#133: 🧠 What Happens to Your Brain on 5-MeO-DMT?
The Surprising Sleep-Wake Dance of Psychedelic Consciousness
Hey Friends,
I wrote this newsletter on a flight to Berlin, my former home.
I returned to a flat which I called home for most of 2022.
The flat where I started this newsletter.
Arriving felt like going back in time.
I remember the feelings of letting go of one project, my company Memido, and not knowing what comes next.
This newsletter was my anchor into learning, self discovery and finding my voice.
Now I face another end of one chapter and beginning of a new one.
It's fitting to be back where this journey began, sitting in the same space but as a different person.
The circle closes, yet opens again.
This cycle of endings and beginnings reminds me of today's topic - the profound brain states induced by 5-MeO-DMT.
Just as this substance can dissolve boundaries and create new neural connections, life's transitions offer us the chance to see ourselves and our place in the world differently.
As I settle back into this familiar space with new eyes, I invite you to explore how our brains navigate profound change - both the kind facilitated by powerful substances and the kind that comes from life's natural transitions.
With curiosity from Berlin,
Nina
💬 In this note:
🧠 What Happens to Your Brain on 5-MeO-DMT?
📚 Rejection
⚡️ Cellular Digital Twin
#133: 🧠 What Happens to Your Brain on 5-MeO-DMT?
I've always been fascinated by altered states of consciousness.
How can a tiny molecule completely transform our perception of reality?
5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is particularly intriguing because it creates what researchers call a "dissociative state of arousal."
That's a fancy way of saying you feel like your consciousness disconnects from your body.
But here's what really caught my attention: What does this look like in the brain?
Your Brain Has Different States
First, let's talk about the different states your brain can be in.
When you're awake, your brain shows fast, low-amplitude waves on an EEG (electroencephalogram - a device that measures brain activity).
During deep sleep (called NREM sleep), your brain shows slow waves and spindles.
During dream sleep (REM sleep), your brain activity looks more like when you're awake, even though you're deeply asleep and your muscles are completely relaxed.
We also see a variety of mixed, hybrid or distinct features of waking and sleep.
For example, sleep-like slow waves on an EEG have been observed in awake animals after sleep deprivation, or in patients who have experienced a stroke.
So where does 5-MeO-DMT fit into this picture?
The Waking-Sleep Paradox
Here's where things get weird.
When researchers gave mice 5-MeO-DMT, they discovered something unexpected.
The mice were clearly awake - moving around with dilated pupils - but their brains were showing slow waves typically seen in deep sleep.
This created what scientists call a "dissociated state of arousal."
Imagine being wide awake but having your brain act like it's in deep sleep. That's exactly what was happening.
The researchers found that pupils dilated by 75% while the brain showed these sleep-like slow waves.
Normally, dilated pupils mean high arousal and increased brain activity.
But here, the opposite was happening in parts of the brain.
What This Means for Humans
When researchers studied DMT (a similar compound to 5-MeO-DMT) in humans, they found equally fascinating results.
Chris Timmermann at Imperial College London measured brain activity by EEG in people who received DMT intravenously, and published the results in Nature:Scientific Reports in 2019.
TImmermann’s team discovered:
Alpha waves (the brain's main rhythm when awake) dramatically decreased
Theta waves (associated with dreaming) temporarily increased
Overall brain activity became more chaotic and unpredictable
These effects are the opposite to what is seen in states of reduced consciousness, such as in deep sleep or under general anaesthesia.
“The changes in brain activity that accompany DMT are slightly different from what we see with other psychedelics, such as psilocybin or LSD, where we see mainly only reductions in brainwaves,” said lead author Christopher Timmermann, from the Centre for Psychedelic Research.
Timmerman describes the phenomenon observed in the figure above as follows, “Here we saw an emergent rhythm that was present during the most intense part of the experience, suggesting an emerging order amidst the otherwise chaotic patterns of brain activity.”
Overall, people in the experiment described the experience as "like dreaming but with your eyes open."
The Therapeutic Connection
These slow brain waves might be key to why psychedelics can have therapeutic effects.
During normal sleep, slow waves are thought to help the brain reorganize and form new connections - a process called synaptic plasticity.
If 5-MeO-DMT creates similar slow waves while you're conscious, it might explain why people report lasting changes in perspective and mental health after psychedelic experiences.
The brain might be getting a chance to rewire itself in ways that normally only happen during sleep.
A New Understanding of Consciousness
What fascinates me most is how this research challenges our understanding of consciousness.
We used to think of wake and sleep as completely separate states.
But psychedelics show us that consciousness exists on a spectrum with fascinating hybrid states in between.
The fact that our brains can be simultaneously awake and asleep-like suggests consciousness is far more flexible than we ever imagined.
Psychedelics may be the tool to access these simultaneous states and to uncover even more surprises about how our brains create reality.
📚 Book of the Week
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Rejection is a sharp, uncomfortable, and weirdly hilarious exploration of what happens when people desperately seek connection but keep missing the mark.
Through seven interconnected stories, Tulathimutte examines characters who are painfully online, chronically overthinking, and catastrophically bad at human relationships.
Warning: this book will make you cringe. Hard.
You might recognize yourself in some of the characters’ worst moments and you might also be hoping some of these characters just don’t take it too far.
Pick it up for a laugh, and well…a cringe.
⚡️ Check This Out
This viral tweet has circulated many times claiming it is the most detailed image of a human cell created to date, and that is…incorrect.
It is not an image taken from a microscope at all, but a digital representation.
Also, it’s a representation of an animal cell…not a human cell.
It came across my instagram last week with the claim that it is “the most detailed image” of a human cell and I thought it was amazing.
But when I dug into it, I uncovered the misinformation.
And even worse, when the image gets shared, the original credit gets lost. 🙁
Nonetheless, it is spectacular and impressive.
This stunning image is a 3D computer illustration created by Gaël McGill (Harvard Medical School) and Evan Ingersoll.
It depicts a eukaryotic cell.
McGill explained to Newsweek for the article “Fact Check: Does Viral Tweet Show 'Most Detailed Image' of a Human Cell?” that a real photo at this scale would be physically impossible.
In reality, molecules are smaller than the wavelength of visible light itself.
The digital representation they created synthesizes structural data from labs worldwide to visualize "the great complexity and beauty of the cell's molecular choreography."
McGill notes the illustration actually shows cells as less crowded than they really are in nature.
All that being said, this image tends to circulate the internet time and time again.
If you want to check out the original source of the digital representation, you can explore an interactive version of the illustration on Digizyme's website, where you can highlight individual cell components to learn what they're called.
🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?
It’s available on: 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts
On the Nina’s Notes Podcast I interview entrepreneurs who are building products based on the science that I write about in the Nina’s Notes Newsletter.
You’ll also find voice overs of all the weekly Nina’s Notes.
Edited by Wright Time Publishing