Around 300 million people in the world live with some kind of color vision deficiency.
But being color blind doesn’t mean that one is completely unable to see color. It usually means that people have a difficult time telling the difference between red, green, and yellow. However, there are also some people that can’t see any color at all – just black and white. Unfortunately, being color blind is genetic, and if one is born with it, there’s no known way to manage it.
Currently, no cure or treatment is known for color blindness.
But could psychedelics be the key to treating color vision deficiencies?
A 2021 report that was published in Drug Science, Policy and Law revealed that there are some people who consumed psychedelics recreationally. Afterwards, they were able to see colors they were never able to in the past. There were also some people who reported improvements in vision even if it has been a long time since they consumed psychedelics.
JEC Anthony and other researchers at the University of Cambridge sought out to understand if psychedelics could indeed impact color blindness. They analyzed data from the 2017 Global Drugs Survey, a large-scale study that takes place yearly, asking color-blind people if they noticed any changes in their vision after consuming psychedelics.
Among a cohort of 47 respondents who had a color vision dependency, 23 reported that they indeed experienced improvements with color blindness after psychedelics consumption. Meanwhile, the other half didn’t. But among those who experienced improvements in vision, they said that it occurred 3 days, while some experienced it for as long as years after they took psychedelics.
The researchers attribute these improvements to the ability of psychedelics to activate the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor which is responsible for neural plasticity, helping the brain create new connections.
“Psychedelics may facilitate the experience of an expanded spectrum of colors,” said the researchers. “In the excited psychedelic state, new communication between cortical regions may link new photisms to pre-existing concepts of colors, thus facilitating a new color experience and improving color blindness,” they wrote.
While there are only a few modern studies surrounding the impact of psychedelics on color blindness, it’s interesting to say the least. But one of the earlier studies was conducted in 1963 by Dr. Alex E. Krill, who published a report called, “Effects of a Hallucinogenic Agent in Totally Blind Subjects,” discussing a trial in which 24 completely blind people were given LSD in order to get them to experience hallucinations through the experiment.
“Such phenomena (hallucinations) occurred only in blind subjects who reported prior visual activity…” they wrote.
The Impact of Psychedelics on the Brain and Vision
There is still a lot we don’t know about how drugs alter our vision by its mechanisms within the brain.
For LSD, some research suggests that its psychedelic effects happen when the drug changes communication within the brain at the neuronal level. Researchers found that LSD hooks onto serotonin receptors, which is one of the vital neurotransmitters that we use for communicating. When we experience visual hallucinations on LSD, it’s likely because these receptors are stimulated within the visual cortex, a region in the brain that processes visual cues including color and light.
A study in 2016 analyzed the effects of LSD on the brain. The results, which were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, revealed that when people consumed LSD, their visual cortex showed unusual activity. In fact, they found bigger 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 which is 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, from the Imperial College London’s Department of Medicine and the study’s lead author: “We observed brain changes under LSD that suggested our volunteers were ‘seeing with their eyes shut’ – albeit they were seeing things from their imagination rather than from the outside world. We saw that many more areas of the brain than normal were contributing to visual processing under LSD – even though the volunteers’ eyes were closed. Furthermore, the size of this effect correlated with volunteers’ ratings of complex, dreamlike visions.”
There’s Still More We Need To Know
No doubt, we need much more research into psychedelics. If the little studies we have so far shows promising results in its ability to potentially help some people correct their color blindness and vision, that should be foundation enough to conduct more research.
It’s clear how powerful psychedelics are, and we are only barely starting to scratch the surface. The impact of these amazing drugs on the brain, so it’s no wonder that they are commonly referred to as mind-altering substances. One of the findings that consistently keeps showing 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 the ways psychedelics can help rewire the brain and even influence the immune system in the brain as a whole. Remarkable evidence keeps showing up year after year. We only hope that more scientists look into a possible solution to help those with color vision dependencies in the same way people are investing into its ability to treat depression, PTSD, and other emotional disorders.
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