The Brain at the Threshold

DMT, Near-Death Experience, and the Ecology of Altered States

Recently, on a car ride, my partner quipped at me: I heard this podcast about DMT which is made by the brain as we die, isn’t that amazing? Intrigued, the geek that I am followed the claim up.

There are discoveries that do not close a question so much as give it better edges, or lead us to better questions.

DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamin) occurs naturally in many plants and animals and has been used as an entheogenic for a long time, before being synthesised. DMT has spent decades in an odd neighbourhood of the cultural imagination. It has been called the spirit molecule, folded into stories about dreams, birth, death, alien intelligences, ancient ritual, and the architecture of reality itself. Some of that language is poetic. Some of it is useful as metaphor, and some of it may run much further than the evidence allows.

Science, when it is working well, does not necessarily make the mystery smaller, but perhaps more accountable.

The 2019 rat study was striking not because it proved a psyched…