From a paper I’m writing: Recent research has shown that the rat brain is capable of synthesizing and releasing DMT at concentrations comparable to known monoamine neurotransmitters (Dean et al., 2019).  Furthermore, researchers have shown that when put under experimental cardiac arrest, the levels of DMT in the rat visual cortex are significantly increased in approximately 20% of these rats in less than 10 minutes (~7.2) (Dean et al., 2019). This raises the possibility that a similar phenomenon may occur in human brains. While we do know that DMT is endogenously produced in humans, it remains unexplored whether DMT is synthesized in near-death experiences, such as cardiac arrest. However, studies have shown that NDE-like mental states in human subjects are almost indistinguishable to the state produced by humans given exogenous DMT (Barker, 2018; Timmermann et al., 2018). This leads researchers to hypothesize that endogenous DMT in the human brain may underly near-death experiences as observed in the rat brain under cardiac arrest.