Why Do People Who Take The "Spirit Molecule" Describe Such Similar Experiences?

Of all the psychedelic drugs, such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin (the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms", with all the odd experiences they can induce in the user, one drug has a reputation amongst "psychonauts" who take them for causing particularly odd experiences.

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N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), sometimes referred to as the "spirit molecule," has potentially been used for thousands of years. You may already be aware of the substance through the work of American philosopher, ethnobotanist, and author Terence McKenna, who developed some pretty strange views on the topic, or UFC commentator turned podcaster Joe Rogan.

The drug, when inhaled, produces an intense psychedelic experience which can be unsettling, profound, or destabilizing, and can last for up to 45 minutes. Even McKenna, who was no stranger to psychedelic substances, was regularly shocked by what he experienced when he took it.

"DMT is a reliable method for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50.000 years," McKenna said of the drug. "Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet. And if you don't think so, then tell me you don't think so after you've smoked 75mg DMT. Otherwise we just don't have anything to talk about."

One particularly odd aspect (we should stress this is likely due to changes taking place in the brain, though we don't know the precise mechanism yet) is a certain similarity in experiences that have been reported by DMT users. McKenna described his own experience of encountering "entities" which became known in the DMT-taking community as "machine elves".

"During my own experiences smoking synthesized DMT in Berkeley, I had had the impression of bursting into a space inhabited by merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures," he said in his book True Hallucinations. "Dozens of these friendly fractal entities, looking like self-dribbling Faberge eggs on the rebound, had surrounded me and tried to teach me the lost language of true poetry."

That's a pretty odd experience, and McKenna went on to describe other bizarre hallucinations, where the "elves" and "jesters" toyed with him, or else presented advanced technology to him which could be operated through song. What is really strange (though that does not mean that it is in any way supernatural) is that users tend to report fairly similar experiences.

"People who smoke DMT, and can recall their experiences in detail, frequently describe seeing vivid and detailed geometric structures, experienced synesthesia, visions of alternate worlds," one study, which looked at self-reported experiences collated from around the Internet explains, "encounters with strange autonomous entities and divine beings, interactions with complex technological objects, profound emotional and mystical experiences, and being transported to unusual and complex hyperdimensional places."

Study author Stephen Kagan attempted to break these experiences down into categories of Places, Objects, Entities, Feelings, and Attributes, which were further broken down (for instance, the Places category contains experiences of domes, caves, space, and hyperdimensional places).

"In the majority of reports, people who encountered complex visual and synaesthetic phenomena and had the experience of entering alternate realities did not describe their experiences as being manifestations of their own minds and frequently described what they encountered as being autonomous of themselves and independent of their influence," the study reads.

"Some people also described the content of their experiences as being more real than real. This often meant that what they experienced was more vibrant, complex, varied or detailed than what they normally experienced in their daily lives. In most cases the ability to perceive their normal surrounding reality did not remain intact and if it did, then the content and structure of their DMT experiences were superimposed upon and within the external world."

Some of the more interesting "entities" seen by DMT users included "gods:mythic", "jester:clown", "elves:goblins" and a rather sinister category of "disembodied". Humanoids were the most-encountered of the reported entities at 36 percent, with more unusual "living machines" appearing in 16 percent of experiences, narrowly beating snakes and dragons on 15 percent. As reassuring as "humanoid" sounds, the experiences were far from usual than regular humanoid humans.

"Sometimes they appear as aliens, family members, have strange shaped bodies or heads, limbs with extra joints or that separate in unusual ways," the study reads. "Their clothing varied from spacesuits to tribal to that of ancient Egyptians or Greeks and their skin varied in color, sometimes blue, red or golden. Their language was usually telepathic or easily understood."

In many of the experiences, the hallucinated entities acted as guides, imparting wisdom whether they were an insectoid or a simple geometric shape. Another small study found that 94 percent of the participants experienced "encounters" with other beings, with over half describing these "encounters" as benevolent. One archetype, described by a user in this study, was one referred to as the "trickster" by DMT users.

"A female face which was tempting me, which I’m kind of familiar with… Then, everything slipped, everything stripped away. As I was tempted in, lured in… and there was like a ‘Hehehe’, there was a mischievousness to it. She was definitely giggling, as if to say, ‘This fucking stupid idiot here he comes again I’m gonna show him, Bang!’… She’s beckoning with a sort of finger like this, going ‘come in, come in’, and I thought OK, I’m mesmerised, so I follow her in," one user described.

"This female entity is fucking all-powerful but at the same time very mischievous and jokey and infantile… So she’s like, ‘I’m the master and orchestrator of this whole situation, but I like having a laugh at the same time’… In that space it’s almost like she came to get me, kind of knew I was coming – ‘Come, come, come, giggle giggle, laugh, look at that, now you are here, now I just sit back and watch you!’"

Though these experiences are certainly taking place in the brain (we're a science website, please don't get mad at us for saying that), they can certainly have a profound effect on the user.

"More than half of those who identified as atheist before the experience no longer identified as atheist afterwards," another study explains. "The experiences were rated as among the most meaningful, spiritual, and psychologically insightful lifetime experiences, with persisting positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose, and meaning attributed to the experiences."

They note that "entity encounter experiences have many similarities to non-drug entity encounter experiences such as those described in religious, alien abduction, and near-death contexts."

So what is going on in the brain during these experiences?

"One explanation is that DMT stimulates regions of the brain which give rise to both the visual aspect of a being and also the experience of sensed presence," Dr David Luke, associate professor of psychology at Greenwich University and author of the book DMT Entity Encounters, told IFLScience. "However, in my research I’ve come across people who have aphantasia, which means they have no visual mental imagery. When they have DMT experiences they don’t see anything, and yet they have entity encounters, so the visual aspect isn’t even necessary for having these encounter experiences."

One idea, backed by a study that used electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on people undergoing a DMT dose, is that DMT blurs the boundaries of brain networks, resulting in "global functional connectivity".

"One increasingly popular view is that much of brain function is concerned with modelling or predicting its environment. Humans have unusually big brains and model an unusually large amount of the world," first author Dr Chris Timmermann, from the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, said in a statement at the time. 

"For example, like with optical illusions, when we’re looking at something, some of what we’re actually seeing is our brain filling in the blanks based on what we already know. What we have seen with DMT is that activity in highly evolved areas and systems of the brain that encode especially high-level models becomes highly dysregulated under the drug, and this relates to the intense drug ‘trip’."

Though we would like to give something more conclusive for why users report these experiences, the truth is that we have a better picture from studies like these, but more research is needed.

"Our results revealed that when a volunteer was on DMT there was a marked dysregulation of some of the brain rhythms that would ordinarily be dominant. The brain switched in its mode of functioning to something altogether more anarchic," senior author Professor Robin Carhart-Harris, founder of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, added.

"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."