The pineal gland is a very small gland deep in the brain. The adult gland weighs less than a fifth of a gram, and its main known job is making melatonin, the hormone that helps set the body’s daily rhythm (Nichols, 2018). Its mystique is much older than DMT research: Nichols traces a history in which the gland was linked to the eye of Horus and treated as the seat of the soul or the third eye.
The idea that it makes the body’s DMT was popularized by the psychiatrist Rick Strassman in his 2000 book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Open Library record), as a speculation rather than a finding. Pineal lore later grew to claim the gland releases DMT at birth, in dreams and near death (Nichols, 2018).
The evidence points the other way, without settling it. In 2019, rats with the pineal gland removed still had DMT in the cortex at levels no lower than rats with it, so the gland is not needed for brain DMT in rats (Dean et al., 2019). The same study found messenger RNA for INMT, an enzyme long linked to DMT, in human pineal tissue from autopsies. No one has measured DMT made by a human pineal gland. Unsupported is not the same as disproven.
Sources
- Nichols, 2018, Journal of Psychopharmacology: DMT and the pineal gland, separating fact from myth
- Dean et al., 2019, Scientific Reports: DMT in mammalian brain
- Barker et al., 2013, Biomedical Chromatography: DMT in rat pineal microdialysate
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