Topic: visual hallucinations

Local stimulation in high-level cortical visual areas perturbs the contents of visual perception. Understanding how the contents of perception are altered by cortical stimulation is necessary for characterizing visual hallucinations in mental disorders and developing visual prosthetics. Anecdotal verbal reports by human patients constitute the main body of evidence in this area of research. The absence of speaking ability in nonhuman primates severely limits the systematic and high-throughput study of stimulation-induced perceptual events. Here we introduce a novel methodology, perceptography

Psychedelic compounds act upon the serotonergic pathway to generate altered states of consciousness and disrupt normal sensory processing, creating profound perceptual disturbances including visual hallucinations. While psychedelics have recently garnered much attention for their cognitive and therapeutic effects, how psychedelics disrupt sensory processing to evoke hallucinations is not as well characterized. Furthermore, while initial studies have investigated how psychedelics alter visual responses during head-fixation, nothing is known about how they might alter visual processing during ac