The Part of Your Brain Reserved for Dying

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer stumbles into a jungle, licks a toad, and briefly communes with a pink-elephant universe before waking up fine. It’s played as a throwaway gag—Homer’s toad is just a vehicle for the visual joke, and he suffers no consequences. Reality, it turns out, operates somewhat differently.

In certain parts of Mexico, people don’t lick the toads. They smoke them. The Sonoran Desert toad secretes a substance called 5-MEO-DMT, and when the secretions are collected, dried, and vaporized, what you inhale reportedly activates the region of the brain associated with the moment of dying—the part thought to generate the tunnel-and-light experience, the dissolution of self, the thing that clinically-dead-and-returned people describe with vocabulary borrowed entirely from religion. Drug forums that cover this territory with the dedicated precision of field researchers describe the experience not as getting high but as temporary death. The ego doesn’t bend—it disappears entirely. What’s left isn’t you in any meaningful sense of the word.

I find a grim coherence in this. Every drug culture eventually reaches the ceiling of what ordinary substances can offer and starts looking for the exit door. 5-MEO-DMT doesn’t promise euphoria or distortion—it promises obliteration, and apparently that’s a sufficient market. Whether it’s wise to repeatedly stimulate the part of your brain designed to fire once, at the end of your life, I’ll leave to neuroscientists and whoever volunteers for these experiments. There’s a law of diminishing returns that applies to every peak experience—the thousandth one is never the first. The people smoking toads in the desert are probably not thinking about that. Nobody ever is, at the time.