Psychedelic drug experiences are among the most fascinating but mysterious journeys of the human mind. Long the domain of indigenous shamans and modern “psychonauts” who seek self-discovery, the sensory-rich experiences often include kaleidoscopic geometries and intelligent entities that defy description—until now. A new research collaboration and preprint between two frontier research organizations, the Trace Institute and Noonautics, details a plan to study the mathematical architecture of human experience based on the psychedelic compound N,N-dimethyl tryptamine, or DMT. The preprint findings are published on PsyArXiv.
Noonautics, led by psychedelic researcher and neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore, will use its extended-state DMTx protocol—which can extend DMT experiences from a few minutes to hours—to send trained scientists and other experts into the DMT space to make precise observations and conduct experiments. Trace Institute founder and scientific director Donald Hoffman, professor emeritus, and colleagues will deploy their arsenal of mathematical models, including a new version of trace logic for conscious observers, to develop a quantitative framework to interpret the rich details of the DMT experience.
The collaboration will combine a theoretical basis for the psychedelic experience with human experiments to test predictions of the models for an empirical understanding of altered states of consciousness.
The two scientific leaders will have a conversation about their research and its background and implications for a new science of reality on Saturday, June 13, 2026, at the Lighthouse, an applications-only creative campus at the historic Venice Beach Post Office, with plans for a video release to the public on YouTube.
The project, Hoffman says, “will provide a new framework for exploring the effects of psychoactive substances such as DMT on the structure and function of spacetime.”
Gallimore adds, “With a theoretical foundation for the highly unusual state of consciousness induced by DMT, we can test these theories experimentally.”
Reflecting forward, Gallimore says, “This collaboration is a first step to a mathematics of altered states of consciousness and, ultimately, for engineering our perceptual interface to expand our view of reality.”
More information
Andrew Robert Gallimore et al, Traces of the Other—Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism, PsyArXiv (2026). DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/8qvgy_v2
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Trace Research Institute
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