burnt said:
his claim was "every night, when you go to sleep, your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine" and "if you don't dream, you'll go crazy and die".
the latter may have some semblance of truth to it, but he insinuated that DMT, a medically 'unimportant' compound, causes dreams.
Yeah, this is abundantly not true and is probably based on a poor reading of Strassman.
If there is any truth to the dream theory it will be far more nuanced. Perhaps DMT really does lie at the base of the human sense of spirituality. We can crudely quantify spirituality in a member of any culture by measuring the perception of 'connectedness' to other people and/or something bigger. The prediction is that people who feel more spiritual will have more abundant or productive DMTergic neurons. (of course we still have to identify the DMTergic neurons. This could be done in mouse I bet.)
I think Strassman thought the pineal was a good candidate because there is evidence that it is important for the human sense of spirituality. Kinda circular there but it is really just a candidate. Since this INMT seems to be expressed in the rabbit brain it will almost certainly be expressed in the mouse brain. Slice, stain and stare. The experiment to prove Strassman wrong is trivial.
Of course, it is entirely likely that DMT may have a very mundane function in the CNS. Perhaps DMT is made to target excess tryptamines to the CSF for removal from the brain.