After McKenna: The Entity Research

“In a 2020 Johns Hopkins survey (Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020) of 2,561 people who had already had a DMT entity encounter, many respondents described features similar to McKenna's; the survey cannot show how common such encounters are. A 2023 Imperial College EEG-fMRI study (Timmermann et al., PNAS 120(13)) mapped DMT's global brain effects but did not isolate entity contact. Similar reports keep appearing; the neuroscience has not explained them.”

When Terence McKenna first described encountering 'merry elfin, self-transforming, machine creatures' during his DMT experiments in Berkeley in the early 1970s, he had no way of knowing whether the experience was idiosyncratic. He was, as far as he knew, one of very few Westerners who had smoked synthesized DMT.

The subsequent decades revealed that the entity report was not idiosyncratic at all.

Rick Strassman's clinical DMT study at the University of New Mexico (1990-1995), the first human DMT research in decades, found that a majority of his sixty volunteer subjects reported entity contact. Many described the entities in terms strikingly similar to McKenna's: small, playful, insectoid or elfin, engaged in the production of objects or language.

In a 2020 Johns Hopkins survey (Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020) of 2,561 people who had already had a DMT entity encounter, respondents described the encounter in detail. It documents the phenomenology in detail but sets no prevalence rate, because every respondent was recruited for having had an encounter; the 97% figure often attached to it appears in no published paper. The most common entity types were humanoid beings, gods or supernatural figures, and what respondents described as aliens or interdimensional beings. The emotional tone of the encounters was predominantly positive; most respondents described entities as benevolent and the encounter as meaningful.

A 2023 Imperial College London fMRI study (Timmermann et al., PNAS 120(13)) mapped DMT's global brain effects, large increases in global functional connectivity, network disintegration and desegregation, and compression of the principal cortical gradient. It did not isolate entity contact as a distinct neural signature, and no published imaging study yet has: the phenomenology is well documented, the neural specificity is not.

McKenna's phenomenological report has survived into the era of neuroscience intact as description. What it describes, whether external entities, projections of the unconscious, or something else, the neuroscience has not resolved. What it has confirmed is that the consistency of the report across fifty years and thousands of independent subjects is not random. Something consistent is being encountered. McKenna described it first and most vividly. What it is remains open.

Sources

• Sexton et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 33(9) (2019) [Source not found; under review]
• Timmermann et al., PNAS 120(13) (2023)
• Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001)
• McKenna, True Hallucinations (1993)
• Davis et al., J. Psychopharmacol. 34(9):1008-1020 (2020)