Scientists discover how the brain changes during psychedelic trips on DMT

Advanced brain scans have shown how a powerful psychedelic drug increases connectivity in areas of the brain linked to higher level functions, such as imagination.

Hoping to gather new insights into how psychedelics alter a person’s conscious experience, scientists conducted an experiment with DMT (dimethyltryptamine).

This is the natural psychedelic used in ayahuasca ceremonies, where participants drink a brew in a spiritual ceremony typically led by a shaman.

The study, published in the journal PNAS, is the first to track brain activity before, during and after the DMT experience in such detail.

Unlike other well-known psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin, DMT’s effects on the brain are brief, lasting only a few minutes instead of hours.

The drug produces intense altered states of consciousness, and people who have taken it often see vivid and bizarre visions, or feel they have visited alternate realities or dimensions.

It has been unclear however how the compound actually alters brain function to account for these effects.

To find this out, the researchers from Imperial College London scanned the brains of 20 healthy volunteers, who were given relatively high doses of DMT by injection.

Two types of scans were taken of the participants’ brains before, during, and after the trip: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG).

FMRI measures small changes in blood flow that occur with brain activity, while an EEG is conducted by attaching small sensors to a person’s scalp to pick up electrical signals produced by the brain.

The total psychedelic experience lasted about 20 minutes, and at regular intervals, volunteers provided a rating of the subjective intensity of their experience on a scale of