Just wondering, why do so many plants make DMT? What good is it to a plant to make an analogue of a neurotransmitter?

It doesn't seem to be for repelling pests or attracting bees or any other obvious (to me) use of chemistry by plants.

It seems odd that it would be so common without offering some advantage. What do they use it for?

why do humans have DMT?

why does anything have DMT?

afaik there is no real scientific explanation, its considered just a random metabolite (a "physiological noise" of sorts as dennis mckenna put it).

basically tryptophan is everywhere, as are the enzymes to turn it into an amine, and then to methylate the tryptamine, so the reaction occurs all the time for seemingly little (if any) reason.

at least i believe that is the 'official' explanation, though honestly i am not entirely sure; i am basing this all on youtube videos of dennis mckenna outtakes from spirit molecule.

a similar question would be: why do plants contain poison? do animals get an effect from oral dmt or is just humans or what that need harmalas? acacias are riddled with thorns, theres dmt to the blood for you. self defense maybe?

other than that it could be a form of 'plant communication'

either wa im glad it exists and that we have knowledge of it's existance

afaik DMT is relatively non-toxic to most life-forms...

Similar question, not the same. Should have worded it better. DMT as a self defense mechanism, not a toxin.

I remember my second dmt experience, I felt like a poisoned animal in the jungle and that I had 'really done it this time, messing with plants'

I dunno, If i never knew what it was, got pricked by a thorn, had this massive trip and thought I was dying, I probably wouldn't go near that tree again.

Much like some people choose not to do it again, or give up midway through their first go at the molecule.

Just an IDEA

Sheep and to a lesser extend cows get staggers if they graze on dmt (and its family family)-containing grasses.

didn't we already confirm the source of staggers as being not related to tryptamines?

what makes you suggest DMT is the cause?


i would come back to that tree every day
but seriously, i doubt a thorn prick could deliver a reasonable amount of DMT in the bloodstream.

and it doesn't explain the other thousands of DMT-containing plants that have no self-defense mechanisms, nor environmental factors to facilitate them.

it just doesn't add up imo.

Where in nen's post (and references therein) does it say that the toxicity of phalaris tryptamines was excluded? Reference in one study said that the toxicity of n-methyl tyramine from phalaris was excluded, but that's not a tryptamine.

Sigh. I don’t know, I guess my idea is stupid then. Although it excited me.

You might as well be asking why humans are here, and why we have chems in our brain. We don’t NEED feel good chems to survive, do we? So why? Why does a plant contain anything, let alone a tryptamine. Because personally I feel the rock in the street is just as connected to me as my parents, as we all stem from the same source.

Perhaps that was a wide throw.

not stupid at all, in fact, probably the leading speculation amongst mainstream science.

i am just saying that i personally don't see it.

Yup, you're right - the above study is a good demonstration of the non-toxicity of dmt and co.

people i dont know S#!~ and you all know that ,

so with that i put forward this notion that perhaps the plants are using DMT as a neurotransmitter , perhaps plants have kind of a different neurolgical system to ours and perhaps they are also computing

who knows these things....

Jin, interesting thought. I definitely believe plants have a consciousness. I can't really speculate too much on the physical mechanism of this though. As far as I know they don't have neurons.

Don't tell your parents that!!

..makes humans more intelligent..
and more likely to grow them..
.

dennis mckenna has some interesting thoughts on this theory... he briefly mentions it in the spirit molecule movie, but i believe he goes more in-depth in some of the interview outtakes that can be found on youtube.

This also makes sense to me. I read somewhere once about Salvia being such a hard plant to grow and survive by itself, and that it evolved over time to contain this intriguing substance, so that humans may find it of interest and thus keep the plant alive.

Strategic Evolution

sorry to be danny-downer, but if that is the case why would these plants have produced these substances before humans existed?

maybe if salvia evolved to contain salvinorin recently(??).. but afaik DMT has been in plants long before there were humans to be aware of such molecules and their effects.

haha not a downer. Because neither you nor I were around that long ago to say for sure. Now if you came up with a source verifying it has been around for ages then ya I would be a bit bummed. It's like saying humans have always had the same brain chemistry. I dont know, have we?

So you assert that there was no dmt in any plant whatsoever before the advent of humans? Isn't that extremely unlikely? The odds are that plants with dmt have been there before humans, and that doesn't really warrant specific demonstration.

Itmakes sense that having dmt is an advantageous trait for a plant that happens to grow in proximity to humans that know what dmt can be used for. But dmt must be of some use to a plant other than making it appeal to humans. In analogy, an animal with plenty of muscle mass is appealing to humans (due to its nutritional value) but muscles per se are of use to the animal (e.g. for locomotion).

As it happens with all secondary metabolites (which includes dmt) their roles in plant physiology are still obscure, yet it is commonly thought that they may have something to do with plant defences e.g. they can have antimicrobial action and/or being toxic to predators. For dmt specifically, (as Parshvik Chintan corrected me) there is evidence against its toxicity to ruminants, but how about insects? fungi? Too bad there is no, if any, research on the issue.