N, N, Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a complicated molecule.
It’s many different things, depending on whom you ask. According to scientists, it’s a monoamine alkaloid called a tryptamine: the same type of chemical compound as psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and the neurotransmitter serotonin. DMT is structurally and functionally similar to those other compounds, binding to serotonin receptors and inducing psychedelic effects—unlike those other compounds, it’s endogenously produced by the human body. That’s why it’s known as “the Spirit Molecule,” said to induce a mystical experience of profound and unparalleled proportions.
Some claim it’s the most powerful hallucinogen known to man, transporting you to a fanciful world of your mind’s own creation. Others say it’s a round-trip ticket to another dimensional reality where you are but a pasajero, a passenger. After all, it’s the active ingredient in ayahuasca, the Amazonian brew that combines a DMT-containing plant with an MAOI inhibitor, the only way to make the ingested molecule bioavailable. But when smoked, vaped, or injected, isolated DMT concentrates the experience—transforming ayahuasca’s four-hour-plus, highly subjective journey into a five-to-20-minute rocket ship to a reality that’s entirely immersive and extremely intense.
Whatever you think DMT is, one thing is inarguable: At a high enough dose, your perception isn’t merely altered, but entirely replaced. Those who take it say they’re transported to a realm completely separate from, but no less real than, our consensus, waking world, one outside of three-dimensional reality and often populated by interactive, sentient entities. This makes retaining and translating the experience elusive, often frustratingly so, slipping from the tripper’s grasp as their being filters back in. As neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore says, the trip is “both inexpressible and undeniable, often irretrievable, but almost always irreversible.”
And that’s not even the molecule’s most intense expression. DMT has multiple analogues, chemical compounds that are structurally and/or functionally similar. Most of them are less-potent cousins of the N,N variety, but there’s one that dwarfs even that most Earth-shattering experience: 5-MeO-DMT. If psychedelics alter your perception, and DMT replaces it, 5-MeO-DMT smashes the concept of perception altogether, taking you to the amorphous liminality outside of space and time, objects and entities, worlds and dimensions.
Into the void.
But to grasp how this happens, first we need to understand how psychedelics work in the brain, which means releasing our common concept of brains and what they do.
Everything that makes your waking world—the words you’re reading now, the sound of a passing car, even the face you see when you look in the mirror—is merely a model, your brain’s best guess at the external environment based on prior experience and the entities we’ve collectively defined: the lines and dots that make a letter; what a face looks like; how a car sounds; even measures of space and time.
When you were a baby, your brain was still building this model, continually taking in new information from the environment. But your brain, while just 2% of the average person’s body mass, uses 20% of the body’s energy—mostly in the form of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters that relay signals to and between areas of your brain, including those that come from your physical senses. The simple act of perceiving the world is a massive drain on your resources, and processing every line, dot, sound, and sensation you encounter in real time would keep you in a drooling, wide-eyed, perpetually infantile state. Indeed, at our earliest stages, our brains are working so hard that they use more than 60% of the body’s energy.
So, as you get older, your brain starts to operate like the efficient machine it is: It builds a model, then uses this to make predictions, the shortcuts that get you through your day. It filters out the vast majority of the data it receives from the external world through your senses, processing only the bare minimum of lines and dots and sounds necessary to predict that it’s reading words, looking at a face, or hearing a passing car, filling in the blanks with data from the model. In fact, pretty much the only time your brain receives unfiltered information from your external environment is when the model is wrong—when its predictions are contradicted by what you encounter with your physical senses.
For example, if you think you see a person on the side of the road, but a second look reveals it to be a tree; bite into what you expect to be a delicious fruit, only to find it unripe; or, in the case of psychedelic therapy, revisit a traumatic memory from a different vantage point, then you receive the correct sensory information from your physical world about what’s actually happening right now. You see not a person, but a tree; taste sour instead of sweet; and separate the past from the present. This information is then sent back to higher-level brain areas, where the model is adjusted—allowing you to react according to your current reality.
Essentially, your waking world is a simulation modulated and supported by the external environment. Your brain can run this simulation even when you’re asleep. In fact—and here’s the really trippy part—to your brain, there is no difference between your sleeping and waking worlds; the model it’s running to create your reality is exactly the same one. The only difference is that in the dream state, there’s no sensory information coming in to either confirm or deny the model’s predictions, so anything is possible. At least, that is, within the model’s three-dimensional framework.
This is why many describe the psychedelic experience as “more real than reality,” bringing the boundlessness of the dream state to your waking world. It releases the model’s grip on predictability, which normally auto-fills details, and is defined by a near-constant stream of mental chatter, old behavior patterns, and automatic reactions, programmed by experience and used to predict what will happen next, keeping you perpetually stuck in the past or future. By releasing the restrictions that the brain area responsible for running the model (known as the default mode network, or DMN) places on your experience of reality, psychedelics allow you to form new neural pathways, enact new behaviors, and access old memories the model repressed so you could cope. You experience the world anew, grounded in the present moment.
And this is what can make DMT such a powerful medicine. It’s pure, uncut experience—one that doesn’t just alter the brain’s model, but throws it out altogether and builds a new one.
This is part one of a three-part series. In the next post, we’ll dig into more details about how DMT works, and what makes this experience so unique.
