rational exploration of the underground

One of the most popular “drug geek” myths is that the powerful psychedelic compound DMT is produced naturally within your body, specifically the pineal gland. Not only this, but this natural DMT is apparently involved in a wide variety of previously unexplained processes - it is the mechanism of dreaming, it causes religious feelings, and DMT production spikes near death to “carry away the soul”. This appears to stem primarily from Dr. Richard Strassman’s book The Spirit Molecule, which advanced many of these hypotheses which were then passed on and extrapolated telephone-game style to the point where fluoridated water is apparently an Illuminati plot to suppress natural DMT production.

There’s just one problem - there doesn’t appear to be any concrete evidence whatsoever for this. Dr. Strassman himself explains:

I did my best in the DMT book to differentiate between what is known, and what I was conjecturing about (based upon what is known), regarding certain aspects of DMT dynamics. However, it’s amazing how ineffective my efforts seem to have been. So many people write me, or write elsewhere, about DMT, and the pineal, assuming that the things I conjecture about are true. When I was writing the book, I thought I was clear enough, and repeating myself would have gotten tedious.

We don’t know whether DMT is made in the pineal. I muster a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting a reason to look long and hard at the pineal, but we do not yet know. There are data suggesting urinary DMT rises in psychotic patients when their psychosis is worse. However, we don’t know whether DMT rises during dreams, meditation, near-death, death, birth or any other endogenous altered state. To the extent those states resemble those brought on by giving DMT, it certainly makes one wonder if endogenous DMT might be involved, and if it were, it would explain a lot. But we don’t know yet. Even if the pineal weren’t involved, that would have little overall effect on my theories regarding a role for DMT in endogenous altered states, because we do know that the gene involved in DMT synthesis is present in many organs, particularly lung. If the pineal made DMT, it would tie up a lot of loose ends regarding this enigmatic little organ. But people seem to live pretty normals lives without a pineal gland; for example, when it has had to be removed because of a tumor.

In both these regards-the pineal-DMT connection, and endogenous DMT dynamics-we ought to know a lot more within the next several years due to the efforts of a research group being led by Steven Barker at Louisiana State University. He, with his grad student Ethan McIlhenny, are developing a new super-assay for DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenine, and metabolites. This assay will be capable of detecting those compounds much more sensitively than previous generations of assays. They’re looking at endogenous levels in awake sober normals, to assess baseline values of these compounds. We should have some data from those samples within a year. They also will be looking at pineal tissue. Once we have some baseline data in normal humans in normal waking consciousness, comparisons can be made between those levels and levels in endogenous altered states, like dreams, near-death, and so on.

It appears that myths about drugs can cut both ways, and this is an important illustration of the requirement for critical thinking, no matter how appealing the initial conjecture. Steven Barker and Ethan McIlhenny’s work to determine baseline DMT levels continues, with their latest paper involving detection of metabolites produced by ayahuasca consumption.

Hanna J. “DMT and the Pineal: Fact or Fiction?” www.erowid.org/chemicals/dmt/dmt_article2.shtml. Jun 3 2010.

Fundamentally, the nervous system is simple. It receives sensory input, then translates this into an appropriate response. Things get a bit more complicated when we try to find out just what happens in between those two events. Sensory impulses travel through neurons, brain cells that can be thought of as switches, turning on or off depending on their input. It is important to realize that no overall response is determined solely by one structure of the brain or even one system, and it is not a simple yes-no decision but the interaction of many yes-no decisions. Like the collapse of a building or the stampede of a crowd, it is the influence of many small factors or decisions that cause a critical yet vague threshold to be reached.

The brain can be thought of somewhat as a tangled web of neurons, with dendrites connecting to axons. At the receiving end, a single neuron thrusts out many dendrites, which bring signals toward the nerve cell. They reach out for stimuli, like branches of a tree toward the sun. Their twigs swarm with tiny receptors. Receptors are small structures designed to recognize and lock on to certain chemical compounds released by other nerve cells. The junction between these dendrites and other axons is called a synapse, and this is where the chemical release and recognition occur.

If a receptor is activated by one of these chemical signals, it adjusts the flow of ions through the membrane of the underlying nerve cell. If many receptors are activated and the flow of ions changes significantly, the nerve cell may lose its polar, charged electrical properties. Instantly the whole depolarized cell fires, sending a signal down the axon causing the release of specific chemical signals. These molecules pour out of tiny round storage packets called vesicles, and deliver this chemical message at the synapse to another dendrite. This process continually echos throughout our brain.

In general, when the first primary chemical messengers reach their receptors, they change the way the next cell acts in one of three ways.

Chemical messengers can act as transmitters. In this case the chemical messenger acts directly and is the prime mover. It quickly transfers the signal from the near side of the synapse (presynaptic side) to the far side of the synapse (postsynaptic side). To transmit its fast excitatory messages, the brain usually uses molecules of acetylcholine or glutamate. They increase the excitability of the next cell (and hence the likelyhood to fire) by depolarizing it. Other primary neurotransmitters decrease the next cells excitability. GABA, for instance, excels in this role and hyperpolarizes the next cell. The nerve cell which released its transmitter into the synapse quickly prepares to fire again. It recaptures most of its transmitter molecules, recycles them back up into storage vesicles, and releases them again. Many nerve cells fire as fast as the wingbeat of a hummingbird, firing several hundred times a second. We can refer to this as neurotransmission, and think of it like a private telephone line. Two people are conducting a brisk and efficient conversation, on a hardwired private link which corresponds to the synapse.
Chemical messengers can act as modulators. Instead of being the prime movers, these messengers merely modify the way other primary neurotransmitters are acting. They nudge whatever excitation or inhibition is underway in one direction or the other, but with less influence than the primary neurotransmitter. For instance, norepinephrine (NE) can act as a modulator. Some NE receptors cover the terminal endings of acetylcholine nerve cells, and can stop them from releasing their acetylcholine. In a broad generalization, norepinephrine enhances sensate responses (including those from noxious stimuli), dopamine energizes, and serotonin enters into mood-related behaviours. Neuromodulators can be thought of as a volume knob - given an ongoing conversation, they can either amplify it or mute it.
Chemical messengers can act as neurohormones. A nerve cell may release a hormone into tissue fluids, and it may diffuse a long distance before it can find the specific receptor it binds to, and it needs no synapse to act. We can think of neurohormonal communication like a radio station broadcasting across the country. The messages travel widely, but only specific radio sets tuned into a certain station will receive any information.

The brain has trillions of these receptors, attached to dendrites, cell bodies, and axon terminals. They are precisely shaped structures that will attach to a single neurotransmitter. Each receptor can be thought of as “voting” for excitation or inhibition of the nerve cell. The result determines whether the cell fires, how frequently the cell fires, and for how long the burst of firing will last.

Each chemical messenger is used in many different circuits throughout the brain. No one modulator, no one transmitter, no one receptor can be said to be the sole cause of any behavior. A given chemical messenger does two major things:

1. It subtly influences many behaviors by acting at many levels simultaneously in the brain.
2. It increases or decreases the contributions made by other chemical messengers and their receptor systems.

As a result of this feedback on multiple levels, the brain is gifted with a huge array of functions and experiences, each subject to wide variation and gradation.

Now let’s work our way inside the brain.

At the base of the brain the spinal cord becomes enlarged, and is known as the brain stem. The lowest level of the brain stem is the medulla, rising up from the spinal cord. The medulla controls the most basic of operations including cardiac, respiratory, vomiting and vasomotor centers, as well as regulating autonomic functions, such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure.

As we move further up the brain stem we find the pons, involved in general arousal of the nervous system, assisting in controlling autonomic functions, sleep, and relaying sensory information between the cerebrum and cerebellum. This relaying is necessary as the cerebellum is seemingly detached from the rest of the brain, lying off to the back of the brain stem. It is involved in other basic functions, most notably motor control. It does not initiate movement, but acts as a grand director - receiving input from sensory systems and from other parts of the brain and spinal cord, and integrating these inputs to fine tune gross motor activity. The cerebellum is also involved in motor learning, such as a baby deer tottering around and correlating sensory input to motor output in order to use its legs.

The midbrain controls the visual and auditory systems as well as eye movement. Portions of the midbrain called the red nucleus and the substantia nigra are involved in the control of body movement. The darkly pigmented substantia nigra contains a large number of dopamine-producing neurons, degeneration of which is associated with Parkinson’s disease. Barry Kidston, a 23-year-old chemistry graduate student in Maryland, synthesized MPPP (a synthetic opioid painkiller) in 1976 after learning about it from an obscure 1947 paper, but screwed up a few tiny technical details leaving traces of MPTP behind. It took only three days of self-injection of the tainted MPPP for the trace MPTP to irreversibly damage the substantia nigra and for Barry to start exhibiting symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

The bulbous thalmus extends out of the top of the brain stem, and it situated between the cerebral cortex and the midbrain, both in terms of location and function. Its functions include relaying sensory input and motor signals to the cerebral cortex, along with the regulation of consciousness, sleep and alertness. It is surrounded by basal ganglia which are primarily involved in action selection, or the decision of which of several possible behaviors to execute at a given time. Experimental studies show that the basal ganglia exert an inhibitory influence on a number of motor systems, and that a release of this inhibition permits a motor system to become active. The basal ganglia can therefore be thought of as a “behaviour switch” influenced by signals from many parts of the brain, including the “executive” prefrontal cortex.

Centered deep below the thalamus lies the hypothalamus, the connection between the nervous system and the endocrine (hormonal) system. The hypothalamus controls body temperature, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and circadian cycles. Sweeping up from the hypothalamus on both sides are several other structures collectively known as the limbic system, or “paleomammalian brain”. These ancient structures infuse emotional overtones in our experience and into our affective responses, affect long term memory, behaviour, and the sense of smell. One limbic component, the hippocampus, helps us process data and relay them to be stored in various memory circuits.

The limbic system was originally proposed as the emotional center of the brain, with the neocortex taking the role of “hard computation”. This has been cast into controversy with the discovery that the hippocampus is involved in memory retention, and the boundaries of the limbic system have been redrawn again and again since the concept was originally proposed. Some scientists propose scrapping the concept of a seperate limbic system entirely.