Reading · Born Again, Again by Dr. Chloe West

DMT can be found in plants, even your grass outside. This molecule, which is one of the most powerful psychedelic drugs we know of, appears to be something the mammalian brain, your brain, can build on its own.

If the brain goes to the trouble of synthesizing a psychedelic, there should be a reason, right? Bodies do not usually spend their resources on nothing. So why would the brain make DMT?

The most famous answer comes from psychiatrist Rick Strassman. In 2001 he published DMT: The Spirit Molecule, based on the first human DMT studies in a generation. He proposed that DMT is produced by the pineal gland, a tiny structure deep in the brain, and is released in a great flood at the moment of death. In this telling, DMT is the chemical doorway to the beyond, it is the molecule that carries us out of this life and into whatever comes next. People who take a large dose describe being pulled through a tunnel into a vast, luminous space that feels more real than real, meeting radiant beings or a loving presence, and returning certain they have glimpsed what lies on the other side. If that is what waits behind the final flood of DMT, then dying is not a light going out but a passage, and something is there to meet us. It’s a beautiful story, and it’s the reason a lot of people even know that DMT is endogenously produced in the human brain.

But it is worth being honest that this part is largely speculation, and the pineal-gland version of it almost certainly does not hold up. The neuroscientist David Nichols has laid out carefully why: the pineal is a tiny gland that releases only minute amounts of its main hormone, melatonin, while a full psychedelic dose of DMT is something on the order of a thousand times more than that gland could plausibly produce. A dramatic pineal flood of DMT at the moment of death simply does not fit the numbers. That does not mean the underlying phenomenon is not real. It means we have to look past the pineal, and past the story, to see what is actually going on.

In 2019, a team led by Jimo Borjigin showed that the rat brain contains the machinery to build DMT, and that it does build it, at concentrations in the same range as familiar neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine. Crucially, the brain kept producing DMT even in animals whose pineal gland had been removed, which tells us the pineal is not the source; the wider brain is. A 2025 review by Steven Barker, one of the chemists who has spent a career measuring this, confirms that DMT is genuinely present in the mammalian brain. But it is worth being careful here: whether those endogenous levels are high enough to actually do anything psychoactive is still debated, and Barker himself cautions that finding the molecule is not the same as proving it has a function. Earlier work had found only trace amounts in blood and urine, so detecting it in brain tissue itself was a real step, but a step toward a question that is still open.

The same 2019 study in rats found something else. When the researchers stopped the rats’ hearts to induce cardiac arrest, DMT levels in the visual cortex rose sharply in about one in five of the animals, within minutes. Endogenous DMT, rising right at the edge of death.

This is a point researchers studying psychedelics, among them Tommaso Barba, have been making publicly: those final moments are a whole neurochemical storm, and it is far from clear that DMT is the molecule doing the important work. In those extreme moments, other signaling chemicals surge dramatically: studies of the dying rat brain have found serotonin rising more than twentyfold and noradrenaline more than thirtyfold, along with spikes in dopamine, glutamate, and the brain’s own opioids, and several of these act on the very same receptors that psychedelics do. So while DMT clearly rises in the dying rat brain, it is only one voice in a much larger neurochemical storm. We genuinely do not yet know whether DMT specifically contributes to the near-death experience, or what role, if any, it plays. Additionally, the DMT surge and the wider chemical storm alike have only been measured in rats. These are measurements you cannot really make in a dying human brain, so whether ours does anything similar as we die simply has not been shown. For now it stays an open question rather than a fact.

What makes this possibility so interesting is the research comparing DMT to near-death experiences. Near-death experiences are the vivid, oddly consistent episodes some people report after coming close to death or being revived from it, often after cardiac arrest. People describe leaving the body, moving through a tunnel toward a light, meeting loved ones who have died, and feeling an immense peace. Accounts like these show up across cultures and centuries, and as modern medicine revives more people from the edge, we hear about them more and more.

So, when Chris Timmermann and colleagues gave people DMT in a lab and compared their reports to the accounts of people who have had near-death experiences, the two were almost indistinguishable. They are both described as a journey down a tunnel, a brilliant light, a shared sense of leaving the body and entering another realm, and similar encounters with something that feels like a presence. There are a few differences to note. People in real near-death experiences far more often meet deceased loved ones, and their accounts tend to move through a clear sequence, sometimes arriving at a border or a point of no return, while DMT journeys rarely include either (Michael, Luke, and Robinson, 2025). There is even a case study of one person who survived a near-death experience and later took a close chemical cousin of DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, and found the two unmistakably alike.

So we have a molecule the brain can make, that appears to surge as the heart stops, at least in rats, that produces an experience nearly identical to what people report from the threshold of death. It is easy to see how you get from there to the spirit molecule. And it’s cool that we found all of this stuff out after his book came out.

So why would the brain do this? Maybe the brain makes DMT at the end in order to give us the experience. To ease the passage. To open a window onto something vast and loving so that we do not leave in terror. To hand us, in the last minutes, the most meaningful experience of our lives. But I don’t think this is why the brain does this.

Regardless, people who have had near-death experiences often describe them as the most important thing that ever happened to them, and they are frequently changed for the better afterward: less afraid, more open, more awake to their own lives. I am not interested in explaining that away. Whatever the evolutionary reason behind this mechanism, and whatever the biology turns out to be, those experiences are real, and their meaning to the people who have them is real.

But meaning to us and purpose in us are two different questions. That an experience matters enormously to the person having it does not, by itself, tell us why the machinery that produces it is there.

Evolution does not build elaborate machinery just to deliver a mystical experience.

A trait tends to be conserved because it helps an organism survive and reproduce, and dying is, almost by definition, the moment when there is no reproductive future left to protect. Scholars of religion largely agree that religious belief itself is not an evolutionary adaptation but a byproduct of other mental systems (this is the argument the anthropologist Pascal Boyer is known for). If even our capacity for religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences is a side effect rather than a target, it is hard to argue that natural selection specifically engineered a molecule to produce one on our way out.

So the profound experience at the threshold may be exactly that: a side effect. Something that rides along on a piece of biology that is there for a different reason entirely. So, instead of asking what DMT is trying to show us, I think the better question is what DMT is trying to do.

Here is the possibility I find myself unable to stop thinking about, and I want to flag plainly that this is just my hypothesis, but I have spent a good while with this idea. I have even begun writing it up as a formal scientific paper. I am still gathering evidence and studying the field, and I hope to submit it for publication one day.

So, what if the DMT surge at the edge of death is not a farewell, but a rescue?

Think about what is actually happening in those minutes. In the rats, the heart has stopped. Oxygen is falling. Electrical activity is beginning to collapse. If any system in the mammalian body were going to mount an emergency response, this is the moment for it. And what I want to suggest is that the DMT surge might be part of that response: the brain, sensing the signatures of its own dying, might flood itself with a molecule that pushes back.

It would be a kind of chemical CPR. When a heart stops, we push on the chest to force it to keep moving. Maybe when a brain begins to go dark, it does something similar for itself. And the reason I take this seriously is that when you look at what DMT actually does in the body, its effects line up, one after another, with exactly what you would want it to do in an emergency.

The most immediate threat to life when blood flow to the brain stops is hypoxia, the starving of tissue for oxygen. Neurons need oxygen to live. And DMT, it turns out, protects cells against precisely that. In 2016, a team led by Attila Szabo showed that DMT shields human brain cells from damage under low-oxygen conditions, and that it does so by activating the sigma-1 receptor, a protein that helps cells stay alive under stress. This is not a receptor known for producing visions. It is one known for helping cells endure.

Near-death experiences are strongly associated with oxygen starvation, and patients with the highest carbon dioxide in their blood, a marker of oxygen debt, report more near-death experiences than others. Low oxygen and the DMT-like state keep showing up together.

Last year, a team publishing in Science Advances gave DMT to animals after a stroke, which is exactly what it sounds like: a brain suddenly cut off from its blood supply. DMT reduced the damage. It stabilized the blood-brain barrier, calmed the inflammation that follows a stroke, and it worked through the same sigma-1 receptor. A brain starved of oxygen, given DMT, came through with less injury. That is not the behavior of a molecule whose job is to escort us out. That is the behavior of a molecule trying to keep the tissue alive.

Keeping the cells alive is only half of a rescue. You also have to get the system running again. And this is where DMT’s most famous effect, the one behind the visions, may turn out to have a deeper purpose.

I have written before about brain entropy, the measure of how varied and complex the brain’s activity is at a given moment. If you want the long version, see below.

Inside the Entropic Brain

Jun 28

Do you ever just remember that the universe is expanding? Right now, as you read this, everything is quietly getting further away from everything else, as it has been since the beginning. The bigger it gets, the more disordered it gets. Galaxies drift apart, stars burn through their fuel and go dark, heat leaks out into the cold and never finds its way …

The short version is that a rich, conscious, wide-awake mind runs at high entropy, with many regions active in many combinations, while sedation, deep sleep, and unconsciousness run low. DMT drives entropy up, and hard. Under DMT the brain’s activity becomes more diverse and more globally connected, more regions talking to more regions at once, and recent imaging keeps confirming and sharpening this: a 2025 study found the brain moves between states more easily under DMT, and another that its activity breaks free of its usual fixed patterns.

In a dying brain, as the brain loses oxygen, its entropy falls toward zero. In 2023, researchers recording from dying human brains saw a surge of high-frequency, highly organized activity in the seconds around death, a spike rather than a slide. And there is evidence that greater complexity in the brain's electrical activity is associated with better odds of surviving cardiac arrest, though so far in small studies, and as a group-level association rather than a validated clinical predictor (Moshirvaziri, Ramezan-Arab, and Asgari, 2016).

Line those up and a picture forms. Dying looks like collapsing entropy. DMT is one of the most powerful entropy-raising agents we know of. A surge of it, right as the brain begins to flatline, is exactly the jolt you would design if you wanted to push a stalling brain back up toward the complex, integrated activity that being awake and alive is made of.

DMT may not only help us survive the crisis but also repair the damage afterward.

DMT has real effects on the cardiovascular system; even the early human studies showed it raises heart rate and blood pressure, which is again what you would want when the goal is to restore circulation.

And most strikingly, it looks like DMT may even work to regrow neurons to repair damage as well. Just last month, an article was published showing that DMT facilitated the proliferation, or multiplication, of human neural stem cells, the cells that can become new neurons, in a dish. I want to be careful with this, because dividing stem cells are not the same as finished, working neurons, and it is early, in-a-dish work. But the direction is remarkable: DMT is a molecule that might help the brain build more of its own raw material.

So when we put the pieces together, DMT stops looking like a death chemical. It protects cells from suffocating. It jolts a fading brain back toward the activity of consciousness. It supports circulation. It may even help the brain rebuild after damage has occurred. That is the résumé of a survival molecule. Scientists are picking up on this, and DMT has now entered early human trials for stroke, given at doses too low to cause a trip, to see whether it can protect a brain that has just lost its blood supply. We are, in other words, beginning to use DMT as a rescue drug on purpose.

I want to be clear about where the solid ground ends, because this is the kind of idea that is easy to oversell.

What is established: DMT is made in the mammalian brain. It rises in dying rats. It protects cells from low oxygen through the sigma-1 receptor, it reduces damage after stroke in animals, it raises brain entropy, and it can make neural stem cells divide. Those are findings, with citations, most of them from the last two years.

What is my hypothesis: that these effects add up to a single, coordinated resuscitative response, and that this, rather than the delivery of a mystical experience, is the reason the brain makes DMT at the edge of death. That last step is not proven. We have not even shown a DMT surge at death in humans yet, only in rats. Careful researchers, including some who have spent their lives on this molecule, remain skeptical that endogenous DMT has any dramatic function at all, and they may turn out to be right.

But it is a hypothesis worth testing. Cardiac arrest is one of the leading causes of death in the world. If even part of this is true, if a molecule our own brains already make can help a brain survive the loss of its oxygen, then we are not only looking at an explanation for the light at the end of the tunnel. We are looking at a possible tool for pulling people back through it.

So here is where I am, and I want to be honest that what follows is speculation, my best reading of the current research rather than a settled conclusion. The stories we tell about DMT have almost all pointed outward and upward, toward other realms and departing souls and doors into the beyond. The biology, as we are beginning to see it, may point in a different direction, back toward the body. Back toward the failing heart, and the darkening brain, and the cells fighting not to die. And maybe, if this idea holds up, the tunnel and the light and the overwhelming sense that something enormous is happening are partly what that fight feels like from the inside.

If it turns out to be true, a brain that makes its own last-ditch medicine, and in the process shows its owner something they will call the most profound moment of their life, is not a smaller wonder than the spirit molecule. It might be a larger one.

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DMT: The Life Molecule

Inside the Entropic Brain

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