Oops.. I meant "SPICE Makes You SMARTER?? But now that you are here, I pose that as a serious question. We all know spice can make you WISER.. but can it make you smarter?

Could you be getting smarter on a neurological level?? Could frequent use somehow wiire new neuro transmitters/pathways on a higher level than without?

There is clearly a lot of evidence that the brain changes and adapts itself to thoughts, intent and behavioral repetition. Is it possible the brain could benefit from the dmt flash?

Any of you old timers see any difference in brain function/intelligence with years of use?

I certainly could use a few more IQ pts

Wasn't there a study where they could induce the growth of new neurons (not more synapses, whole new nerve cells!) through exposure to psilocybin? From psilocybin to DMT is only a small step and more neurons should IMO mean more mental capacity.

Also I think that a lot of the benefit is in showing new perspectives to things and thereby teach you to not believe what you are told, but to use your own experience and reasoning. This should help utilizing the mental capabilities.

I believe it does. I find that I surprise myself with a slightly improved sense of humor, mental acuity, and expanded awareness.
It's subtle, but noticable.
My theory is we change with every new experience like a wave meeting another wave to form a new wave, the more powerful the experience, the more the wave that represents ourselves undergoes a shift.

The paper I read was using 25i-NBOMe to trigger neurogenesis, which is a full agonist of 5-HT2A receptors, as opposed to something like psilocybin or DMT which are partial agonists and have a wider receptor affinity. Consequently, findings with 25i may not be applicable to tryptamines.

There may have been a psilocybin study, I just haven't seen it.

There is a great book I'd recommend called "The Brain that Changes Itself"... it is facinating! It's an easy read considering the subject is neuroscience. It has many examples of how the brain can grow new neurons.

Here is the study



And here is a talk about the paper:

Measuring intelligence is a slippery thing where all sorts of ambiguous definitions come into play. One of the "types of intelligence" that IQ tests do not measure is emotional intelligence. Through its visionary potential combined with its affinity for facilitating connections, DMT can seem to augment empathy in many cases. It makes sense to me that an increase in empathy would translate to an increase in emotional intelligence whereby one learns learns or gains the capacity to react in new emotional patterns to old stimuli/situations.

IME DMT facilitates connections of all kinds, and so if one is fortuitous, attentive and receptive, one can walk away with all sorts of knowledge that was not formerly available (least not in a meaningful way) to the conscious mind. I wouldn't say that "spice makes you smarter" so much as it does have the capability for augmenting knowledge and getting you to use your thinking cap just a little bit more. Stretching the mind out to the extent that DMT can should be great mental exercise if nothing else.

Spice makes you Curious...

Curiosity leads you to get Smarter...

Depends who smoalked it. I believe it is much more attractive to individuals with a curiosity for radical new experiences. Open minded, not so much smart. Then there are the wrong kind of people... those looking to get high or or those looking to seek confirmation that they are the Chosen One, or those who go on to cut their penis off.

There but for the grace...

I think they've long been thought of as consciousness expanding plants/teachers/molecules/medicines for a good reason, but that said, of course there is countless kinds of intelligence.

One funny example is how my cousin could have gone to harvard for mathematics, and has a very high IQ, yet he thinks the earth is 6,000 years old...lol. A more striking example is Christopher Langan...the guy with supposedly the hightest IQ in the world, yet he lacks common sense and other kinds of intelligence (particularly social/emotional intelligence)...he's still just a bouncer in a bar!

so i think those are good points Global on emotional intelligence. That is something often neglected and overshadowed by all this focus on IQ these days.

Generally speaking, circumstances and experiences that cause a sense of discomfort that you have to then work through in some capacity, induce neural growth via plasticity and release of neurotrophic factors.

Whether or not these changes make you 'smarter' is debatable, but changes are being induced. Another reason to tend carefully to set and setting. It might very well determine what you take away from the experience in terms of learning or unlearning.

Christopher Langan appears to be slightly more than 'just a bouncer in a bar'. He claims to support freedom of intellectual inquiry - does anyone know his views on psychedelics?

Well yeah of course, he is more than 'just a bouncer'. He's a very smart and interesting guy i'm sure. I simply meant to point out his poor social/empathy intelligence and generally arrogant attitude, despite his ridiculously high IQ over 200...and not to imply that people with low paying jobs are by definition less intelligent. You would think though that someone that smart would be doing something else.

Not sure about his thoughts on psychedelics but it would be interesting to ask him

It wouldn't surprise me. Not DMT per se, and not in everyone, though.

For the "right" kind of person these substances are bound to increase curiosity by continously delivering mindfucks that require constant reevaluations of one's core beliefs, pushing the boundaries of perception into unknown territories, and forcing one to think about reality in novel ways. Inevitably the world is perceived in a different way, perhaps impossible to imagine before one's had such experiences.


I guess it's like reading in that way. Imagine someone young and curious, they pick up a few books to start satisfying their thirst for knowledge, soon enough a book turns into 10 turns into 20, then 50, inevitably new ideas and ways of perceiving reality are internalized, and the world as it was seen before this cascade of events is now a distant memory, for the way this person sees the world is now forever altered.

Something like this is bound to increase one's intelligence, or at least to make one reach higher and higher into their potential, which to an external observed would look like the same thing.

When you say smarter, I think of "using your intelligence in a wise and intelligent manner", and I would say that in most cases, DMT does indeed improve your smartness. But mostly through alteration of previously engrained emotional habits that get in the way of cognitive clarity and general awareness.

Whether it increases your IQ or not, is a completely different matter. I think that perhaps at lower doses, mostly due to its highly energetic effects (and lack of focus-diverting visual activity), it could actually be a quite potent cognitive enhancer. If somebody can make a slow-release version of a low dose of DMT and have them do mental puzzles (Raven's Progressive Matrices), I have a feeling that it would improve their scores. Creatine does the same too - and we're talking healthy individuals here, not people with "ADHD" or any other mental disease - simply by improving molecular energy processing the brain simply performs better.

I'd say that intelligence ultimately comes down to mental energy. If you have boundless amounts of mental energy, you are more capable of picking up information (IMO) and add that measure to a childlike sense of wonder and curiosity, and you're what people would call "highly intelligent". Why? Not because you know how to solve an IQ test; but because every day, your goal is to learn more about the world, your surroundings and to parse as much information as possible. And additionally, there's a positive feedback loop on this stuff. You get entranced by these good habits; the brain is plastic, it adapts quickly; the more information you feed it, the faster it will learn to pick up even larger amounts of information.

So to answer your question shortly, I'd say that DMT definitely pushes a person in the right direction of using the intelligence they were granted in the first place, and subsequently increase said intelligence (and a circle closes...)

Sometimes this happens because the hyperslap is so severe that the person realises what a scumbag he has been lately and finally changes his habits around (not only acting more intelligently towards himself, but also towards others; a sense of communal responsibility, perhaps - "If you've been everyone/everything not caring gets harder" other times because all the person needed was a refreshing insight into the nature of reality to spark that boundless amount of curiosity that flows amidst the center of every person's being or even the depressive who is so stuck in negative thought-patterns that seeing even a glimpse of another perspective propels that person out of the depressive thought-loop and wakes up finding colours brighter and a love from within that was not noticeable before.

On top of all this, there's the basic psychopharmacological basis for saying that this molecule would make you "smarter". All its action on 5-HT receptors and in particular with its affinity for sigma-1 receptors and trace amine-associated receptors (TAAR), is -- to me -- highly suggestive of a compound that causes the brain to dump out loads of neurotrophic factors and neurogenesis promoting molecules.

I suspect it does, some times.


It seems widely understood that IQ is not the sole measure of intelligence. I think the point should be driven in further though. Some things that IQ does not measure:

Ethics.
Social intelligence.
Creativity (that is a HUGE one).
B.S detector.
Mental flexibility.
Ability to bounce back from traumas (possibly seen as a subset of flexibility)
Somatic intelligence
Intuition.
Level of mental energy--good one, Sherlockian,

There's more. And none of the above items are small either.

How does the EQ (Emotional Intelligence) fit in to this topic?

Thanks for all the posts everyone! Clearly we all can agree that intelligence can't be bottled up in one simple IQ number. I would argue that every moment in existence makes you "smarter", and certainly the energy and curiosity one puts towards absorbing those moments into your awareness is instrumental to turning experience into knowledge.

My curiosity was a little more along the lines of what Nicita posted about Psylocibin growing more brain cells. You always hear "humans only use 10% of their brains" so I can't help to wonder if the spice helps activate certain parts of the brain that are usually untapped. For instance, does someone wwho uses dmt regularly have the potential to physically make new neuro pathways that someone who never has used it could possibly create without it.

So I guess I may have used the word "smarter" where it would have been more appropriate to say "can DMT create new neuro pathways" or soemthing along that line. Clearly, without clinical study this is impossible to prove, but perhaps some good theories may support this. The mushroom study Nicita posted certainly gives it some weight..?

Thanks again for reading and engaging in this threead, you are all very insightful and well spoken psychonauts

*O*

Spice makes you Curious...

Curiosity leads you to get Smarter...


I think sums it up pretty well