical psychosis and the pharmacological underpinnings of visual perception in normal populations.

http://www.uq.edu.au/nuq/jack/psilo_motion(2004).pdf

I would like to see the original Fisher article though.
 
I bet it doesn't really change your eye physically. I think it is very likely that you perceive that you can see things more clearly...it must be...or maybe it changes the shape of the eye slightly like weed.

You could find out by taking a person with really bad vision- if it changes the shape of the eye it probably doesn't change it enough to correct for extremely bad vision.

It is weird though. I also remember looking at a tree and seeing every leaf very clearly. But maybe when you are sober you could do this but you just don't focus on the tree as well. My bet would be a perceptual difference.

Yeah, that's most likely.
 
Wow, nobody mentioned the treatment of glaucoma with marijuana. I'm pretty certain that this changes the pressure in the eye which allows better vision. It doesn't work through changing how dilated the eye is. That shouldn't effect anything really except the amount of light in your eye.
 
^^^ along with this, I also hear much better on some psychedelics (i.e., 'shrooms, marijuana). For instance, I can decode every word of a rap song that would only have been jibberish if I were sober. This is not just a hallucination, since I can verify the lyrics.
 
maybe because you're lazy when your sober and you don't give as much shit about the lyrics. psychedelics can almost act like amphetamines (or stimulants), especially pea's. you're just more focused because you're more active, lazy boy q=0)
 
No, that's not it at all. I can intentionall try to follow lyrics and will not be able to decipher all the words. Whereas, while stoned or tripping, I will hear all the words clearly and will even hear background noises in the song(s) that I normally never heard before.
 
>>Wow, nobody mentioned the treatment of glaucoma with marijuana. I'm pretty certain that this changes the pressure in the eye which allows better vision. It doesn't work through changing how dilated the eye is. That shouldn't effect anything really except the amount of light in your eye.
>>

This is a function of marijuana's vasodialatory effects in the eye rather than any psychedelic action.

ebola
 
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