Psychedelic ‘Ego Death’ with DMT May be Tied to a Collapse in Alpha Brain Waves
A study on DMT suggests suppresion of alpha waves may be associated with ego dissolution
A new study using DMT as a scientific tool reveals how psychedelics alter the brain’s alpha-wave dynamics and weaken our sense of self. The researchers found that DMT pushes the brain away from its usual “critical” balance between chaos and order, a state believed to be essential for coherent self-awareness over time. This shift appears as a pronounced dampening of alpha waves, corresponding to stronger subjective experiences of ego dissolution. The findings suggest psychedelics may be uniquely suited to probing the neural foundations of consciousness and selfhood.
Key Facts
Alpha-Wave Disruption: DMT significantly suppresses alpha activity, correlating with reports of ego dissolution.
Criticality Shift: The drug moves the brain away from its normal balance between chaos and order, weakening the continuity of self-related thought.
Tool for Consciousness Research: The study supports using psychedelics to examine how the brain constructs self-awareness.
“Psychedelics profoundly alter subjective experience and brain dynamics. Brain oscillations express signatures of near-critical dynamics, relevant for healthy function. Alterations in the proximity to criticality have been suggested to underlie the experiential and neurological effects of psychedelics. Here, we investigate the effects of a psychedelic substance (DMT) on the criticality of brain oscillations, and in relation to subjective experience, in humans of either sex. We find that DMT shifts the dynamics of brain oscillations away from criticality in alpha and adjacent frequency bands. In this context, entropy is increased while complexity is reduced. We find that the criticality shifts observed in alpha and theta bands correlate with the intensity ratings of self-dissolution, a hallmark of psychedelic experience. Finally, using a recently developed metric, the functional excitatory-inhibitory ratio, we find that the DMT-induced criticality shift in brain oscillations is towards subcritical regimes. These findings have major implications for the understanding of psychedelic mechanisms of action in the human brain and for the neurological basis of altered states of consciousness.
Significance statement Criticality is characterized by fluctuations occurring on a wide range of spatiotemporal scales and high complexity. Here, we investigate the effects of DMT, a classic psychedelic, on criticality of brain oscillations and in relation to subjective experience. We find that DMT shifts the normally dominant alpha oscillations towards a quieter subcritical state, increasing entropy while reducing complexity, and that this shift correlates with intensity of disruption of the sense of self.”
Mona Irrmischer, Marco Aqil, Lisa Luan, Tongyu Wang, Hessel Engelbregt, Robin Carhart-Harris, Klaus Linkenkaer-Hansen, Christopher Timmermann. DMT-induced shifts in criticality correlate with self-dissolution. Journal of Neuroscience 24 November 2025, e0344252025; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0344-25.2025. Paper link
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