Less Is More: Why a Small Dose of 5-MeO-DMT Looks Like 15 Years of Meditation

Most people assume a low dose of a psychedelic is just a watered-down version of a high dose. Less intense, less interesting, less everything. A team at University College London just proved that wrong.

Christopher Timmermann and his colleagues brought a Tibetan Buddhist lama into the lab — a 57-year-old master from the Mahāmudrā tradition with over 54,000 hours of meditation practice. Fifteen years of intensive retreat. The kind of person who can sit down and dissolve his sense of self on command.

They hooked him up to high-density EEG, gave him either a placebo, a low dose (5 mg intranasal), or a high dose (12 mg intranasal) of 5-MeO-DMT across three separate visits, and recorded what happened to his brain. They also had him do his normal nondual meditation practice during each session, before the dose kicked in.

What they found overturns some basic assumptions about how this compound works.

The low dose didn't do what anyone expected

At 5 mg, the lama's brain didn't look like a mild version of a high-dose trip. It looked like his meditation.

Both states — his practiced nondual meditation and the low dose of 5-MeO-DMT — produced the same signature: increased alpha power and decreased gamma activity. Alpha waves are associated with relaxed wakefulness and internally directed attention. Gamma waves are tied to active cognitive processing, the constant hum of your thinking mind sorting, labeling, and narrating experience.

The researchers ran machine learning cross-decoding between the two states and confirmed significant neural overlap, driven especially by reduced gamma activity in the posterior and right frontal regions.

The lama described the low-dose experience in terms any meditator would recognize: thoughts still arose, but they dissolved immediately. Sensory experience continued, but without the usual mental commentary. He felt stable equanimity — present, aware, but not tangled up in his own narrative.

That's not a mini-trip. That's what 54,000 hours of meditation training is designed to produce.

The high dose was a different animal entirely

At 12 mg, everything changed. The lama's gamma activity spiked broadly across the brain. Neural entropy — a measure of how unpredictable brain signals become — shot up. His system was flooded with signal.

He described seeing an overwhelming white light. His body vanished. "There are no thoughts," he said afterward. "There's totally a loss of perception of the body, the room, everything."

The researchers call this the "saturation route" to ego dissolution. The brain doesn't quiet down — it gets overwhelmed to the point where ordinary experience collapses under the weight of its own activity.

Two routes to the same destination

This is the study's most interesting contribution. Timmermann's team identified two distinct neural pathways to self-dissolution:

The subtractive route — seen in both meditation and low-dose 5-MeO-DMT. Less neural firing, less entropy, less cognitive noise. The mind gets quieter. Experience simplifies. Thoughts still happen but don't stick. This is the "clearing" that experienced meditators spend years learning to access.

The saturation route — seen only at the high dose. More neural firing, more entropy, more signal than the brain can organize. Experience doesn't simplify — it overloads. The self doesn't gently dissolve; it's blown apart.

Both routes can produce ego dissolution. But they feel different, they look different on a brain scan, and they probably need different kinds of support afterward.

What this means if you've sat with 5-MeO-DMT

If you've had a high-dose 5-MeO-DMT experience, you probably recognize that saturation description — the white light, the total disappearance of everything, the sense that you touched something beyond ordinary comprehension. That kind of experience can be profoundly disorienting. It's also the kind that most often sends people looking for integration support, because the gap between "that" and normal life feels impossibly wide.

But this study suggests something worth considering: the compound has a subtler mode too. One that doesn't overwhelm but simplifies. One that the brain processes through the same channels as advanced meditation practice.

The researchers write that this convergence makes low-dose 5-MeO-DMT "a potential complement to meditative training." Timmermann is now studying whether the compound helps beginning meditators advance their practice more quickly.

The bigger picture

This is a single case study — one person, three lab visits. The researchers are clear about that limitation. But it's also one of the most detailed brain-imaging comparisons ever done between a psychedelic state and genuine expert meditation, and the overlap at the low dose is hard to dismiss.

It adds to a growing body of evidence that 5-MeO-DMT occupies a unique position among psychedelics. It doesn't just produce intense experiences. Depending on the dose, it can access states that contemplative traditions have mapped for centuries — states that normally require thousands of hours of disciplined practice to reach.

That's not a party trick. That's a tool. And like any tool, how you use it matters.

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Timmermann, C. et al. (2025). Neural effects and phenomenology of nondual meditation and 5-MeO-DMT in an expert meditation practitioner. PsyArXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/whqdp_v2

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