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Steven Barker is the chemist who has spent fifty years proving your brain makes its own psychedelic. He built the mass-spectrometry methods sensitive enough to find DMT in living tissue, and showed it sits in the brain at concentrations rivalling serotonin and dopamine. In 1981 the war on drugs cut his funding and the work stopped for fifteen years. He also synthesised his own supply — and took it.
Expect to learn:
- The locked cabinet: what his mentor kept behind two locks, and why Barker raided it
- The missing neurotransmitter: why DMT meets every formal criterion and nobody noticed
- Machine elves: why he calls the term marketing rather than science
- DMT immunity: the lab technician who took a full dose and felt nothing
- Receptors inside the neuron: the 2023 finding that explains the neuroplasticity
SPONSORS
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GS EPISODES MENTIONED
Andrew Gallimore - No.1 DMT Neurobiologist: Alien Worlds, DMT Entity Encounters, Attractor States and Consciousness: https://youtu.be/USgWrxEFWDA
Rick Strassman - Meet The Father Of Modern DMT Research: https://youtu.be/KeAZOj7tYsc
Dennis McKenna - Dennis McKenna: "I've Spent 50 Years Investigating The Entities That Exist Within Ayahuasca": https://youtu.be/gTSBhfZhuD8
David Nichols - Meet The Greatest Living Psychedelic Scientist You've Never Heard Of: https://youtu.be/6umTgXsW1lQ
GUEST LINKS
ResearchGate Profile: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Steven-A-Barker-2164230436
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, an Endogenous Hallucinogen (2018 review): https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00536
A Critical Review of Endogenous DMT in Humans 1955-2010 (with Strassman): https://doi.org/10.1002/dta.422
LC/MS/MS Analysis of Rat Pineal Microdialysate (2013, the paper discussed on tape): https://doi.org/10.1002/bmc.2981
Administration of DMT in Psychedelic Therapeutics (2022 review): https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-022-06065-0
LISTEN ON
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Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-giants-shoulder/id1752486249
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00:00 Trailer
0:02:15 50 Years Chasing One Molecule
0:06:37 Huxley, Osmond and the Birth of "Psychedelic"
0:08:01 The Schizotoxin Hypothesis That Started It All
0:10:54 Finding DMT in Everyone, Not Just Patients
0:11:56 How the War on Drugs Killed the Research
0:16:39 The 40 Years of Research We Lost
0:18:36 "Have You Ever Taken It Yourself?"
0:19:20 Inside the Locked Psychedelic Cabinet
0:20:22 The Overabundance He Didn't Want to Waste
0:22:51 Why He Won't Describe What He Saw
0:23:38 Set, Setting and the Expectancy Problem
0:27:16 Dennis McKenna Has Never Seen a Machine Elf
0:28:31 "Machine Elf" Was a Marketing Term
0:30:40 The Tryptamine Family Tree Explained
0:34:21 Bufotenine, 5-MeO-DMT and the Blood-Brain Barrier
0:38:36 DMT as a Working Neurotransmitter
0:41:34 "DMT Is the Missing Neurotransmitter"
0:44:56 You Have Two Brains - and the Gut Makes More
0:46:29 Pushing Back on Gallimore's Alien World
0:54:04 96% Say the Entity Was Conscious
0:57:52 Did the Caveman Experience an Alien?
0:59:07 "These Are Not Real Elves"
1:06:40 Are Some People Immune to DMT?
1:10:51 You Can't Build Tolerance to Your Own Neurotransmitter
1:15:46 The Receptors Hiding Inside Your Neurons
1:24:24 What a Psychedelic Overdose Actually Is
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