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Unlocking the Mind: DMT Psychedelic’s Impact on Reality Perception

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Published on: March 28, 2023,

N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a hallucinogenic tryptamine drug that naturally occurs in many plant species. It can also be made in a laboratory. DMT is found while pineal gland become active or during spiritual experience. It’s impact on mind is realized by various cultures like Shamans across ceremonies in South and Central America.  It is found in Ayhusca.  Scientists have found new insights into how psychedelics alter conscious experience via their action on brain activity.

 

In a stud at Imperial College London twenty volunteers revealed how DMT alters brain function. During DMT experience there was increased connectivity across the brain. The changes to brain activity were more prominent in areas related with high level functions such as imagination. Humans have usually big brains and model an unusually large amount of the world. With DMT there is activity in highly evolved areas and system of the brain that encode high level models become highly deregulated under DMT and this related to intense trip. The effect of DMT effects on the brain is brief and lasts for a minute. DMT produces intense and immersive altered states of consciousness with vivid and bizarre visions with a sense of visiting alternatives realities or dimensions and similarities to near death experience. But how the compound alters such effect in brain is unclear.

 

The fMRI scans found changes to activity within and between the brain regions on volunteers under the influence of DMT. Effects included increased connectivity across the brain.  It was found that the psychedelics expert their effects by disrupting high level brain systems. “Our results revealed that when a volunteer was on DMT there was a marked deregulation of some of the brain rhythms. The brain switched in its mode of functioning to something altogether more anarchic. It will be fascinating to follow up on these insights in the years to come. Psychedelics are proving to be extremely powerful scientific tools for furthering our understanding of how brain activity relates to conscious experience” said Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, and senior author on the paper (now working at the University of California, San Francisco).

 

The Imperial team is now exploring how to prolong the peak of the psychedelic experience through continuous infusion with DMT, and some are also advising on a commercially run trial to assess DMT for patients with depression.

 

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