DMT Models the Near-Death Experience | Hacker News Reader

DMT Models the Near-Death Experience

frontiersin.org

63 pointspseudolus13 comments

It sounds very... Odd? Basically they asked questionnaires to two totally unrelated groups (people who took DMT; and people who had NDEs in the past) and then did some ANOVA magic in SPSS and decided that they were related because people score similarly on a quiz? I'm a bit confused by how reliable this method would be. Also the sample size < 20 seems questionable to me.

But this is just me with very little statistics experience so I am probably wrong in all these thoughts. And there's probably someone way more knowledgeable who can give a better opinion about the research methods and results

It's not a very conclusive study for the reasons you mention. Researchers have long suspected connections between DMT and NDEs (see my other comments), but the bottleneck here is that it's still so difficult to get funding and approval to do studies with these substances (it was actually not possible at all for decades) that this is about the state-of-the-art.

Hopefully this is now changing and things will progress, in the meantime this is better than nothing, perhaps unless taken out of proportion!

Disclaimer: I just follow this field and have no credentials in it.

Yes. This is, to put it plainly, pseudo-scientific bullshit.

Eh, it's a very limited study that basically says two sets of subjective effects are similar. Useless, maybe, but not pseudo.

Many things share similarities, and aren't otherwise related.

> then did some ANOVA magic in SPSS and decided that they were related because people score similarly on a quiz

Ahh flashbacks to undergrad biology

Further than this, DMT is endogenous and protects against hypoxia:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2016.0042...

http://beckleyfoundation.org/2016/09/15/the-first-study-to-s...

Some are lead to believe that DMT is released during a NDE as a last attempt at survival.

Could it also be post NDE behavior modification? Maybe it's an evolutionary system to try to expand the host's perspective, as maybe the NDE may have been the result of poor actions of the host.

It seems that it could have many functions, and even many second order effects. It’s too early to tell but I really hope we find out in my lifetime.

Here is a link to the PDF version of jarmitage's first link on fnins:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5021697/pdf/fni...

There is also a pretty interesting movie: "DMT: the spirit molecule" [0] which touches the topic of releasing DMT during NDE.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtT6Xkk-kzk

Rick Strassman’s book which this film was inspired by IIRC is a great read that I found hard to put down. People like him, at least how he comes across in his book, seem to deserve a lot of credit for the psychedelic science renaissance we are now experiencing.

Ive never had a NDE, but I have had DMT. Reality itself pales in comparison to how "real" and vivid the experience was.

Unlike other hallucinogens which apply a "filter" to the senses, DMT was like a wormhole to another dimension.

If that's what death is like, it makes me think consciousness would asymptotically approach anhiliation but live "forever" in whatever state a DMT trip is.

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