Consciousness and DMT: The Strange Question of Who We Really Are
It was a warm spring evening, yesterday, and while wage-working, I was listening to a documentary about consciousness, neural networks and DMT. Once again, I found myself disappearing down one of those rabbit holes that makes everything else seem rather ordinary.
Who are we, really?
It is a question I encountered years ago while studying philosophy at university, and I doubt there will ever be a final answer.
That is probably why I still find it fascinating. Philosophy has been asking versions of the question for thousands of years. Neuroscience has now joined the conversation with brain scans, neural networks and increasingly sophisticated ways of observing what happens when our ordinary experience of being ourselves changes.
And that is where things become very interesting.
Consciousness and DMT: What Happens to the Self?
DMT — N,N-Dimethyltryptamine — is a powerful psychedelic compound capable of producing profound alterations in conscious experience. Researchers studying DMT have observed marked changes in brain activity during the experience, including increased signal diversity and changes in the usual patterns of communication between brain networks.
People can report something stranger still: the ordinary boundary between me and everything else can weaken dramatically.
That immediately raises a philosophical question.
If my sense of being me can change when the activity of my brain changes, what exactly is this self I spend every waking moment assuming is solid?
We tend to imagine ourselves as sitting somewhere behind our eyes. There is a little me in here, looking through two windows at a world that exists out there.
Yet the brain does not appear to work quite like that.
There is no tiny observer sitting inside the skull watching the film of our lives. What we call the self seems to involve processes spread across different areas and networks of the brain. Memory contributes. The body contributes. Emotion, attention, expectation, sensation and our personal history contribute.
The sense of self is not merely behind our eyes.
It is woven through the experience.
The Brain Is Doing More Than Watching
This is the part that takes me straight back to philosophy.
We usually think perception works something like a camera. The world is there, our eyes collect the information, and our brain shows us what exists.
Neuroscience offers a much more interesting picture.
Our brains are constantly interpreting incomplete sensory information. Previous experience, memory and expectation help determine what we notice and how we understand it. We are receiving information from the world, certainly, but we are also participating in the construction of our experience of that world.
That distinction matters.
Saying that we help create our experience of reality is very different from saying our thoughts magically create reality itself. I can think as positively as I like about tomorrow's weather and still get rained on.
But I can influence the experience I have while standing in the rain.
And suddenly an old philosophical problem becomes intensely personal.
Two people can experience the same conversation and walk away with completely different accounts of what happened. One hears criticism. Another hears concern. One remembers a particular sentence. The other barely noticed it. Neither person necessarily fabricated anything. Their brains interpreted an event through everything they brought with them.
Memory. Expectation. Attention. Belief. Experience.
Their own particular neural history.
We don't merely experience the world.
We experience the world through ourselves.
So Where Is “Me”?
This may be the question that fascinates me most.
When I was studying philosophy, questions about consciousness could sometimes feel wonderfully abstract. What is mind? What is self? How can physical matter produce subjective experience?
Then you walk away from the textbook and realise the question is about you.
I have changed enormously throughout my life. My opinions have changed. My knowledge has changed. Cells have died and been replaced. Memories have faded while others have somehow survived decades. Things I once believed with certainty I now question.
Yet through every version there has been this persistent feeling:
I am still me.
What is carrying that continuity?
Is the self something permanent, or is it a story the brain continually updates?
There are brain networks associated with self-referential thinking, memory and our ability to place ourselves within a larger story. Researchers studying psychedelics have become particularly interested in what happens when the usual organisation of some of these networks changes and the familiar boundary of self becomes less stable.
DMT does not answer the mystery of consciousness. If anything, it seems to make the mystery larger.
And I rather like that.
Because science can observe neural activity while someone reports losing their ordinary sense of self.
Science can measure electrical rhythms, blood flow and connections between regions of the brain. What remains extraordinarily difficult is explaining why any of that activity should produce an experience at all.
Why should neurons firing produce the feeling of warmth?
The memory of a childhood kitchen?
The experience of loving somebody?
The awareness that I am sitting here wondering about consciousness?
There is still a gap between describing what the brain is doing and explaining why being a brain feels like anything from the inside.
And somewhere inside that gap sits one of humanity's oldest questions.
Who am I?
A Thought to Take With You
Maybe the self is less like a person sitting behind the eyes and more like an ongoing conversation between brain, body, memory, experience and the world around us.
We receive reality, interpret it, respond to it and change because of it. Then the changed person meets the next experience.
Around and around it goes.
Which leaves me with a question I suspect will occupy my mind long after this documentary finishes:
If the person experiencing the world is continually changing, who exactly is the “I” who believes it has been here all along?
I don't have the answer.
I am increasingly fascinated by the possibility that asking the question may be the more interesting part.
Namaste
Deb xx
Thoughtful writing across life, mind, and meaning.
Sources & Further Reading
Timmermann et al. (2019), Neural correlates of the DMT experience assessed with multivariate EEG — Scientific Reports.
Yeshurun, Nguyen & Hasson (2021), The default mode network: where the idiosyncratic self meets the shared social world — Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
Buckner & DiNicola (2019), The brain’s default network: updated anatomy, physiology and evolving insights — Nature Reviews Neuroscience.
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