Andrew Gallimore

Because the pineal gland has this long history and mystical traditions, the seat of the soul, the third eye, all this kind of stuff.

So everyone wants DMT to be produced by the pineal gland.

The problem is, first of all, is that the pineal gland is very small.

It's about the size of the end of my pinky.

And it's designed or evolved to produce nanograms, micrograms of melatonin, very small amounts you need.

So the idea that this gland can suddenly start pumping out milligrams of DMT to achieve a kind of psychedelic state in the dream state is quite an ask.

There have been some studies or one study in particular actually looked at DMT levels.

So we've known since the 1950s.

that DMT is produced by, is a product of mammalian physiology and it's produced by humans.

In those days, they tried to kind of pin schizophrenia on DMT.

The idea that if there was some

fault some problem with tryptamine metabolism, instead of producing serotonin, which is 5-hydroxytryptamine, the brain could instead start producing elevated levels of NN-dimethyltryptamine or DMT.

And so they started looking for differences in DMT levels in psychotic patients, schizophrenic patients versus normal people.

And there've been more than 100 studies that have looked at

levels of DMT in the blood, in urine, in cerebrospinal fluid.

But there's no convincing, consistent evidence that suggests that DMT is the cause of psychosis or dreaming, in fact.

Okay, so it's actually produced from tryptophan.

So DMT is an alkaloid.

And alkaloids are all produced from amino acids.

So tryptophan is first converted to tryptamine.