The Mystery

For nearly 50 years, a theory has lingered in the background of psychiatric research: that the human body might naturally produce a molecule capable of slowing down a brain enzyme linked to hallucinations. Now, researchers in the University of Florida College of Pharmacy are revisiting that forgotten science. Their goal is to identify and characterize a natural 'brake pedal' in the brain — one that could open the door to a new class of drugs for the production of endogenous DMT. The 'brake pedal' McCurdy’s team is investigating is a naturally occurring molecule that may slow the activity of an enzyme called indolethylamine N-methyltransferase, or INMT, which helps produce the powerful psychedelic compound dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, in the body. A 1977 study suggested tiny proteins in the body could block the enzyme, but the research stopped there. Nearly 50 years later, UF researchers are revisiting that early work in hopes of replicating it. “If we can characterize th...

The DMT world transcends archetypal form. So alien. So other. As such, the brain tries to make sense of the experience by translating the perception into some archetypal form: the Insectoid, the Elfish, the Reptilian, the Trickster. ‘The DMT state, at its deepest levels, is the apotheosis of the alien. It is a world that the brain should not know how to build. It is a world that should not exist and yet there it is, irresistible in its construction and undeniable in its presence. To smoke DMT means to confront not merely a different world, but one that is, frankly, impossible.’ So it’s not a dream. It’s not a hallucination. It’s not an 'Archetype of the Collective Unconscious'. It’s not even a drug. It’s a reality switch. How best to express this notion of sudden reality switching – instantaneous journeying – than by the metaphor of the radio first used by Henri Bergson over a century ago, and updated by Andrew (and many others) to the television. The radio and the television d...

Your brain is very good at building a world. In fact, your brain builds your world, your consensus model of reality, as a default. Think about it: we inhabit a functional model of reality constructed by the fantastically complex machinery of the brain. Whatever state of consciousness – whether driving a car, climbing a mountain, reading a book, drinking beer, hallucinating monsters or asleep and dreaming – our brains construct the realities we experience. We think we inhabit the real world, but we know nothing of this real world that is not mediated through the neural processing function. As such we cannot really talk of external reality at all, but only of the internal construction of external reality; and from an evolutionary perspective the model needs to be functional, coherent and consensus or we would face challenges of survivability. The implications are huge. Alter brain chemistry and alter perception. Perturb the reality-building mechanism and perturb reality. Andrew developed...

Animism, the belief that all things possess a spirit or consciousness, has been a part of human culture for millennia. Joscha Bach’s cyber animism takes this ancient concept and reframes it through the lens of modern computational theory. In this view, the 'spirit' or 'consciousness' of things is reimagined as their inherent capacity for information processing. At the heart of Bach’s theory is the radical proposition that the entire universe can be understood as a vast computational process. This idea aligns with concepts in digital physics, which suggests that the fundamental nature of reality is information-based rather than material. In this framework, everything from subatomic particles to galaxies can be seen as participating in an ongoing, universal computation. A key aspect of cyber animism is the concept of emergence. Bach proposes that consciousness and intelligence are emergent properties that arise from sufficiently complex information processing systems. Thi...