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THE PSYCHEDELIC PINEAL + 71 around the pineal immediately take up and dispose of them. Therefore, cir- cumstances in which adrenal catecholamine release occurs, such as in times of stress or during exercise, don't stimulate daytime melatonin formation. We performed a research study that demonstrated this quite clearly. Elite athletes ran a high-altitude marathon, spending much of it above 10,000 feet. We measured melatonin before and after the race. For many of the runners, this was "nearly" a near-death experience. Yet melatonin levels in these athletes rose only to those observed at night during normal sleep—hardly an explosion of brain chemistry! Nevertheless, we did see that it is possible to override the pineal's defense shield if the stress is _ great enough.” Neuroscientists believe this barrier to pineal activation exists because it would be problematic for an animal to experience its environment as "dark" during daylight hours. Since the pineal normally releases melato- nin only at night, daytime melatonin release would "feel" as if it were dark at the "wrong" time, and the animal would be disoriented. However, this explanation is weak. Daytime melatonin secretion is hardly "dangerous" enough to merit such a complex and efficient secu- rity system. Melatonin effects are not immediate, but rather take hours to days to materialize. In addition, daylight almost instantly suppresses melatonin production to near zero, returning the system to baseline be- fore any internal disruptions occur. However, consider what might happen if stress easily triggered the pineal to produce DMT, rather than melatonin. DMT is physically immo- bilizing and produces a flood of unexpected and overwhelming visual and emotional imagery. Certainly, frequent bursts of DMT release would be much more dangerous for an animal than would be those of melatonin. It may be that melatonin is so hard to make during the day because any breach in the pineal security system is intolerable. The pineal erects a bar- rier to inordinate stress that protects equally everything behind it. So, one set of circumstances in which pineal DMT may form is when stress-induced catecholamine output is just too great for the pineal shield to withstand. It also is possible that the pineal security system does not function nor- mally in psychotic individuals. There are strong indirect data supporting