N,N-Dimethyltryptamine and the Pineal Gland: Separating Fact from Myth
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Plain English Summary
You may have heard the appealing idea that your pineal gland -- a tiny pea-sized structure in your brain -- floods you with DMT (a powerful psychedelic compound) when you die, producing those famous near-death experiences with tunnels of light and out-of-body travel. This paper is basically a rigorous takedown of that claim. The math just doesn't work: the pineal gland weighs less than 0.2 grams and makes only about 30 millionths of a gram of melatonin daily. Producing enough DMT for a psychedelic trip would require roughly a thousand times more output than this tiny gland can manage. There's also no good evidence that brain cells stockpile DMT. Instead, the author points to far more plausible explanations for near-death experiences: massive surges of brain chemicals during oxygen deprivation, including 30-fold spikes in norepinephrine and 20-fold jumps in serotonin. Less romantic, perhaps, but the chemistry actually adds up.
Abstract
The pineal gland has a romantic history, from pharaonic Egypt, where it was equated with the eye of Horus, through various religious traditions, where it was considered the seat of the soul, the third eye, etc. Recent incarnations of these notions have suggested that N,N-dimethyltryptamine is secreted by the pineal gland at birth, during dreaming, and at near death to produce out of body experiences. Scientific evidence, however, is not consistent with these ideas. The adult pineal gland weighs less than 0.2 g, and its principal function is to produce about 30 µg per day of melatonin, a hormone that regulates circadian rhythm through very high affinity interactions with melatonin receptors. It is clear that very minute concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine have been detected in the brain, but they are not sufficient to produce psychoactive effects. Alternative explanations are presented to explain how stress and near death can produce altered states of consciousness without invoking the intermediacy of N,N-dimethyltryptamine.
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Cites
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- Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin — Carhart-Harris, Robin L (2012)
- Does the Arousal System Contribute to Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences? A Summary and Response — Long, Jeffrey (2007)
- Out-of-Body Experience and Autoscopy of Neurological Origin — Blanke, Olaf (2004)
- Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions — Blanke, Olaf (2002)
- Classic Hallucinogens and Mystical Experiences: Phenomenology and Neural Correlates — Barrett, Frederick S (2018)
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📋 Cite this paper
Nichols, David E (2017). N,N-Dimethyltryptamine and the Pineal Gland: Separating Fact from Myth. Journal of Psychopharmacology. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881117736919
@article{nichols_2017_endogenous_dmt,
title = {N,N-Dimethyltryptamine and the Pineal Gland: Separating Fact from Myth},
author = {Nichols, David E},
year = {2017},
journal = {Journal of Psychopharmacology},
doi = {10.1177/0269881117736919},
}