Complex slow waves in the human brain under 5-MeO-DMT.
Cell reports July 22, 2025 George Blackburne, Rosalind G McAlpine, Marco Fabus et al. 10 citations
Inhaling a high dose of vaporized synthetic 5-MeO-DMT radically reorganizes low-frequency brain oscillations, making them heterogeneous, viscous, and nonrecurring, and halting their typical forward and backward travel across the cortex. This reorganization also causes broadband neural activity to become more stable and low-dimensional, with increased energy barriers for rapid global shifts. These findings, based on EEG data from 29 healthy individuals, provide a detailed account of how the drug sculpts human brain dynamics and reveal atypical cortical slow-wave behaviors relevant to neuroscientific models of serotonergic psychedelics.