In the 90s, psychiatrist Rick Strassman proposed in his book DMT: The Spirit Molecule that large quantities of DMT (an endogenous psychoactive substance), are released into the brain upon death. I don't know that we have any clear evidence of this, but its certainly an interesting perspective on what might account for near death, and death experiences.

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observationist 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Traumatic events, like NDEs, tend to come with lots of adrenaline, stress hormones, and a cocktail of neurotransmitters that could have the secondary consequence of slowing overall monoamine oxidation, similar to MAOIs, resulting in longer effective exposure to any chemicals like DMT that would normally be transient.

You at most have around 250 μg in your system, you need at least 40 times that to get to the lower threshold of a psychedelic effect. If other factors are in play, and it doesn't get immediately metabolized because of everything else consuming the MAO supply, then it's plausible that there could be an effect.

If that were the case, then you're looking at a potential last-ditch survival mechanism, reinforcing the experience and "fuzzing" the memory for maximum impact.

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squidsoup 3 days ago | parent [-]

There is evidence for a surge in DMT production in some rats upon death:

> In our previous studies, we have observed a marked elevation of some, but not all, critical neurotransmitters in rat brain during asphyxic cardiac arrest21, which we posit may contribute to the elevated conscious information processing observed in dying rats21,49. These data also suggest that global ischemia (by cardiac arrest, as in the current study), similar to global hypoxia (by asphyxia, as in21), leads to a tightly regulated release of a select set of neurotransmitters21. To test whether DMT concentrations are regulated by physiological alterations, we monitored DMT levels in rat brain dialysates following experimentally-induced cardiac arrest, and identified a significant rise in DMT levels in animals with (Fig. 4A) and without the pineal (Fig. 4B).

> The cardiac arrest-induced increase of endogenous DMT release may be related to near-death experiences (NDEs), as a recent study reports NDE-like mental states in human subjects given exogenous DMT50. Not all rats in our current study exhibited a surge of DMT following cardiac arrest (Fig. 4), an interesting observation in light of the fact that NDEs are reported by less than 20% of patients who survive cardiac arrests.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6088236/

Presumably only 20% of the rats were religious.

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observationist 3 days ago | parent [-]

Right, the 250 microgram figure was the maximum amount that you might dump into your system in one go, normal DMT blood concentration is far lower. The bare minimum for a psychedelic experience is 20k micrograms, but many people won't notice anything overt until 35k+, and a full "breakthrough" experience requires 50k or more, generally speaking, independent of weight.

For such a tiny amount of DMT to have a significant impact, it would have to be 40 to 100 times more "effective" than usual, or be supported by the soup of other chemicals released in those situations in a sort of entourage effect, with MAO metabolism reduced, and all sorts of neurons firing that otherwise would be silent.

NDEs often overlap real events, where full-on DMT trips shut out the world, so the entourage effect theory makes the most sense to me. Your brain gets overwhelmed, and the dump of DMT all at once, with serotonin, dopamine, and adrenaline maxed out as well, contributes to a predictable psychedelic effect on subjective experience.

	▲	squidsoup 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting, thanks for the insight.

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junto 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The interesting thing about DMT is that it’s an ego-stripper. You have no sense of self. You are non-corporeal. Time and space are irrelevant.

People who have taken DMT find it very difficult to explain what the visions mean when they flash before your eyes. “Flash” in the sense that they are so fast and from every conceivable direction simultaneously and you can see in all directions. And beautifully purple.

Since we are beings that have a conscious “self”, we attribute these moving images to “our lives flashing before our eyes”, but I believe that to be our egotistical selves applying that after the fact.

I now believe that the human brain acts as a filter to a raw stream of collective human shared consciousness, normally out of our grasp.

What people see there is a short temporary window into everyone else’s exact same moment in time.

It’s like a back door hack into god’s admin console and you get to watch the interconnected consciousness of human existence in real time for a few minutes.

However our brains aren’t meant to run unfiltered. Our brains usually optimize and filter as much as they can to conserve energy. We notice the differences and not the usual. Our brains fill in gaps. Eventually the brain overloads as the trip runs to an end and everything goes black. A complete void overwhelms you.

The brain finally reboots and coming back is like watching an old Linux machine reboot, loading its kernel and drivers before adding the OS layers.

First you question what you are, before then discovering who you are. It’s like a process of birth but coming out of hibernation mode for fast boot.

Maybe death is the same. Returning to the collective consciousness.

Like the ant that cannot comprehend the existence of the universe or the neuron that only understands its nearest neighbors, maybe there exists a plane above human individuals as an analogy to the neuron or the ant, that we too cannot not perceive nor understand, because our brains are too small to comprehend it. Only for those fleeting moments when we overclock the system.