Cross-Species Evidence for Psilocin-Induced Visual Distortions: Apparent Motion Is Perceived by Both Humans and Rats.
Biological psychiatry global open science September 1, 2025 Čestmír Vejmola, Klára Šíchová, Kateřina Syrová et al. 4 citations
Psilocin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, impairs the ability to distinguish between static and moving images in both humans and rats. In a visual discrimination task, human participants and male rats were asked to judge whether an image was static or moving. Under psilocin, both species showed significant difficulty in this task. In humans, the impairment tracked psilocin plasma levels and self-reported hallucination intensity. In rats, psilocin selectively disrupted performance in a motion-based task but not a luminance-based task, suggesting a specific effect on motion perception. Decision time was also linked to discrimination impairment. This is the first evidence that rats experience visual distortions similar to those reported by humans, offering a model for studying altered visual perception in drug-induced and psychiatric conditions.