Exploration
Speculative, phenomenological, and interdisciplinary essays on what DMT and the wider psychedelic compounds reveal about consciousness, biology, and mind. Where Research catalogues findings and Understanding consolidates them, Exploration follows the implications outward — into comparative neuroscience, evolutionary biology, the phenomenology of altered states, and the philosophical questions that psychedelic experience makes unavoidable. Curious without being credulous.
Shulgin's tryptamine notebooks: the cartography DMT research still navigates by
The relevance of Shulgin's tryptamine work to present-day DMT research is not merely historical. Several active lines of enquiry trace their intellectual ancestry directly to his structure-activity observations.
Szára's 1956 self-experiment: the Budapest dose that launched DMT research
Cold War Hungary, 1956: Stephen Szára couldn't get LSD, so he made DMT and dosed himself. Modern psychedelic research began that afternoon.
DEEP DIVE #1 Five Hundred Million Years Apart, Touching Through the Glass: The Octopus, MDMA, and the Deep Chemistry of Social Connection
In 2018, Eric Edsinger and Gül Dölen published a short paper in Current Biology that posed an apparently absurd question: what happens when you give MDMA to an octopus?
DMT EEG: Alpha Power Outperforms Lempel-Ziv Complexity (Timmermann)
Timmermann et al. test EEG correlates of the DMT experience: alpha power outperforms Lempel-Ziv complexity, the entropic-brain hypothesis's signature.
DMT an overview
From a forthcoming book — first chapter, free. ---