Does the brain really make its own DMT? New study ignites debate

It surely does ,but not the way expected here.  so the debate.

Science loves to surprise and also confound.

all good though and gthey are looking.

Does the brain really make its own DMT? New study ignites debate

By Kayleigh Long

April 17, 2026 01:32 pm

https://refractor.io/psychedelics/brain-dmt-endogenous-consciousness/

A new study fails to find any evidence DMT in rat brains, sparking debate over whether the brain really produces its own psychedelic "spirit molecule"

Does the brain really produce its own psychedelic “Spirit Molecule” to power our dream states and near-death experiences? A new study has sparked fresh debate over endogenous DMT, and its presence – or absence – in mammalian brains.

The case for the negative

When Mikael Palner embarked on a series of experiments on rat brains last year, the question wasn’t so much whether he and his team would find N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) – but where, and how much.

Since DMT is a tryptamine with similarities to serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine), he decided to focus on serotonergic neurons. He expected to find measurable quantities of endogenous DMT, and/or meaningful storage of additional DMT his team exogenously administered to the subject rats before dispatching them for ex vivo examination.

“We did not find it, and we did not find any evidence for DMT being taken up in axons [by the serotonin transporter] or in serotonin vesicles [by the vesicular monoamine transporter],” Palner, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, told Refractor over email.

The finding that DMT was “neither formed nor retained” in serotonin terminals in the rat brain came as a surprise, Palner said. DMT degrades rapidly, but by blocking its metabolization, he and his team expected to preserve detectable amounts.

The study, published in Neuropharmacology last month, concluded there was “scant evidence” for endogenous DMT in rat brains.

In defence of the affirmative

Palner’s findings appear to be at odds with a prominent 2019 study by Dean et al, which found that the rat brain “is capable of synthesizing and releasing DMT,” and showed that DMT was endogenously produced in several regions of the brain, including the visual cortex. This, the authors noted, raises “the possibility that this phenomenon may occur similarly in human brains.”

Steven Barker, a Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University in the Department of Comparative Biomedical Sciences who co-authored the 2019 study, says he has some questions.