I posted this to r/DMT earlier today and was told people here might be interested as well!
I recently purchased a cheap NeuroSky Mindwave headset and thought I would put it to interesting use. Obviously I am just one subject, so this is just a fun experiment, not publishable work. The results are significant within one subject (me), but not generalisable to the whole population.
Results, in simple terms:The human brain processes information using small electrical currents. These can be measured on the scalp using electrodes and show up as brain waves on what's called an EEG. Brain waves come in different flavors, some are fast (alpha, gamma, high frequencies), others are slow (delta, theta, low frequencies). Different frequency bands are thought to represent different processing systems and states of the brain. These graphs show the change in the power of brain waves in the delta, theta, and alpha bands from baseline to DMT, as well as example brain waves for each condition. Basically, the brain waves get slower and the archetypal 10Hz alpha waves disappear. This may relate to the brain switching to internal processing rather than usual processing of the external world. Any questions, feel free to ask!
Results:15mg of DMT caused a significant (P<0.01) increase in delta and theta power and a decrease in alpha power in yours truly. Raw waveforms confirmed this, one can see more lower frequency activity and a loss of alpha in DMT compared to Baseline. See attached figure, raw waveforms in bottom right panel and spectral band results in the other panels.
Discussion:The results are largely in line with Timmerman et. al. (2019,
link), who also saw a large decrease in alpha and some increase in frontal delta / theta with doses up to 20mg IV. As per their discussion, collapse of alpha and emergence of delta/theta probably relates to a switch towards endogenous processing , though could also reflect the sedative effects of DMT at these doses.
I would love to explore this with multiple doses to establish dose-response relationships, in conjunction with other substances, or with multi-electrode EEG if I can get my hand on it cheaply.
Methods:Baseline was a 20 minute closed eyes meditation session. Straight after, 15mg of DMT was vaped and inhaled in one large breath and the trip was done with eyes closed. EEG was recorded with a frontal montage sampled at 512Hz, referenced to a clip on the left ear.
EEG was cleaned up and analysed with a simple Matlab script to filter it (0.25-48Hz) and calculate the power spectrum (15s windows, 5s overlap). For the DMT condition, the first 5min of the trip were used (from the end of clear smoking/coughing artifacts). Bands were defined as usual, except alpha was restricted to around the 10Hz peak. Spectral powers in dB across conditions were compared using a two-sample t-test with significance at P=0.05 or less.
Subjective effects: lots of well-developed closed-eyes visuals, some light open-eyes visuals, a sense of my body not belonging to me but rather just being observed. Nowhere near breakthrough, for this experiment I chose a moderately conservative dose.
Figure link in case I mess it up (my first time here):
Figuredmt_eeg_guy attached the following image(s):
DMT_final_fig.png
(141kb) downloaded 87 time(s).