If you are color blind, try magic mushrooms!

Around 300 million people around the world live with some form of color blindness.

But color blindness doesn’t mean you can’t see colors. It usually means people have a hard time telling the difference between red, green, and yellow. But there are also people who cannot see any color at all – only black and white. Unfortunately, color blindness is genetic, and when you’re born with it, there’s no known way to deal with it.

There is currently no known cure or treatment for color blindness.

But could psychedelics hold the key to treating color blindness?

A 2021 report published in Drug Science, Policy and Law revealed that there are some people who use psychedelics recreationally. After that, they could see colors that they could never see before. There were also some people who reported improvements in vision, although it had been a long time since they had used psychedelics.

JEC Anthony and other researchers at the University of Cambridge were trying to understand whether psychedelics might actually have an impact on color blindness. They analyzed data from the 2017 Global Drugs Survey, a large-scale study that takes place annually and asked color-blind people if they noticed changes in their vision after using psychedelics.

Among a cohort of 47 respondents who had color blindness, 23 reported that they actually experienced improvements in color blindness after using psychedelics. The other half doesn’t. But among those who experienced an improvement in vision, they said it occurred after 3 days, while some continued to experience it years after taking psychedelics.

Researchers attribute these improvements to psychedelics’ ability to activate the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor, which is responsible for neural plasticity and helping the brain make new connections.

“Psychedelics may facilitate the experience of an expanded color spectrum,” the researchers said. “In the excited psychedelic state, new communication between cortical regions can link new photisms to pre-existing color concepts, thereby facilitating a new color experience and improving color blindness,” they wrote.

While there are few modern studies on the effects of psychedelics on color blindness, it is interesting to say the least. But one of the earlier studies was done in 1963 by Dr. Alex E. Krill, who published a report entitled “Effects of a Hallucinogenic Agent in Totally Blind Subjects” about a study in which 24 completely blind people were sequentially administered LSD to induce hallucinations to experience through the experiment.

“Such phenomena (hallucinations) occurred only in blind subjects who reported prior visual activity…” they wrote.

The influence of psychedelics on the brain and vision

We still don’t know much about how drugs alter our vision through their mechanisms in the brain.

For LSD, some research suggests that its psychedelic effects occur when the drug alters communication in the brain at the neural level. Researchers found that LSD attaches itself to serotonin receptors, which are one of the vital neurotransmitters we use to communicate. When we experience visual hallucinations with LSD, it’s likely because these receptors are stimulated in the visual cortex, a region in the brain that processes visual cues like color and light.

A 2016 study analyzed the effects of LSD on the brain. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that the visual cortex of people who used LSD showed unusual activity. In fact, they found greater synchronous activity with other parts of the brain, which they attribute to the visual hallucinations the participants experienced.

Normally, our eyes process information in the visual cortex, located behind the head. What was interesting was that under the influence of LSD, other parts of the brain worked to process visual information.

according to dr Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College London’s Department of Medicine and lead author of the study: “We observed brain changes on LSD that suggested our volunteers were ‘seeing with their eyes closed’ – even though they were seeing things with their imagination rather than the outside world . We saw that many more areas of the brain than normal contributed to visual processing on LSD—even though the volunteers’ eyes were closed. In addition, the magnitude of this effect correlated with the volunteers’ ratings of complex dreamlike visions.”

There’s more we need to know

Undoubtedly, we need a lot more research on psychedelics. If the small studies we have so far show promising results regarding its ability to potentially help some people correct their color blindness and eyesight, that should be enough basis for further research.

It’s clear how powerful psychedelics are, and we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface. The effects of these amazing drugs on the brain, so it’s no wonder they are commonly referred to as mind-altering substances. One of the findings that keeps coming up is the ability of psychedelics to alter neural pathways and connectivity in the brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex (responsible for regulating emotions and high-level cognitive function) as well as the amygdala (responsible for emotional responses). ).

Regardless, countless people around the world can benefit from how psychedelics can help rewire the brain and even affect the immune system in the brain as a whole. Remarkable evidence emerges year after year. We just hope more scientists look for a possible solution to help people with color vision impairment in the same way that people are investing in their ability to treat depression, PTSD, and other emotional disorders.

CANNABIS AND YOUR EYES, READ MORE…

WHY DO YOU GET RED EYES FROM SMOKING KRAFT READ THIS!