British scientists have compiled, from the words of a born-blind rock musician, the first-ever account of psychoactive substance-induced hallucinations of a person who has never seen a single color in his life.
In a unique case report published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, a man who was blind from birth told scientists about his experience of using the psychoactive substance LSD, including the experience of synesthesia, a phenomenon when stimuli from one nature trigger the experience of another. In the case of the person in question, synesthesia was a mixture of touch and sound.
In everyday life, we experience signals from the senses in autonomous modalities: we see color, hear sounds, feel touches. Sometimes, as a result of mental disorders, after trauma or under the influence of psychoactive substances, modalities shift, and a person “sees sounds”, “hears colors”. Or even more complicated: there are cases where sounds have caused the visual experience of the taste of food. Because such stories are rare, human languages have no semantic apparatus to describe them. The phenomenon of mixing sensory modalities is called synesthesia. Scientists still argue about its mechanisms: the most popular theory is that synesthesia is the result of the activation of cross connections between brain regions that specialize in processing information about different sensory organs.
The man, according to whom the researchers compiled the report, was born in 1948, two months before the deadline set by the doctors. Because of this, he developed retinopathy of prematurity, which left him completely blind. He started playing musical instruments as a teenager and later made a career as a rock musician. With his group, he toured a lot and led a not very moderate lifestyle: he often used psychoactive substances, mainly marijuana and its derivatives, as well as hallucinogens - psilocybin, ayahuasca and LSD in a form known as the blue pentagon ("blue pentagon" - from for blue and pentagonal stamps). In the report, the musician calls himself "Mr. Blue Pentagon".
The Blue Pentagon has never seen anything in its life, therefore, under the influence of hallucinogenic substances, it did not experience anything similar to visual images, but it repeatedly experienced synesthesia.
“Whenever I listened to music, it was as if I was in the middle of the most beautiful waterfall in the world. The waterfall effect evoked Bach's third Brandenburg Concerto; I heard the violins playing in my soul. The sounds of ordinary songs became three-dimensional."
The authors of the report emphasize the importance of three conclusions that can be drawn from the story of the Blue Pentagon. Firstly, the absence of visual hallucinations in the blind from birth, and secondly, the quality and intensity of other experiences. And third, LSD-induced cross-modal experiences. The first point does not seem very surprising, but it is important as a starting point in further studies of changes in brain connectivity in congenital disorders. It is known that late vision loss provokes a restructuring of neural connections in the visual cortex of the brain, which, in turn, leads to exacerbation of other senses and an improvement in higher cognitive functions.
From the observations of the Blue Pentagon, a preliminary conclusion can be drawn that loss of vision at birth affects the connectivity between the regions of the brain that process tactile, sound and taste signals, the authors write in the conclusion.
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