| Title | The Mushroom Making People Hallucinate Dozens of Tiny Humans | |
| Date | Monday May 04, @04:52AM | |
| Author | hubie | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
Meet The Mushroom That Makes People Have The Exact Same Hallucination
Scientists call them "lilliputian hallucinations," a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures
Biologist Colin Domnauer is reopening an old case that Chinese health officials seem to have stopped caring about. Every summer, residents of the Yunnan province check into hospitals with complaints that they're hallucinating tiny elflike people. They would see the little dudes marching under their doors, scaling their walls, and clinging to their furniture.
Health officials used to care about it. They looked into it some years back and found that the cause was Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom that's been eaten in Yunnan for years. It's supposedly got a rich, umami flavor, and locals know that you have to cook it thoroughly, not to bring out that flavor, but to kill off the mushroom's hallucinogenic properties.
Scientists call these "lilliputian hallucinations," a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures. If you've seen the Adult Swim show Common Side Effects, you may be familiar with the surreal trippiness of this apparently very real form of mushroom-based hallucination. What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.
It's always the little elf dudes.
[...] What's fascinating is the active compound isn't psilocybin, the hallucinatory chemical found in shrooms people take recreationally or therapeutically. The hallucinations take 12 to 24 hours. to begin and can last for a long time, sometimes long enough to require hospitalization and careful observation. The trip can last so long that it's impractical as a recreational drug, which is why no culture seems to use the mushroom intentionally as a psychedelic. Not yet, at least.
BBC Article:
'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans
Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.
Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.
The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August.
One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in.
"At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'" says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. "It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there."
But outside of Yunnan and a couple of other places, the strange mushroom is largely an enigma.
Domnauer first heard of L. asiatica as an undergraduate from his mycology professor.
"It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time," Domnauer says. "I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more."
[...] So Domnauer's first goal has been to pin down the species' true identity. In 2023, he travelled to Yunnan during the peak summertime mushroom season. He surveyed the province's sprawling fungi markets and asked sellers which of their mushrooms "makes you see little people". He purchased the ones that the giggling vendors pointed to, then brought the specimens back to the laboratory to sequence their genomes.
[...] Domnauer also visited the Philippines, where he had heard rumors of a mushroom causing similar symptoms as those from the historical records from China and Papua New Guinea. The specimens he collected there looked slightly different from the Chinese ones – they were smaller and light pink compared to the larger, redder Chinese mushrooms, he says. But his genetic testing revealed that they were indeed the same species.
[...] But it's not psilocybin that's giving the L. asiatica mushrooms their lilliputian effect, says Domnauer.
He and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations in L. asiatica. Current tests suggest it is not likely related to any other known psychedelic compound. For one, the trips it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the extraordinarily long duration of these trips and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself.
These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect.
There's another curious factor: other known psychedelic compounds also usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says. "I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations."
Understanding this mushroom will be no easy feat, Domnauer says, but as with studies of other psychedelic compounds, the scientific research it produces could end up touching on the biggest questions of consciousness and the relationship between mind and reality.
[...] "Now we may understand where in the brain [liliputian hallucinations] originate," says Dennis McKenna, an ethnopharmacologist and director of the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, a non-profit education center in California, US. He agrees that understanding the mushroom's compounds could lead to new drug discoveries. "Is there a therapeutic application? It remains to be seen," says McKenna.
Researchers estimate that less than 5% of the world's fungal species have been described, so the findings also highlight the "enormous potential" for discovery in the world's ever-dwindling ecosystems, says Furci, whose work focuses on exploring the fungal kingdom. "Fungi hold a very large biochemical and pharmacological library that we're only just beginning to tap into," says Furci. "There's still a world of discoveries to be made."
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printed from SoylentNews, The Mushroom Making People Hallucinate Dozens of Tiny Humans on 2026-05-17 21:23:36