A Brief Introduction to DMT
N,N-Dimethyltryp\tamine, or DMT, is the strangest psychedelic that you might not have ever heard of. DMT is one ingredient of the psychedelic brew ayahuasca. When combined with Banisteriopsis caapi, and the other ingredients of ayahuasca, the brew makes for hours long trips. When DMT is prepared outside of ayahuasca, however, it makes for the shortest (~15-45 minutes) and strongest psychedelic trip of them all. DMT trips involve "breaking through" to what individuals describe as "another realm". Users often describe being transported down a tunnel, to a distant realm where they meet seemingly autonomous entities. Often, those same entities appear to different people all over the world. Now, researchers at John's Hopkins University are attempting to catalog these experiences to figure out just what those DMT entities are.
For centuries, many people believed that DMT was inside of the human body, specifically in the pineal gland. They also believed that DMT would be released near the time of death. Well, in 2019, one study, published in a top science journal, Nature, found DMT in many areas, including the pineal gland, of the rat and human brain. Also in this study, the researchers induced cardiac arrest in rats, as a model of a near-death experience, and observed significant increases in DMT levels in the visual cortex. This was the first study to show that the rat brain is capable of synthesizing and releasing DMT at concentrations comparable to known monoamine neurotransmitters. The authors then suggest that this phenomenon may occur similarly in human brains. It's quite obvious that much more investigation into DMT is needed so that we can better understand these fascinating substances.
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