i came across a post recently about some upcoming research into DMT, the psychedelic drug
some people genuinely believe that DMT allows us to enter other dimensions and communicate with intelligent beings who live there.
these beings, referred to as entities, are a surprisingly common feature of DMT experiences. people describe encountering aliens, insects, gods, jesters and bizarre intelligences that seem to have their own personalities, intentions and consciousness. some claim the entities communicate with them telepathically, show them things about the universe or introduce them to entire environments that feel completely separate from our own reality.
in a study people described these experiences as feeling more real than ordinary waking life, and said they believed the entity continued to exist after their encounter ended.
that is an extraordinary effect for a molecule to have on someone’s understanding of reality.
but the research goes way further…
because some scientists are now proposing that these entities might actually exist…
and they believe this so strongly that they’re planning to study whether DMT experiences involve interactions with conscious beings that exist independently of the people experiencing them.
in May 2026, neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and researcher Niffe Hermansson published a preprint titled Traces of the Other: Are DMT Entities Real?.
they say something like our perception of physical reality is like a biological interface. according to this theory, what we experience of the physical world is only a limited representation of a much more fundamental reality made up of other conscious agents.
the suggestion is that DMT might alter that interface, allowing us to perceive things that are normally inaccessible.
Gallimore describes it like changing the channel on a television. the machinery producing the experience is still there, but the world being presented to consciousness has changed.
they’re proposing experiments to test whether these entities exist independently from ourselves - by giving someone DMT and asking them to communicate with an entity. another particant isolated from the first would then attempt to retrieve that information from an entity during their own experience.
personally i think this is nuts…
i’m fairly convinced they’ll turn out to be hallucinations.
what i find more interesting, though, is that these - credible - academics are so convinced by their experiences on dmt that they’re actually undertaking research to find out for sure if it is real.
that to me is very interesting. and i think the much more interesting discovery might be what that tells us about the brain.
why would this drug be different?
DMT is a drug.
we already know that psychoactive drugs alter perception, emotion, memory, cognition and the sense of self.
we know that changes in brain chemistry can cause people to see things that aren’t there, hear voices, lose their sense of self, experience time differently or become convinced of bizarre things
we don’t generally assume that those experiences reveal an alternate reality.
so why would DMT be an exception?
it reminds me a little of the way people sometimes approach religion. there have been thousands of gods, but people can be remarkably confident that all the other gods are inventions and theirs is the one that exists.
i get a similar feeling when people describe DMT entities as independent intelligences. we recognise that the brain can generate hallucinations, but when a drug produces a sufficiently convincing experience, we’re tempted to believe that it’s revealing an undiscovered truth
obviously, it doesn’t logically rule out the possibility. it just seems like quite a conclusion to draw from something we already know the brain is capable of doing.
so what does it do?
DMT is N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a serotonergic psychedelic that acts predominantly through the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. these receptors are expressed throughout the cortex, particularly in regions involved in higher-order information processing.
activating them changes the activity of cortical neurons and the way large-scale brain networks interact.
in a 2023 study published in PNAS, researchers at Imperial College London measured brain activity during DMT experiences using simultaneous EEG and functional MRI.
they observed substantial changes in brain-network organisation, including increased connectivity across regions that are normally more functionally separated, alongside changes in electrical oscillations and measures of neural signal diversity.
the intensity of the subjective experience was associated with these changes in brain activity.
so we have a drug that acts on receptors involved in cortical information processing, measurably changes how the brain communicates with itself, and produces an extraordinarily different experience of reality.
to me, that’s already a compelling explanation for why the world might suddenly look and feel completely different.
the much more interesting rabbit hole…
because if DMT can make your brain construct an entirely different world, complete with environments, other beings, intentions, communication and an overwhelming conviction that everything you’re experiencing is real, what exactly is your brain doing when you’re sober?
the world you’re experiencing is a model
we tend to think of perception as a fairly direct process.
there’s a world outside us, our eyes collect information about it, and our brain allows us to see what’s there.
but that’s not really how it works.
when you look at the room you’re sitting in, you aren’t experiencing the physical room directly. you’re experiencing a representation of it constructed by your nervous system.
light reflected from objects enters your eyes and stimulates photoreceptors in the retina, which convert that light into electrochemical signals. those signals are processed through retinal circuits, travel along the optic nerve and, via pathways including the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, reach the visual cortex.
at no point is there a little image of the room travelling through your nervous system.
the brain receives patterns of neural activity from which it must infer what is happening in the external world.
it somehow takes these electrical signals, constructs a model and generates experience of a continuous, three-dimensional environment full of colours, objects, distances, movement and meaning.
the brain is also constantly filling in missing information.
each eye has a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the retina, an area without photoreceptors. you don’t ordinarily experience two holes in your visual field because the visual system constructs a continuous scene using information from the surrounding area and the other eye.
your eyes also make rapid movements several times a second yet the world generally appears stable and continuous.
the experience of a coherent visual world requires the brain to integrate information and compensate for the limitations of the sensory signals it receives.
and it does all of this without you noticing.
you just look around and experience a world.
one explanation for this is predictive processing.
the basic idea is that the brain is continuously generating predictions about the causes of its sensory inputs and updating those predictions as new information arrives.
rather than building perception entirely from incoming sensory data, the brain uses existing models of the world to interpret what those signals are likely to mean.
your model of reality is dependent on past experiences
that’s both physical and emotional experiences
your brain has learned that objects tend to persist when you stop looking at them, that faces have certain configurations and that they mean specific emotions, that particular sounds come from particular sources, and that moving your head should produce predictable changes in visual information.
these expectations help the brain interpret incomplete, noisy and ambiguous sensory data.
when incoming signals differ from what the system expects, the mismatch can generate a prediction error, which contributes to updating the model.
the brain also has to estimate how reliable different sources of information are, for example the weighting assigned to different predictions and sensory signals.
if visual information is unreliable, the brain may rely more heavily on what it already expects. if the sensory evidence is strong, it can force the model to change.
neuroscientist Anil Seth describes perception as a controlled hallucination.
the hallucination part refers to the fact that conscious experience is generated internally by the brain.
the controlled part is also important, because ordinary perception is continually constrained and updated by information from the external world.
the brain is essentially maintaining an extraordinarily sophisticated, constantly updated model of its surroundings.
and that model is what you experience.
which means that, in a sense, we’re already living inside a simulation.
not necessarily one created by anything outside us.
a biological simulation constructed by the brain, continuously developed using imperfect information from the external world.
so what happens when you take dmt?
if our ordinary conscious experience depends on the brain maintaining a coherent model of reality, what happens when a drug profoundly changes the neural processes responsible for maintaining that model?
one theory was proposed by Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston in 2019, in a paper called REBUS and the Anarchic Brain.
REBUS means relaxed beliefs under psychedelics.
the theory proposes that psychedelics reduce the influence, or precision, of certain predictions that normally constrain perception and cognition.
these models include assumptions about the environment, the body, the self and the relationships between things.
under psychedelics, the normal influence of these established expectations may become less dominant, allowing unusual patterns of sensory and internally generated activity to affect conscious experience more strongly.
the REBUS model is still a theory rather than a complete explanation. but it provides a plausible account of why psychedelics can produce such radical changes in how the world is experienced.
and if you think about DMT through this framework, the entity experiences start to make a lot more sense.
the same brain that ordinarily constructs a convincing model of your bedroom, your body and the people around you is now operating under radically altered neurochemical conditions.
the sensory information is different, the relationships between neural networks have changed, and the predictions that ordinarily keep perception relatively stable may also be out of whack.
but the brain is still doing what it does.
constructing an experience of reality.
it’s just constructing a very different one.
and this includes the experience of other people.
your brain is simulating other people too
when you interact with another person, you don’t actually have access to their consciousness.
you see their face, hear their voice, observe their behaviour and use that information to infer what they’re thinking and feeling.
your brain is continuously constructing a model of them and their mind.
this involves processes associated with social cognition and theory of mind, including networks involving the temporoparietal junction, superior temporal sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex.
these systems help us interpret behaviour in terms of intentions, beliefs, emotions and goals.
if someone suddenly goes quiet during a conversation, you might assume that they’re upset, distracted, annoyed or thinking about something else.
you aren’t perceiving any of those mental states. you’re generating possible explanations from the information available to you using everything you’ve experienced from other people and the particular person you’re interacting with.
your experience of another person’s mind is constructed through neural processes, even though the person supplying the information is external to you.
this is also why negative past experiences can make us more likely to anticipate rejection, criticism or hostility from others, even when their behaviour is ambiguous. our brains interpret new interactions through models shaped by past experiences, and it often takes repeated, contradictory experiences for those expectations to change, and the model to update.
back to DMT…
this made me wonder whether DMT entities are produced by this same machinery.
the brain already knows how to model other beings - it does it all the time.
it already knows how to interpret behaviour as intentional, attribute thoughts to other minds and generate expectations about how those minds might behave.
how does DMT mess with this system?
in June 2026, researchers published a paper in Neuroscience of Consciousness titled Computational Spirits: A Neuroscientific Account of Psychedelic Entity Encounters.
they proposed that DMT entities might arise through changes in two processes.
the first involves how the brain detects agency.
when an experience contains information that is complex, unfamiliar and difficult to predict, the brain may infer that it has been generated by an intentional agent.
think about how many different belief systems we make up to try and ascribe meaning to randomness.
the second involves how the brain distinguishes self-generated activity from things originating outside itself.
normally, the nervous system can predict the sensory consequences of its own actions. for example, when you move your eyes, your brain uses signals from the movement itself to distinguish between sensory changes from the movement vs the external world.
similar processes help the brain distinguish between internally generated events and external ones
psychedelics may alter these mechanisms, making internally generated experiences feel as though they originate from somewhere else.
some mental health conditions also affect this process - such as auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia.
there’s also some really interesting research on hauntings, in which researchers stimulated the brain to produce the feeling of a ghost in the room (Induction of an Illusory Shadow Person (2006) and Neurological and Robot-Controlled Induction of an Apparition (2014).)
so if you combine an intense and complex sensory experience with a reduced ability to distinguish it from your own activity, it’s likely you’d feel that an agent outside of yourself is responsible.
this hasn’t been established experimentally as the explanation for DMT entities, but it’s my working theory because it connects these bizarre experiences to mechanisms we use in ordinary life.
also dreams
like dreaming for example
you can dream about having a conversation with someone who says something completely unexpected, disagrees with you or behaves in a way you would never consciously have imagined.
and the entire conversation is being generated by your own brain.
the fact that the other person surprises you doesn’t mean their thoughts originated outside you.
so it’s entirely possible for your brain to generate something that feels unfamiliar, independent and intelligent that you recognise as your own creation.
now imagine those mechanisms operating during a profound disruption of ordinary perception
you might experience another world populated by other minds.
and you might be completely convinced that those minds exist independently of you.
but then what about ordinary life?
Gallimore’s idea of changing the channel sounds completely implausible to me when it’s used to suggest that DMT reveals a hidden universe full of intelligent entities.
but there’s something about that idea that i think is profound.
the same biological machinery that generates our ordinary experience can, under different conditions, generate an entirely different one.
and both can feel real.
we know this happens in dreams, hallucinations, neurological conditions and psychedelic states.
the world we experience is extremely dependent on the current state of our nervous system.
so how do we know that the version we’re experiencing right now is the right one?
we can interact with and repeatedly test whether our internal models correspond to the environment - it makes our ordinary perception fairly reliable as a guide to the external world than an unconstrained psychedelic hallucination.
but it does mean that the experience of reality depends on neural processes generating those experiences.
the fact that perception is constructed doesn’t mean there’s nothing outside us to perceive.
we never get to step outside of our processing and inspect the actual external world independently of our nervous systems.
everything we know about the world is interpreted using the biological machinery available to us.
and that machinery is so convincing that we ordinarily have no reason to question it.
the big question
but imagine someone who had only ever experienced the DMT state. suppose, somehow, their brain had developed and learned to function within that world, and it was the only reality they had ever known.
then imagine giving them a drug that suddenly caused them to experience our everyday reality.
wouldn’t they find that just as strange?
wouldn’t they become convinced that they’d accessed some alternative dimension?
how much of our conviction that this is what reality really looks like comes from the fact that it’s the only version we’ve experienced consistently?
we have good reasons to trust ordinary perception as an effective model of the real physical environment.
but we have equally good reasons to be aware that the model is limited and imperfect
we’re still experiencing that environment through the particular systems, neural architecture and processes of a human brain.
we experience the version of reality our biology allows us to construct.
and the really strange thing is that we don’t experience ourselves constructing it.
we just experience the result.
the hallucination itself is the interesting bit
i’ll be interested to see what Gallimore and Hoffman find.
i think the chances of them demonstrating that DMT entities are real are extremely small, although i’d be fascinated if their research produced evidence of information transfer.
i also think there’s a tendency to overlook something real that is already extraordinary, because we’re so focused on the more sensational possibility.
we’re trying to find out whether DMT allows people to access another reality, while the neuroscience is telling us something wild about the reality we’re already experiencing.
our brains are constructing an incredibly detailed, coherent and continuously updated representation of the world using electrical and chemical signals.
the machinery responsible for producing our ordinary conscious experience is capable of generating worlds that feel every bit as real to the person experiencing them.
i find that just as interesting than the possibility of discovering another dimension.
because even if every DMT entity turns out to be entirely generated by the brain, we’re still left with the extraordinary fact that a physical organ can generate the subjective experience of an entire world, populated by apparently independent conscious beings, with no corresponding external environment.
and that the same organ is doing that very same thing every moment we’re awake.
i don’t think you need to believe that DMT entities are real to find that mind-blowing.
in fact, i think the possibility that they’re entirely generated by the brain might be the more interesting explanation.
because it means the thing capable of creating such a convincing alternative reality is already sitting inside your skull.
and it’s currently creating this one.
references
- Gallimore, A. R., Hermansson, N., & Hoffman, D. D. (2026). Traces of the Other: Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism. PsyArXiv preprint. Read paper.
- Davis, A. K., et al. (2020). Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 34(9), 1008–1020. Read paper.
- Timmermann, C., et al. (2023). Human brain effects of DMT assessed via EEG-fMRI. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(13), e2218949120. Read paper.
- Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews, 71(3), 316–344. Read paper.
- Mago, J., et al. (2026). Computational spirits: a neuroscientific account of psychedelic entity encounters. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2026(1), niaf069. Read paper.
- Sanders, J. W., et al. (2026). Micro-phenomenology of immersion and perceived presences under DMT. Neuroscience of Consciousness. Read paper.
- Seth, A. K., & Bayne, T. (2022). Theories of consciousness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 23, 439–452. Read paper.
- Seth, A. (2021). Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Faber & Faber.
- Trace Institute & Noonautics (2026). Traces of the Other: Research Collaboration. Research programme.