Author
Stephen Page
Writer on DMT, ayahuasca, iboga and tryptamine research. LLB; incoming MSc in Psychedelics: Mind, Medicine and Culture, University of Exeter (2026)
Cabinet of Marginalia
The Case of the Vanishing Molecule
Wide vintage-style ARDMT Field Notes comic strip titled “The Case of the Vanishing Molecule,” showing the scientific history of endogenous DMT from Julius Axelrod’s 1961 INMT enzyme discovery through inconsistent transmethylation-era findings, Borjigin’s rat brain studies, and modern
Cabinet of Marginalia
The Compound That Forgot to be Interesting.
The Compound That Forgot to Be Interesting — a field note on timing, context, and rejected purchase orders. In 1931 the Canadian chemist Richard H. F. Manske first synthesised N,N-dimethyltryptamine and entered it into a table of tryptamine derivatives without ever suspecting what it would become.
ARDMT Field Notes
Endogenous DMT from Axelrod to Borjigin: what sixty years have settled and what they have not
The story begins, as so many stories in psychedelic pharmacology do, with Julius Axelrod. In 1961, working at the National Institute of Mental Health, Axelrod demonstrated that rabbit lung tissue contained an enzyme capable of methylating tryptamine to form DMT.
ARDMT Field Notes
Extended-state DMT infusion: three decades almost-but-not-quite attempted
There is something faintly poignant about the extended-state protocol's career: pharmacokinetically straightforward, clinically demanding, ethically complex, and philosophically loaded, all at once.
ARDMT Field Notes
DMT in a Parkinson's model: Madrid group returns with fuller claims
The Madrid group — Morales-García, López-Moreno, Calleja-Conde, and colleagues — return to Experimental Neurology with what appears to be their most developed account yet of DMT's neuroprotective potential in a preclinical model of Parkinson's disease.
ARDMT Field Notes
Strassman's IV DMT protocol: the dataset that still sets the dose
Rick Strassman's DMT studies were not the first to administer the compound to humans; that distinction belongs to the Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szára, who injected himself with it in 1956.
ARDMT Field Notes
DMT on VTA Ih-negative neurons: sex-dependent firing changes in reward circuitry
A group at the University of Exeter has turned its electrodes on a rather specific neuronal population: the Ih-negative cells of the ventral tegmental area.
ARDMT Field Notes
Manske to Szára: DMT's twenty-five years as a compound without a question
Manske's synthesis appeared in 1931, published in the Canadian Journal of Research, as part of a broader programme of work on tryptamine derivatives.
Foundations
What is the Sigma-1 Receptor?
A strange protein inside cells, why DMT binds to it, and the increasingly serious question of what that binding might mean.
Foundations
What is the Default Mode Network?
The brain regions that hum when you are not doing anything, the self that hums with them, and what psychedelics seem to do to the whole arrangement.
Foundations
Harmine and the MAOIs
Oral N,N-DMT, taken on its own, reaches the gut wall, encounters intestinal MAO-A, and is broken down before it can be absorbed. Almost none reaches the bloodstream. The body's protection against dietary amines is, in this case, doing exactly its job. Oral DMT is pharmacologically inactive.
ARDMT Field Notes
Lempel–Ziv complexity is the weakest correlate: Exeter's dose-dependent DMT EEG study
Lewis-Healey, Pallavicini, Cavanna and colleagues have now published, in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, a dose-dependent EEG study of inhaled freebase DMT that carries a rather pointed conclusion: