Does the human brain make DMT? What has been measured, and what hasn’t

THE SHORT VERSION · SWIPE

▶ Watch it as a 20-second video

‹›

“Your brain makes DMT” is one of the most repeated lines in psychedelic culture. It sounds like a settled fact. It is really three separate questions stacked on top of each other: does the human body make DMT at all, does the human brain make it, and does it make enough to matter? Each has a different answer and a different quality of evidence.

This article works through the human evidence piece by piece: the decades of body-fluid studies, the enzyme messages found in human brain tissue, the rat experiments that people quote as if they were human data, and the gaps that nobody has filled. For the basics of the molecule itself, start with our pillar guide, what is DMT.

What does “the brain makes DMT” actually claim?

Endogenous means made inside the body rather than taken in from outside. For DMT the classic pathway runs from the dietary amino acid tryptophan to tryptamine, through an enzyme called aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC), and then from tryptamine to DMT through two methylation steps long credited to a second enzyme, indolethylamine N-methyltransferase (INMT) (Barker, 2018). So the claim “the brain makes DMT” needs three things to be true: the raw material and enzymes are present in the brain, DMT actually forms there, and it is present in amounts that could do something. Evidence: established for the textbook pathway as a description; whether it runs in the human brain is unresolved.

1. Is DMT made anywhere in the human body? This is answered by measuring it in blood, urine and spinal fluid.
2. Is it made in the human brain? This needs evidence from brain tissue or from fluid sampled in the brain.
3. Is there enough to matter? This needs a measured concentration and a known function, neither of which exists for the human brain.

What did 55 years of body-fluid studies find?

Scientists started looking for DMT in people in the 1950s, partly because of the “transmethylation hypothesis”, the idea that conditions such as schizophrenia might involve the body making its own hallucinogens. That basic premise remains unproven, but the research led to the discovery of an enzyme that methylates tryptamines (Barker, 2022). Endogenous DMT was first reported in human blood and urine in 1965, according to a 2023 paper’s history of the field (Glynos et al., 2023). Evidence: established as history.

In 2012, three researchers critically reviewed 69 published studies, from 1955 to 2010, that reported DMT and two related compounds (bufotenine and 5-MeO-DMT) in human blood, urine or cerebrospinal fluid. They looked at the methods and the criteria each study used to decide that DMT was really there (Barker et al., 2012). The lead author later summarised the verdict (Barker, 2018):

• Many early studies probably misidentified the compound, so their often high reported levels, and any links to psychiatric diagnoses, were probably in error.
• Where DMT was properly identified, healthy control groups had it too, sometimes at higher levels, so it was neither necessary nor sufficient for any diagnosis.
• Where mass spectrometry evidence was provided, DMT is endogenous and can often be measured in human body fluids.

That third point is the solid core of the human evidence: with modern identification methods, DMT does turn up in people. But the amounts are small. A 2019 paper notes that studies of human body fluids have reported DMT only in trace amounts, “calling into question any physiological role” (Dean et al., 2019). And as of 2018, no study had tried to link human DMT levels in blood, urine or saliva to body events such as daily rhythms, sex or age (Barker, 2018). Evidence: established that DMT is detectable in human fluids; preliminary on what the levels mean.

Has DMT been found in human spinal fluid?

Yes, but only in a handful of studies, and none measured how much. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) bathes the brain and spinal cord, so it is the closest anyone has come to sampling the human brain chemically. A 2022 review notes that only a handful of studies have tried to detect endogenous DMT in the human brain, and all did so indirectly, through CSF (Barker, 2022). The 2018 review adds that those CSF studies made no effort to quantify the DMT they detected (Barker, 2018). Evidence: preliminary. Detection in CSF fits with brain production but does not prove it, because substances can reach CSF from the blood.

Does human brain tissue have the machinery to make DMT?

For a long time the answer looked like no. When the human INMT gene was cloned in 1999, a Northern blot survey of 35 tissues found its messenger RNA in most tissues (Thompson et al., 1999); later authors note that this survey did not detect it in human brain (Dean et al., 2019). That fed a popular idea that any DMT in the brain must be made in the body and carried there. Evidence: established as the historical finding.

There were hints the other way. In 1972, Juan Saavedra and Julius Axelrod reported an enzyme in rat and human brain that converts tryptamine into N-methyltryptamine and DMT (Saavedra and Axelrod, 1972). Other early studies reported INMT activity in parts of the human brain such as the frontal cortex, and a 2011 study found INMT protein in the pineal gland, spinal cord and retina of monkeys (Barker, 2018). Evidence: preliminary. Early enzyme-activity assays used crude tissue extracts, which cannot pin activity on one specific enzyme (Glynos et al., 2023).

The clearest human finding came in 2019. Using a sensitive staining method called RNAscope in situ hybridisation, a University of Michigan team detected INMT messenger RNA in human medial frontal cortex, human pineal gland and human choroid plexus (the tissue that makes CSF). The human samples were archived, de-identified autopsy tissue (Dean et al., 2019). The authors explain the change from 1999: Northern blots are less sensitive and give no information on which cells carry the message. Evidence: preliminary. It is one lab’s staining result in post-mortem tissue.

Three cautions apply. Messenger RNA is the instruction for making a protein, not the protein, and not proof the protein is active. INMT also methylates other molecules, including histamine and sulfur- and selenium-containing compounds, so its presence does not show that DMT is being made (Dean et al., 2019). And the 2019 study checked whether INMT and AADC sat in the same cells only in rat tissue, not in human tissue. Our INMT enzyme explainer covers the enzyme in depth. Evidence: established for these limits.

Has anyone measured DMT in a living human brain?

No. This is the single most important fact on this page. As of the 2018 review, there had been no efforts to quantify DMT in the human brain (Barker, 2018), and the 2022 review describes the human brain evidence as limited to indirect CSF detection (Barker, 2022). A 2023 paper states plainly that sampling of DMT in the living brain “has been restricted to rodent studies” (Glynos et al., 2023). Evidence: established. A Europe PMC search we ran on 20 October 2026 surfaced no later study reporting such a measurement among its most relevant results.

Part of the reason is method. The rodent technique, microdialysis, involves surgically implanting a probe that passes through brain tissue and collecting fluid from a freely moving animal for hours or days (Dean et al., 2019). Measuring whole brain tissue after death has its own problem: one researcher argues that DMT may be lost when tissue is processed, which may explain why whole-brain measurements in rodents have given widely differing results (Barker, 2022). Evidence: established for the method; the tissue-loss explanation is one researcher’s view.

What do the rat and mouse studies add?

Much of what is quoted as “the brain makes DMT” comes from rats. In 2013, DMT was detected for the first time in fluid sampled near the rat pineal gland, using a mass-spectrometry method that tracked 23 compounds (Barker et al., 2013). In 2019, DMT was measured in the visual cortex of 36 living rats, averaging 0.56 nanomolar (billionths of a mole per litre) in rats with a pineal gland and 1.02 in rats without one, in the same low range as serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline measured by the same sampling method (Dean et al., 2019). The numbers, the method and the limits are unpacked in our rat brain study explainer. Evidence: preliminary. Rats only, and the 2019 measurements come from one lab.

Then came the twist. In 2023, the same Michigan group made rats with the INMT gene knocked out. Brain and lung tissue from those rats methylated tryptamine just as well as normal tissue, but the products were neither N-methyltryptamine nor DMT, and rat INMT by itself could not make them (Glynos et al., 2023). In 2025, a separate team made INMT-knockout mice and found no obvious drop in their endogenous psychedelic tryptamine levels, “suggesting that psychedelics might be produced by alternative biosynthetic pathways in rodents” (Hatzipantelis et al., 2025). Evidence: preliminary. In rodents, the textbook enzyme does not look necessary; which enzyme does the job is unknown.

Is there enough DMT in the brain to matter?

This is where researchers genuinely disagree. Pharmacologist David Nichols argues that the very small concentrations detected in the brain are not enough to produce psychoactive effects (Nichols, 2018). Steven Barker, a long-time endogenous-DMT researcher, argues that rat cortical levels sit in the normal range for established neurotransmitters, and that if DMT is packed into vesicles like other transmitters, local concentrations could be higher than the averages suggest (Barker, 2022). Both are arguing from the same thin data, mostly from rats. Evidence: unresolved.

Both sides agree on one thing: a normal everyday role, if there is one, would not be to produce psychedelic experiences. Barker writes that DMT’s primary homeostatic role does not involve routine creation of the profound effects seen when it is given from outside (Barker, 2022). The idea that DMT may be a neurotransmitter dates to a 1976 paper arguing it met the criteria of the time (Barker, 2018), and the 2019 authors suggested cortical cells carrying both enzymes might be “DMT-producing neurons”, while noting a role for them still had to be explored (Dean et al., 2019). Evidence: unresolved. A proposed role is not a demonstrated one.

Newer hypotheses keep the question open. In 2025, Barker proposed that DMT may be the brain’s missing natural partner for 5-HT2A receptors that sit inside nerve cells rather than on their surface, and reported that rat brain DMT levels have been shown to rise with stress (Barker, 2025). That is a hypothesis from one researcher, not a demonstrated fact in any species; the receptor side is covered in DMT and the 5-HT2A receptor. Evidence: unresolved.

Which popular claims go too far?

The claim that the dying brain floods with DMT is a separate question again, examined in our fact-check, does the brain release DMT when you die?. In short: a rise was measured in rats after induced cardiac arrest, and never in a human (Dean et al., 2019). Evidence: preliminary for rats; unresolved for humans.

What would it take to settle the question?

• A quantified measurement of DMT in living human brain tissue or fluid, with modern mass-spectrometry identification (never done).
• Repeated sampling of human body fluids over the day, linked to sleep, stress or other body events (not done as of 2018, per Barker).
• Identification of the enzyme or enzymes that make DMT, now that INMT-knockout rodents still appear to have it (unresolved).
• Independent replication of the rat cortex measurements by another laboratory with a different method (not found in the sources we read).
• A demonstrated function for endogenous DMT in any species, rather than a proposed one (unresolved).

The fair summary in one line: DMT is probably made somewhere in the human body in small amounts, the human brain has at least some of the instructions for the enzyme long credited with making it, and nobody yet knows whether the living human brain makes meaningful DMT or what it would do there.

Shroomverse sells mushroom products. This article is general information about research on whether the human body and brain make DMT. It is not medical, legal or purchasing advice, and it does not recommend any product.