From: houle@nmt.edu (Paul Houle)
Subject: Re: Blind people and hallucinogens
Organization: New Mexico Tech
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 07:27:50 GMT


>In article <1992Dec14.204549.7499@shearson.com> me@nowhere.com () writes:
>>Hi folks,
>>        does anybody know of any studies done in the '60s on blind people
>>given hallucinogens that highly activate the visual cortex such as
>>DMT and psilocybin ? Anybody care to speculate on how people born blind
>>experience the visual dimension of these substances? Does it manifest itself
>>in a different way? I would imagine that people who have lost their sight
>>would experience the visuals normally, since the visuals can be 'seen'
>>with eyes either open or closed... Does one need to know what it's like
>>to see before being able to experience the visuals?

	One would suspect.  From what I've been told,  one needs some kind
of seeding data to activate the LSD experience.  For instance,  even
though my (evil drug-using,  etc...) friend did see eyes closed visuals
the time that he ate too many mushrooms,  what he saw with his eyes closed
was nothing like what he saw when he opened his eyes and looked at the
regular geometric pattern on his floor!  (Which BTW,  was transmuted into
a "digital-clock full-color active matrix, high-speed,  organic and
evolutionary 4-dimensional face-centered cubic matrix kaideoscope")  The
main problem with this was that he,  the bundle of sense impressions and
inerconnections that he was,  was running in a circle around the idea that
the miraculous floor was trying to kill him.  So he closes his eyes,  and
what he sees when he closes his eyes is pretty bad too...  The good
news is that he found some sympathetic friends to talk him back to
consensus reality and baseline conciousness.

	I'm not really sure where LSD data gets inserted (or where LSD
modulates data), but it is pretty well known that the V1-V4 levels of
the visual processing system (BTW, my friend says that his experience
"proves" that Gabor transforms are used in visual processing) don't
self-organize in year +1 in blind human systems.  Since LSD
halucinations are very complicated but mostly geometric (according to
my friend) he thinks that data input begins at the V2 or V3 levels.  So
from a theoretical standpoint,  I don't think that blind people would see
visuals.

	And even if they could see visuals,  they probably wouldn't have
any language to describe them.  If the average blind person is like
my (not blind) girlfriend,  then they would have a hard time putting
anything into words about it..  Try listening to some acid songs,  like
the Cream song where they say,  "All the fantastic colors..." if you don't
have any idea what colors look like.  (BTW my girlfriend is one of those
150+ IQ,  INTP,  transactional Adult,  wants-to-be-hip-but-is-deeply-square-
people;  to get some idea,  her "friend" took two hours to realize that
she was stoned off her ass after eating a batch of radioactive brownies
along with my friend).  Anyway,  my friend just killed a month-old rack
of beer and he's too altered to type,  so this is a good place to stop.
:-)  (BTW,  my friend is a very psychoactive person!)

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