It's an evolutionary curiosity that their DNA study identified 17 species within the genus Lanmoa, but L. asiatica was the only species which produces this hallucinatory effect.
There are several very commonly found boletes within the genus Lanmoa in the US, including L. pseudosensibilis and the "Bouillon Bolete" L. rubissima.
> Now, three completely independent cultures have reported the same specific type of hallucination, and two cases are attributed to the same DNA-verified mushroom species. That indicates that these bizarre psychological effects aren't cultural manifestations or coincidences—they must have a shared underlying chemical and neurological basis.
Rubroboletus sinicus is another species under investigation. Another bolete.
The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong also wrote in Baopuzi around 300 CE about this effect from a mushroom and it seems to be common knowledge in pockets of China. Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén.
I also found this bit funny from the Wikipedia:
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
The usual Chinese expression to describe the mushroom hallucinations is 见小人 (jiàn xiǎo rén), literally “see tiny people.”
Usually there isn't a second 人 (rén) being reduplicated here.
人人 does mean “everyone,” but that's a different construction, and Chinese noun reduplication isn't generally equivalent to adding Spanish -ito. You may also see 小人儿 (xiǎo rénr), where 儿 is a colloquial/diminutive suffix.
I would defer to a native speaker, but Chinese is extremely contextual, and even native speakers often can’t tell you the formal rules of usage for something like this. There’s a lot more listening to register and intuiting intent required than with English. The same phrase used in different way can have a different function. In this usage it does not sound like plural “people” to my ears.
You can say something like 「你看！可愛的狗狗」 and it’s “look! A cute doggy” (reduplicating 狗 gǒu). On the other hand you could say 「人人都知道她是小三！」 and it means “everybody knows that she’s (his) mistress!” (reduplicating 人 rén).
I think this first example is spot on. Though a sibling comment's Wikipedia link doesn't mention it, there is a diminutive or hypocorism use that I feel is best translated into English with the -y or -ie suffix.
狗狗 doggy
猫猫 kitty
鸟鸟 birdie
宝宝 baby
And it kind of works for verbs too:
看看 [take a] looky
It's funny how the Wikipedia article call hallucinations "ill effects". I am yet to hear people call caffeine effects "ill effects". People and their sociocultural biases, uh?
> I am yet to hear people call caffeine effects "ill effects". People and their sociocultural biases, uh?
Coffee has well known ill-effects, I think every coffee drinker at one point have drank too much and felt them themselves. Apparently such a big topic that it isn't just a section of the Caffeine page, it has it's very own Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_toxicity
There are a lot of people with a cultural bias toward hallucinations, who want really hard to get high off anything that could allegedly make them high.
But despite that, this mushroom is not a popular recreational drug. Much like amanita muscaria, which certain people insist must be great if used right, is common as dirt, and yet is so unpopular as a drug that it isn't even restricted.
By these same accounts, you'll get sick. It's unpleasant. Not even the most enthusiastic "psychonauts" seem to manage to take joy in this thing, little people or not.
> Much like amanita muscaria, which certain people insist must be great if used right, is common as dirt, and yet is so unpopular as a drug that it isn't even restricted.
Psilocybe, the genus containing the most commonly cultivated magic mushroom, is also quite common. It is globally distributed with native species on every continent (less antarctica ofc). It didn't become illegal because it was common in the "wild", but because of the cultivation of one particular species at home and in closets.
A. muscaria on the other hand has never been successfully cultivated as far as we know. You would be surprised how many powerful psychoactive "drugs" can be found in ecosystems around the world
> It stops the uncountably large majority of people from doing it. Like more then 99.9% of people.
Most people don't even know about it or have the means to access it as its either not available or not legal in their jurisdiction so not accurate. About 45% of the adults drink. How much lower would that percentage be if alcohol was little known and subjected to the same regulations psychedelics are under?
No, intent matters. If you drugged someone with caffeine (or someone drank it not knowing what it was) then their symptoms would also be called ill effects.
Not all hallucinations are pleasant. Magic mushrooms are known to be pleasurable for many people, but I've heard these mushrooms are not very fun and can last days. Given these effects have been known for a long time there could be a good reason it never caught on
What a wild claim. You can't just say it's arguable, you have to actually argue it. Personally I think it's true but only in a metaphorical way that doesn't apply to hallucinogenic drugs; inasmuch as it applies to hallucinogenic drugs, it's false.
I dunno if it's so wild, but maybe I'm zooming out way too much. The example that came to my mind was "mathematics", something that doesn't "exists" but we "see" it everywhere and humanity got massively improved thanks to it. Electricity would be another example :) I guess how wild the claim is depends on how charitable you read it.
Right, and I think any serious civilizational benefit of drugs in the sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven, and benefit in the hallucinatory regime doesn't exist. That's sorta what I mean: "where big, false; where true, not big."
> sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven, and benefit in the hallucinatory regime doesn't exist
It's a interesting train of thought if nothing else. How would we "prove" a thing like "humanity benefits from being able to create, share and read books?" for example? Or that we can organize in grassroot movements? It's also really hard to qualify directly, as the impact is so indirect.
Same with psychedelics, a lot of scientists, researchers, creatives or even business-people attribute psychedelic usage to some of their success in their fields, but how can we really know if it was because of that or not?
> any serious civilizational benefit of drugs in the sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven
If you do want to get into the "where big":
Shamanic/ritual/religious/social practices that wholly involve hallucinatory experiences (both with and without the aid of hallucinogenic substances) are well attested and documented throughout human development.
So the existence is there; if you want to argue that actually it was a Bad Thing for human collectives, from Siberia to the Amazon, from 50k years ago to the present day, to engage in these practices and that they'd have been much better off Not Doing It, I guess the burden of that proof is on you?
People don't see math or electricity with their eyes and it is simultaneously hard to argue that their physical counterpart doesn't exist. Your examples are things you can't see but exist.
> People don't see math or electricity with their eyes and it is simultaneously hard to argue that their physical counterpart doesn't exist. Your examples are things you can't see but exist.
How is that different from psychedelics? We can "see" their physical counterparts (and chemical reactions) in people's head and body as they trip too.
I have a camera. Suppose I rub course-grained sandpaper all over its lens. Now the camera sees scratches, instead of the outside world. But those scratches are real! We can see their physical counterparts if we study the camera. Clearly, the camera has been much improved.
I read it as “we can see with our imagination”. We build, we invent, we follow our “hallucinations” whether they come from drug use or just an active imagination giving revelations.
It is undoubtedly a bias against joy which wasn't "earned" or "deserved," especially through technology or social class. Similar to how non-white races are accepted as athletes. It's culturally ok for "them" to experience and do/take that as long as it sustains the boundary between us and them. Otherwise, "we" perform a safe version of it, such as time-boxed group imagination of the Christmas elf. Participating in group illusions on a computer screen is allowed bc our bodies remain free from our own control - that's the job of the culture that "got us here." (White boomers). Plays by contrast are suspect bc they require few resources, little dependence on the controlled world and bc they leave room for unsanctioned corporeal participation.
I'm sure most will disagree with me, that's ok. In fact, it's generally required of most to virtually "stone" anyone espousing these viewpoints in order to maintain your position in the post-corporeal hierachy... Wouldn't want this tribe to appear sympathetic to the wrong viewpoints.
The religious will love them if they arrive naturally. There are even a few studies that administered psilocybin to religious professionals. They described it as the most profound experience of their life.
Some ADHD stimulant medications quite literally boost your mood. A literal anti-depression pill.
This function is listed as a side effect of being on these meds. Which is true, it's not being used to treat depression, though is often being used to treat people with depression and treat the root cause of that depression. It just also happens to "perk" you up.
If you're basing your perception of sociocultural biases on what you (1 person) have seen or not seen, you may be speaking to your own biases, rather than others'
To wit: multiple people here have definitely heard the thing you have yet to hear.
Caffeine is beneficial; it's not just a feeling. It has a neuroprotective effect shown in animal model of ALZ and a statistically significant effect in humans that decaffeinated beverages don't provide.
I wasn't meaning to say it's not actually beneficial, I just don't like how often people get dependent on it without realizing. (As in, I wouldn't really mind if people knew they are dependent, but being completely oblivious to it is sort of offputting.)
Meth can be neuroprotective at low doses and is available by prescription for ADHD and obesity. Though, I treat my ADHD with dextroamph and I don't think I need to experience meth (I've heard it is more prone to addiction).
Vast majority of illicit adhd/Adderall on the street is actually just lower dosed meth.
You probably would never know the difference, and many people don't.
A lot of sold-as pure isomers are also simply racemic. People often won't notice that either (due to placebo and other factors), but they won't be getting the full benefit they wanted.
There are outliers like myself of course that cannot have levoamphetamine, it completely disables me. I do not know why and I don't really care to find out. The one and only time I took regular adderall, I had to sleep it off.
The researchers seem pretty convinced that this mushroom causes the hallucinations yet they do not describe trying it out in an experiment.
Surely the most straightforward way is to undercook the mushrooms and run a blind controlled experiment where participants eat the shrooms and report on hallucinations.
> 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.
It kind of does, just because people see spiders and all other kinds of “real” things on datura or benadryl, but I “tripped” on benadryl a few times in high school and it was very “non-euclidean” every time. The laws of physics were not obeyed, and the hallucinations are a lot scarier than goofy little people falling over themselves.
So if the experiences really are real, it sounds to me like something wholly unique. Apparently there are no recorded deaths from the lilliputian mushrooms, and the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.
There are psychedelic phenethylamines that last 24 hours or more, so I don’t think the duration is a sign of anything really.
> the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.
Maybe what causes the effect is not directly in the mushroom, but it needs first to metabolise into it? As in maybe the effect is caused by molecule A, but the mushroom only contains B which then breaks down into A. (for example by the liver or perhaps intestinal microbiome.)
> very “non-euclidean” every time. The laws of physics were not obeyed, and the hallucinations are a lot scarier than goofy little people falling over themselves.
I've never had benadryl hallucinations, or anything of the sort, but I have had quite a few very high fevers that resulted in very similar dreams and hallucinations - and I have zero desire to repeat them, to the point where I'll often delay going to sleep if I have a fever.
I don't think you can put Datura in this scale at all. Datura is borderline psychotic inducing. More damage you might not heal from than funny visuals.
We're talking psychedelics, they're all borderline psychotic inducing, that's why we like and consume them :)
Datura is definitively a different beast, and definitely something I'd recommend others to stay away from even if I and my friend was dumb enough to consume it when we were young. LSD, mushrooms and friends are 100x better and more fun.
No, they are not. Let's not generalize. There is nothing funny or therapeutic about psychosis. We are leaving the dark ages of psychedelics. We don't need to bring them back.
What? Every psychedelic can be dangerous, as always it's more about set and setting than the actual chemical you're using. Most of them can be "psychotic inducing" used the "right" (wrong) way, absolutely.
Again generalising. Psychdelics, if you are not predisposed to psychotic breaks, can cause anxiety and similarly overwhelming emotions. They last 12 hours max. And this mescaline and LSD mostly. Datura can potentially last 2 days. It is dangerous, end of. Also datura is not considered a psychdelic. Hallucinogenics and psychdelics are not equivalent. Datura is referred to as a delirant. With psychdelics, you can estimate dosage much easily. With datura, it is much harder because it is naturally not as evenly distributed in the actual source plant. So you can easily overdose. It's like trying to split a shroom choc that melted but the distribution among areas can be several times over the other areas.
In my opinion, the combination of not able to estimate dosage and losing the ability to tell reality from fiction for up to 2 days alone puts datura in its own separate category.
Someone tripping in psychdelics or even Salvia is really a different category to Datura where the line between reality and fiction is thin. No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably but moving coherently and overall looking sane while doing things that on closer look don't make sense.
Anyone that has seen someone take a strong dose of datura can attest that what you are saying is all correct. It is not a traditional psychedelic in any way, shape, or form.
It's wild seeing someone fully interact with a reality that isn't there and then come back not knowing anything about what happened. I had a friend in the early 2000's that had us video tape and babysit him. He had a half hour long conversation with his dead mother on a telephone that wasn't there. Also, he chain smoked non existent cigarettes for hours. He knew we were there and interacted with us, but he had no continuity.
> . Also datura is not considered a psychdelic. Hallucinogenics and psychdelics are not equivalent. Datura is referred to as a delirant
Ok, finally it's clear you don't actually seem to have a clue what you're talking about. "Deliriant" is not some scientific classification term, it's a subset of hallucinogens some people like to use to distinguish between more visual psychedelics and less ones. And yes, psychedelics and hallucinogens are for all intents and purposes synonyms.
Again, Datura sucks, stay away from it, horrible drug and no fun at all. But the fact that you think that psychedelics automatically mean "No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably" again gives the impression you're not actually giving these drugs the seriousness they warrant. They're wonderful tools but should be used correctly and with a proper understanding of what they actually are and do.
Is the argument that even if you'd do such an experiment with consent of the participants, it'd be unethical? Or are we just assuming this will be done without the consent of the participants?
It's a common misconception: the ethics board isn't the committee deciding whether the trial is ethical, it's the instrument they use to punish you if they decided it wasn't and you decided to ignore them.
neuroplasticity and neurotoxicity aren't mutually exclusive, and its not a phenomenon in of itself that has some positive meaning. for instance, all addictive substances "induce neuroplasticity"
Couldn’t you get consent from the participants to consume hallucinogenic substances but also getting them to agree that there will be a number of trials and they won’t know which one if any of them will actually contain it?
So instead of a single experiment where half of the people get it and half don’t, the experiment will be repeated ten times with the same people over a few months, different meals each time and in total each person will get hallucinogens in their food either zero or one times.
And then you see what effects people report and if that correlates well with who was actually given the hallucinogens, and if there is a lot of placebo among the rest of the people each time that they were not given hallucinogens.
1. The main problem I imagine is not consent but ethics approval. You are probably gonna find some experienced psychonauts curious enough to want to try, but getting it approved by an ethics committee I imagine being tricky.
2. Multiple times per person over months risks attrition which gonna mess it up, and the statistical power increase you get could be offset by that (eg if a person gets it they may not be motivated to come again for the placebo). On the other hand ppl may be more motivated if they know they are gonna get it at least once so dunno.
3. Placebo with hallucinogens is always tricky. I would use psilocybin as (extra or only) control, esp if you test for little ppl. This way you can test if they report more tiny ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
What if the hallucinogen has long term health effects? What if tiny people show up for a participant years from the experiment, while driving?
I guess you can be upfront about unknown unknowns, and most human experiments have some of those, but I assume there are standards to keep those to a minimum.
> Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself
Coward, basically. I have no idea why on earth you'd travel the world looking for a specific hallucinogen and then just try to sequence it and toss it, and then waste everyone's time writing papers saying you essentially have a hunch about the mushroom's effects.
There’s nothing unethical about self experimentation. There are many notable examples of it in the history of science. Most notable is probably Barry Marshall’s decision to self-dose with helicobacter pylori, in an effort to prove that the bacteria caused ulcers. They did, he treated himself with antibiotics, and he was later awarded a Nobel for the research. Werner Forssman also won a Nobel for work partially derived from self-applying a cardiac catheter.
Barry Marshall's story is so iconic that I read it every time despite knowing it very well.
That being said one claim here would be that allowing self-experimentation would pressure people into self experimenting due to how our academia and labs are structured these days i.e. a junior scientists could be pressured into self experimentation by their superiors. So this is definitely not as clear-cut as one might think.
> Barry Marshall's story is so iconic that I read it every time despite
As someone who suffered badly with ulcers in my teens I'm particularly grateful for his work. One course of antibiotics and I never had that problem again.
More so for him and his collaborator having dinner each year when the Nobel prizes were announced in anticipation of the call from the Nobel Prize Committee. Legends.
> There’s nothing unethical about self experimentation.
If people get rewarded for self experimentation, either directly with prices or indirectly with fame and success, more people will try do it. That certainly does raise ethical concerns. It worked out for people you mentioned but there will be many others who might harm themselves doing it.
evidently you are unfamiliar with experimental science or clinical trials, like it or not self experimentation and the consumption/administration of psychoactive substances is considered unethical, rightly or wrongly.
In the case of self-testing it raises concerns of objectivity, not just in terms of perception and observation but with regards to bias and intent, throwing into question the results and reasons for the study.
I'm not sure what ethical considerations come up when testing a medical hypothesis by self-administration. Famously Barry Marshall overturned decades of medical doctrine when he ingested helicobacter pylori, and demonstrated its role in gastritis (and I think providing evidence for peptic ulcers).
That's the feeling I got, that they've tried it out on themselves, but (understandably) neglect to mention it. Which is a shame, because the self-censorship isn't helpful in regards of getting to the bottom of this.
Self-experimentation allows one to conduct science without the imprimatur of the IRB. IRBs, in the name of ethics, fashion themselves as the sole arbiter of what science may be done. Ergo, any loophole that circumvents their authority is prima facie "unethical".
What's unethical about it? It sounds the locals consume it anyway. If the experiment is blind you can even tell the participants what is it about beforehand without losing too much validity.
I don't know much about standard ethical frameworks used in these kinds of experiments, but giving hallucinogens with unknown long term health effects to participants feels somewhat unethical to me.
Also, to get stronger results you would probably want to conduct the experiment on participants who don't have an expectation of seeing little people, so that rules out locals or people who heard of or eaten the mushroom before.
Everything's unethical that seems kinda weird or icky to middle aged HR schoolmarm Karens who like to sit on committees and wiggle their fingers and clutch their pearls, like the good church ladies they are, at the naughty boys.
There were some very questionable experiments done in the name of science that lead to development of ethics guidelines. Being respectful of other people is hardly pearl clutching
Ethics is what people agree on. Not doing unnecessary harm is usually easily agreed on. Don't exploit people who know less it's also on the list. Doesn't mean we didn't learn something valuable from KZ camp experiments, we just don't think it outweighed the costs. And we don't like, or want to encourage, people who think it did.
There are very strict rules for scientific experiments _because_ we know that without them, just guided by "common sense" or "be reasonable", someone would get blinded by ambition or "the potential" and go further than the majority want to accept.
Anyone can "experiment" without it being an accepted scientific experiment. But then they're personally responsible for any and all bad outcomes. If you follow the rules and get the experiment pre-approved, you'll likely be covered by your employer's insurance and free from criminal liability .
That's a very good incentive.
But people don’t agree on ethics. That’s the whole reason you have ethics boards. Otherwise the scientists wouldn’t need one since they already thought the same.
I agree there ought to be rules, but ethics is just a word to make things sound fair when it’s just an authoritative decision, often taking bad arguments (like religious ones or public misconceptions) unnecessarily into account.
Whenever I hear these stories about multiple cultures having the same hallucination, I think that we have to give some weight to the possibility that the little people are real and the mushrooms just let us see them.
I believe that it is because we all have the same basic brain structure. The part of the brain that controls speech is in the same location in each person. So is motor control, vision, etc.
Maybe having the same chemical stimulants going through the same basic processing hardware causes the same outputs. But that's just like my opinion man.
Some would say all of our consciousness is a hallucination.
> It doesn't matter which side of the road you drive on. It matters that everyone else is also driving on that side.
I bet if all our brains were wired to constantly see little people, we would adapt and eventually pick up on subtle cues related to the environment or our emotions.
Some student taking an intro to cultural anthropology course would be shocked to find out that some culture has a very different relationship to their little people as she does to her little people. Strangers making small talk on the subway would ask each other what their little people have been up to today. Someone on Hackernews would be reading an article about an herb that can make the little people completely invisible for days.
0. There are tiny people who are not invisible but there is something that makes it so humans ignore them. That specific mushroom interfered with whatever that is so that we can see them.
An argument for #0 and in favor of #2 is the #2 requires the mushroom to cause an hallucination that includes a lot of generated detail to be realistic and consistent with how an actual tiny person would behave and affect the world.
#0 on the other hand is just turning something off.
An argument for #0 over #1 is that #0 does not require actual invisibility. If there were actually invisible tiny people we still probably would have discovered by now the physical mechanism that can make things invisible, which w e have not. Unless we are going to consider magic or psychic powers or some other such thing completely beyond known physics we can almost certainly rule out actual invisibility.
Hear me out: There are tiny people who are invisible, and independently, there is a mushroom which makes humans hallucinate tiny people. The hallucinations are different than the ones which actually exist.
If they aren't invisible, my cat would have caught and killed dozens of them, and then I'd be smelling their rotting corpses around my house and slipping on their bodies.
Also presumably they'd end up in many pictures, which even if we somehow ignored them still in all photographs AI would still see, as would car lidar systems, etc.
(I guess the likelier theory is that a mushroom that causes hallucination is causing hallucination)
The empirical solution would be to administer the mushroom to people who are not equipped to correctly predict how an actual tiny person would physically interact with certain situations (idk maybe something involving surface tension and liquids of different viscuousities) and instruct them to report their observations. This would then either demonstrate that the tiny people do not obey the laws of physics or that they follow the subject's imagined laws of physics and are therefore hallucinations.
Also of course the tiny people do not seem to causally interact with their physical environment in any measurable way (at least to observers of the test subject) so that already strongly points towards hallucinations but that kind of thinking isn't how you get a grant.
Depends on your definition of what "real" means. Does it mean that people really have the experience of seeing little people? If so, then in that sense it's real. Or does it mean that these little people exist in some other way, outside of the mind and potentially accessible to other physical means of intervention? Probably not.
>They believed their thoughts and bodily sensations were controlled by a machine that defied their technical comprehension and secretly influenced them from a distance, often claiming that it was operated by a group of people who were persecuting them.
think of it like a placeholder for a great argument/explanation that doesn't necessarily exist, but would be funny if it did and would aledge whatever follows (in this case mechanical elfs) as being highly relevant to the topic at hand.
Hallucinogenic experiences can be really specific to particular hallucinogens.
There are some hallucinogens that only produce auditory hallucinations. We don't really have a reason to think those are real sounds.
There are others that will not make you visually hallucinate in the regular sense, but will mess with how your brain interprets what you see - scrambling your internal visual object classifiers, so to speak - so that distinct things sort of melt together in your mind.
Hallucinogens are wild. But I think they are the same as any other drug that has predictable effects, like alcohol or pot.
Maybe it throws us for a loop because subjective experience of hallucinogens are so bizarre and varied and often intense. They truly do weird things to us.
> How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
I understand what you’re trying to say, but this sentence could be an argument against DNA. It’s also chemical compounds that contain an entire script of what our species can and cannot do - and much more.
DNA operates on a much lower level than large scale macro behavior such as 3cm to 30cm tall beings visually phasing through walls, or not… unless you think DNA does somehow directly affect it?
These are pretty famous mushrooms in China. Right now Yunnan mushroom hot pot is all the rage, basically in every city in the country. It's also led to lots of tourists in Yunnan wandering around foraging for wild mushrooms. The problem is that there's hundreds of different types of mushrooms with varying levels of toxicity, and unless you grew up in the area and know what you're doing it's easy to get mixed up. There's plenty of videos on chinese social media of people giggling in hospital beds geeked out their gourds pointing at little people.
I tried to find the psilocybin ones with friends once, just kids (well we were 15) with a few books about mushrooms from the library haha. We grabbed anything that "kinda looked like them", then put them all on the kitchen counter, tried to divide them into piles of the same things and find out what is what... but things just became less clear instead of obvious.
So I decided to look up mushroom poisoning (in the dictionary) and some stuff about potential asphyxiation ~18 (IIRC, it's been a while) hours later made decide no, the risk of dying in my sleep next night is NOT worth it, into the trash it goes.
Yep. I used to go foraging for mushrooms with my family in Russia as a kid, but I absolutely wouldn't do that here without an actual local expert who'd been doing it for years.
Those who have used DMT often talk about machine elves. I imagine there is a part of the brain that specifically recognizes humanoid figures even in the distance that is getting overstimulated.
This is obviously just anecdotal, but when I was 6 I got very ill with the flu and was in bed for days. Super high fever and was quite out of it.
I had a, idk, spell one afternoon where I saw this quilt we had on the wall open up at all the squares, and thousands of tiny people/elves poured out. They marched around carrying little boxes and were all around me.
I remember it so vividly more than 30 years later because it freaked me out so much. Tried telling my parents about it and they just dismissed it as a nightmare, but I swear I was awake, just out of it with fever.
Anyways, it was early 90's, and I know I was close to the dangerous temperatures of high fever. Perhaps the brain does interesting hallucinations in these situations?
Have never hallucinated or had anything like that happen since.
I've had very, very bad dreams and hallucinations when I had fevers as a child. Never saw tiny people, but definitely had weird non-euclidean experiences, and my parents told me that I'd be laying there screaming about something that I had no memory of the next day.
I've hallucinated with fevers before, and they do feel surprising that you swear you are awake, but perhaps you're really in a twilight between awake and asleep and the dreams break through.
You can get brain damage and seizures with a high fever and we knew that in the 90’s. We already had almost all of the fever controlling drugs we use today by the 90’s. What the hell was wrong with your parents? Do you still talk to them? That’s child abuse, buddy.
Remember when stable diffusion would create image soups full of horrifying humanoid faces and figures? I imagine something similar happens when you dull the brain in the right way.
I've read about someone "exploring" the DMT realm with the machine elves by putting a hundred or so willing participants into that state and they found that multiple participants encountered the same machine elf, so there's more going on than just that.
Also, machine elves are not all humanoid. Some of them are complex geometrical shapes that are too complicated to parse. It was very fascinating to read about this phenomenon. I remember that what people described felt like some kind of Internet that is accesses with your consciousness.
I bet there is some mushroom species in Europe as well that contains that substance. All those stories about dwarfs, trolls etc. and especially in woody area's, they must have come from somewhere.
Not sure about the exact same active substance, but Amanita muscaria is the obvious candidate. It's also commonly shown as part of the imagery in stories involving tiny people: the Smurfs, Super Mario (it's the power-up that makes Mario bigger/smaller), Fantasia, Alice in Wonderland, and so on.
Amanita muscaria is iconic because it's the shroomiest looking shroom that ever shroomed, but by all accounts A. muscaria intoxication is not particularly pleasant:
> effects can range from mild nausea and twitching to drowsiness, cholinergic crisis-like effects (low blood pressure, sweating and salivation), auditory and visual distortions, mood changes, euphoria, relaxation, ataxia, and loss of equilibrium (like with tetanus)
> In cases of serious poisoning the mushroom causes delirium, somewhat similar in effect to anticholinergic poisoning (such as that caused by Datura stramonium), characterised by bouts of marked agitation with confusion, hallucinations, and irritability followed by periods of central nervous system depression. Seizures and coma may also occur in severe poisonings.
Depends on how is prepared. If you heat it and prep it the right away it makes a fantastic sleep med. If you don't prep it right you get delirious and people can hurt themselves. You also can't take too much or that can also become delerious. I think that's why it never caught on even though it's far more effective than any other over the counter sleep inducing herb or supplement(in my experience)
In Russia, it's instantly recognizable as a poisonous mushroom - it's a symbol of "danger" that's as obvious as a skull-and-crossbones. Here, in America, most people I've talked to don't even know what it is.
Swedish tradition has it that trolls would replace human babies with their own babies. It does not take a long leap of imagination to to see how this could be used as an excuse for the practice of putting unwanted/deformed babies out into the forest ”for the wolves”. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how common that practice might have been, since it would presumably stem from prehistoric times)
> One person told me that while they were eating soup, the little people were jumping off their spoon into the bowl and swimming around. As they scooped a bite, the little people remained in their mouth.
I think this is so fascinating because the hallucinations sound unlike anything else produced by psychedelics and other psychoactive substances, so I really look forward to learning what the mechanism is.
From the stories I've read it also doesn't sound people are experiencing outright delirium although the experience can probably be pretty stressful if you don't know what is happening.
I'm not sure how well proven it is, but the theory I saw for the common "sacred geometry" that people see while on psychedelics is that the brain normally is quite good at filtering out "noise" and the psychedelics limit this filtering. So, sacred geometry could be a type of noise produced by our biological hardware that the brain normally filters out as unnecessary. Other things besides psychedelics can cause these same patterns to be observed too, from what I understand.
its a hot online topic when talking about YunNan province of china.its a land of all kinds of mushrooms/(and bugs). If you eat mushroom hotpot in there, the waiter will lock the pot and put a timer on the table, before the time limit hit, you cannot open and eat..cooks long time helps reduce the chance of position.
Absolutely brilliant show. Highly recommend it to anyone. Feels like a hyper condensed version of the X-files but with a decent sense of humour to it as well.
Season two will be out next year and I am curious to see how it goes. Towards the end of season one, the side effects were starting to get interesting, possibilities of it turning dark abound.
I'm just glad that after Joe Bennets previous show Scavengers Reign got axed after one season that we will finally get to see some of his stuff expanded.
Wondering if the hallucination also occurs to other animals?
Would dogs taking the L. asiatica see little humans or little dogs? Probably neither, but then does that mean the fungus had targeted humans genetically?
We know with extremely high certainty that classical psychedelics effect other animals similarly given the neuroscience [1]. But this is not a classical psychedelic. We don't know how it works yet, what receptors it operates on, or what the pharmacology is doing.
So would dogs see little humans or little dogs? We can't say for sure. But the best guess might actually be most likely little dogs, or maybe little smells of little dogs. Dogs show conspecific preference (species-focus) while we show facial preference [2] and they have a strong focus on olfactory sense while we're more visual. The vividness might show up in ways we can't really perceive through smell like they can.
And the answer to "does that mean the fungus has targeted humans genetically" is almost definitely no. The study the article is based on [3] mentions that lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom, appear across cultures' folklore, and are reported in alcohol withdrawal, dementia, and macular degeneration. The effect seems fundamental to how the human mind and brain work. So it's more likely that the mushroom is disrupting something and the brain is resolving that disruption into little people, because that's what it does with pattern matching.
This mushroom is an ectomycorrhizal symbiote of the Yunnan pine tree, is ancient with the genus being at least 5 million years old compared to modern humans 300k, and requires undercooking which isn't compatible with human targeting so it doesn't make sense to have any genetic human target.
The fungus supplies a non-targeted disruption and the resulting little people content we describe is the human brain's response. A dog getting the same disruption would resolve it into whatever a dog's machinery produces, or maybe they metabolize it into nothing recognizable.
> does that mean the fungus had targeted humans genetically?
very utilitarian and anthropocentric world view.
Why would a random thing in the world specifically targeting humans with some niche effect? Did cocoa plant target humans specifically with its pleasing flavor (after having been heavily processed), while being toxic for many other animals?
Why would a random thing in the world specifically target anything? Nature throws things against the wall and keeps what sticks.
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedychrum_rutilans, a parasite on a parasite. Did it target beewolves specifically? And now its hosts are dying, was it his fault he chose the 'wrong' target?
Not the anthropocentricity is to criticise, but the idea of nature targeting. OP asked a well meaning question where sth. can be be learned from. Thank you.
The whole targeting phrasing mixes cause and effect. Evolution, as we currently understand it, is working differently: it is random effects and seeing what sticks, as you phrased, not targeting anything specifically.
The level of consciousness where the phrase targeting makes sense is way higher.
With utilitarian and anthropocentric world view you mean the 'target thinking' ascribing intention to nature, and not what is targeted, which are only incidentally humans here.
Most of weird European and Middle Eastern legends and fairy tales originate from drugs or encountering real artifacts or phenomenons which they couldn't explain. Look up how cyclops appeared in mythology.
Well, eastern dragons always reminded me more of a giant oarfish. And some central europe dragons weren't that far off, being described as flying snakes.
I think "every culture has a dragon" is kinda misleading.
"Every culture has a creature that got translated as a dragon" seems closer to the truth. The creatures themselves have a great variety between them.
Domnauer is overstating the "little people" effect here. Seeing miniaturized people seems to be only one of several manifestations associated with these mushrooms. This Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom) is a lot more informative. To me, it sounds like it could actually be a serotonergic substance, but it's not clear. I hope they find the active constituent!
That's nice. Why the hell is it on phys.org? I don't want to see damn drug stuff on a physical science site. Not even "non-psychedelic" pharmakinetics.
Lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom. There are myths about tiny people in pretty much every culture's folklore. People have also reported these hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal, dementia, macular degeneration and other neurological conditions. So, it seems like this phenomenon is fundamental to how the human mind and brain work, but we don't know what causes it or how to treat it.
That's what makes this mushroom different — it reliably produces this effect
I once spoke with a family member who was experiencing hallucinations of little people at the moment. So I guess if you want to experience this at home you can try giving yourself a head wound. Not as active or vivid as described I think though, they just said that the little people were hanging out up in curtains peering at us.
That reminded me. Almost 20 years ago, there was a city folktale that some species of Convolvulus could get you high, and my friend tried it and then described seeing little knights playing|fighting on a wallpaper. I was a designated spotter, and didn't know what to do, so I just wrote down everything she said. Still should have a notebook somewhere.
(It was 2 specific species out of 200, and I hope that not mentioning which part of the plant she ingested would deter people from trying. The plant is also slightly poisonous, could weaken your kidneys. Weak kidneys no fun)
I think there's only one bolete species that has been successfully cultivated. Unlikely you'd be able to get one unless you get someone to harvest a wild one for you. It does seem like it's not the only bolete species to do this though
I'm not advising eating undercooked boletes but that would possibly result in finding new species that have this effect
I’m curious—do the people who have eaten these mushrooms see the same kind of "tiny people," or is "tiny people" just another name for the hallucination?
I don't think it's possible to exactly compare the experiences to see if one person's "tiny people" is the same as another person's "tiny people", but TFA does talk about literally seeing tiny people and not just calling something else "tiny people".
There are several very commonly found boletes within the genus Lanmoa in the US, including L. pseudosensibilis and the "Bouillon Bolete" L. rubissima.
Rubroboletus sinicus is another species under investigation. Another bolete.
The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong also wrote in Baopuzi around 300 CE about this effect from a mushroom and it seems to be common knowledge in pockets of China. Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén.
I also found this bit funny from the Wikipedia:
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
"Little people people" or does the second rén have a different meaning here?
Usually there isn't a second 人 (rén) being reduplicated here.
人人 does mean “everyone,” but that's a different construction, and Chinese noun reduplication isn't generally equivalent to adding Spanish -ito. You may also see 小人儿 (xiǎo rénr), where 儿 is a colloquial/diminutive suffix.
You can say something like 「你看！可愛的狗狗」 and it’s “look! A cute doggy” (reduplicating 狗 gǒu). On the other hand you could say 「人人都知道她是小三！」 and it means “everybody knows that she’s (his) mistress!” (reduplicating 人 rén).
狗狗 doggy 猫猫 kitty 鸟鸟 birdie 宝宝 baby
And it kind of works for verbs too: 看看 [take a] looky
> Reduplication is sometimes employed in verbs and adjectives to enhance the effect of them.
> 胖胖的 pàng pàng de ('quite fat') from 胖 pàng ('fat')
This is the exact opposite of how I'd understand it. Saying someone is 胖 is just calling them fat (rude), but 胖胖的 is teasing, cute, chubby, etc.
Coffee has well known ill-effects, I think every coffee drinker at one point have drank too much and felt them themselves. Apparently such a big topic that it isn't just a section of the Caffeine page, it has it's very own Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_toxicity
But despite that, this mushroom is not a popular recreational drug. Much like amanita muscaria, which certain people insist must be great if used right, is common as dirt, and yet is so unpopular as a drug that it isn't even restricted.
By these same accounts, you'll get sick. It's unpleasant. Not even the most enthusiastic "psychonauts" seem to manage to take joy in this thing, little people or not.
Psilocybe, the genus containing the most commonly cultivated magic mushroom, is also quite common. It is globally distributed with native species on every continent (less antarctica ofc). It didn't become illegal because it was common in the "wild", but because of the cultivation of one particular species at home and in closets.
A. muscaria on the other hand has never been successfully cultivated as far as we know. You would be surprised how many powerful psychoactive "drugs" can be found in ecosystems around the world
Most people don't even know about it or have the means to access it as its either not available or not legal in their jurisdiction so not accurate. About 45% of the adults drink. How much lower would that percentage be if alcohol was little known and subjected to the same regulations psychedelics are under?
No, intent matters. If you drugged someone with caffeine (or someone drank it not knowing what it was) then their symptoms would also be called ill effects.
It's a interesting train of thought if nothing else. How would we "prove" a thing like "humanity benefits from being able to create, share and read books?" for example? Or that we can organize in grassroot movements? It's also really hard to qualify directly, as the impact is so indirect.
Same with psychedelics, a lot of scientists, researchers, creatives or even business-people attribute psychedelic usage to some of their success in their fields, but how can we really know if it was because of that or not?
If you do want to get into the "where big":
Shamanic/ritual/religious/social practices that wholly involve hallucinatory experiences (both with and without the aid of hallucinogenic substances) are well attested and documented throughout human development.
So the existence is there; if you want to argue that actually it was a Bad Thing for human collectives, from Siberia to the Amazon, from 50k years ago to the present day, to engage in these practices and that they'd have been much better off Not Doing It, I guess the burden of that proof is on you?
Your analogy is exactly backwards.
How is that different from psychedelics? We can "see" their physical counterparts (and chemical reactions) in people's head and body as they trip too.
The adverse effects of psilocybin are well known and documented and we know for sure that it’s not physically dangerous.
For the trip part we mostly know how it work and how interact and it can be healing (or bad trip depending on the context).
Still you may have have digestive adverse effects, not because of poisoning but because the human gut cannot digest crude mushrooms.
But you will not be physically sick per se like you would be with a bacteria or a toxin, your immune system will not fight anything.
I just was under the impression that from a 'medical(?)' point of view, the trip is nothing more than food poisoning
I'm sure most will disagree with me, that's ok. In fact, it's generally required of most to virtually "stone" anyone espousing these viewpoints in order to maintain your position in the post-corporeal hierachy... Wouldn't want this tribe to appear sympathetic to the wrong viewpoints.
This function is listed as a side effect of being on these meds. Which is true, it's not being used to treat depression, though is often being used to treat people with depression and treat the root cause of that depression. It just also happens to "perk" you up.
To wit: multiple people here have definitely heard the thing you have yet to hear.
https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/27/12/3737
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-nutrition/harvard-st...
A lot of sold-as pure isomers are also simply racemic. People often won't notice that either (due to placebo and other factors), but they won't be getting the full benefit they wanted.
There are outliers like myself of course that cannot have levoamphetamine, it completely disables me. I do not know why and I don't really care to find out. The one and only time I took regular adderall, I had to sleep it off.
Surely the most straightforward way is to undercook the mushrooms and run a blind controlled experiment where participants eat the shrooms and report on hallucinations.
What stopped them?
> 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.
From when this same story was covered in January
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-m...
I’ve been to parties longer than that.
So if the experiences really are real, it sounds to me like something wholly unique. Apparently there are no recorded deaths from the lilliputian mushrooms, and the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.
There are psychedelic phenethylamines that last 24 hours or more, so I don’t think the duration is a sign of anything really.
Maybe what causes the effect is not directly in the mushroom, but it needs first to metabolise into it? As in maybe the effect is caused by molecule A, but the mushroom only contains B which then breaks down into A. (for example by the liver or perhaps intestinal microbiome.)
I've never had benadryl hallucinations, or anything of the sort, but I have had quite a few very high fevers that resulted in very similar dreams and hallucinations - and I have zero desire to repeat them, to the point where I'll often delay going to sleep if I have a fever.
Datura is definitively a different beast, and definitely something I'd recommend others to stay away from even if I and my friend was dumb enough to consume it when we were young. LSD, mushrooms and friends are 100x better and more fun.
No, they are not. Let's not generalize. There is nothing funny or therapeutic about psychosis. We are leaving the dark ages of psychedelics. We don't need to bring them back.
In my opinion, the combination of not able to estimate dosage and losing the ability to tell reality from fiction for up to 2 days alone puts datura in its own separate category.
Someone tripping in psychdelics or even Salvia is really a different category to Datura where the line between reality and fiction is thin. No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably but moving coherently and overall looking sane while doing things that on closer look don't make sense.
It's wild seeing someone fully interact with a reality that isn't there and then come back not knowing anything about what happened. I had a friend in the early 2000's that had us video tape and babysit him. He had a half hour long conversation with his dead mother on a telephone that wasn't there. Also, he chain smoked non existent cigarettes for hours. He knew we were there and interacted with us, but he had no continuity.
Ok, finally it's clear you don't actually seem to have a clue what you're talking about. "Deliriant" is not some scientific classification term, it's a subset of hallucinogens some people like to use to distinguish between more visual psychedelics and less ones. And yes, psychedelics and hallucinogens are for all intents and purposes synonyms.
Again, Datura sucks, stay away from it, horrible drug and no fun at all. But the fact that you think that psychedelics automatically mean "No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably" again gives the impression you're not actually giving these drugs the seriousness they warrant. They're wonderful tools but should be used correctly and with a proper understanding of what they actually are and do.
3 day non stop trip sounds .. not great, if it ain't great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_committee
/s
I think you would have to dose people without knowledge of that phenomenon
So instead of a single experiment where half of the people get it and half don’t, the experiment will be repeated ten times with the same people over a few months, different meals each time and in total each person will get hallucinogens in their food either zero or one times.
And then you see what effects people report and if that correlates well with who was actually given the hallucinogens, and if there is a lot of placebo among the rest of the people each time that they were not given hallucinogens.
2. Multiple times per person over months risks attrition which gonna mess it up, and the statistical power increase you get could be offset by that (eg if a person gets it they may not be motivated to come again for the placebo). On the other hand ppl may be more motivated if they know they are gonna get it at least once so dunno.
3. Placebo with hallucinogens is always tricky. I would use psilocybin as (extra or only) control, esp if you test for little ppl. This way you can test if they report more tiny ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
I guess you can be upfront about unknown unknowns, and most human experiments have some of those, but I assume there are standards to keep those to a minimum.
That's why you do randomisation and double-blinding.
Coward, basically. I have no idea why on earth you'd travel the world looking for a specific hallucinogen and then just try to sequence it and toss it, and then waste everyone's time writing papers saying you essentially have a hunch about the mushroom's effects.
Beyond terrible science.
That being said one claim here would be that allowing self-experimentation would pressure people into self experimenting due to how our academia and labs are structured these days i.e. a junior scientists could be pressured into self experimentation by their superiors. So this is definitely not as clear-cut as one might think.
As someone who suffered badly with ulcers in my teens I'm particularly grateful for his work. One course of antibiotics and I never had that problem again.
More so for him and his collaborator having dinner each year when the Nobel prizes were announced in anticipation of the call from the Nobel Prize Committee. Legends.
If people get rewarded for self experimentation, either directly with prices or indirectly with fame and success, more people will try do it. That certainly does raise ethical concerns. It worked out for people you mentioned but there will be many others who might harm themselves doing it.
In the case of self-testing it raises concerns of objectivity, not just in terms of perception and observation but with regards to bias and intent, throwing into question the results and reasons for the study.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Also, to get stronger results you would probably want to conduct the experiment on participants who don't have an expectation of seeing little people, so that rules out locals or people who heard of or eaten the mushroom before.
Something isn’t ethical or unethical, somebody just doesn’t like it. They might have a reason for it at best.
There are very strict rules for scientific experiments _because_ we know that without them, just guided by "common sense" or "be reasonable", someone would get blinded by ambition or "the potential" and go further than the majority want to accept.
Anyone can "experiment" without it being an accepted scientific experiment. But then they're personally responsible for any and all bad outcomes. If you follow the rules and get the experiment pre-approved, you'll likely be covered by your employer's insurance and free from criminal liability . That's a very good incentive.
I agree there ought to be rules, but ethics is just a word to make things sound fair when it’s just an authoritative decision, often taking bad arguments (like religious ones or public misconceptions) unnecessarily into account.
Maybe having the same chemical stimulants going through the same basic processing hardware causes the same outputs. But that's just like my opinion man.
> It doesn't matter which side of the road you drive on. It matters that everyone else is also driving on that side.
I bet if all our brains were wired to constantly see little people, we would adapt and eventually pick up on subtle cues related to the environment or our emotions.
Some student taking an intro to cultural anthropology course would be shocked to find out that some culture has a very different relationship to their little people as she does to her little people. Strangers making small talk on the subway would ask each other what their little people have been up to today. Someone on Hackernews would be reading an article about an herb that can make the little people completely invisible for days.
1. There are invisible tiny people that only a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way can let you see
2. There aren't invisible tiny people but a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way makes you hallucinate a specific thing
0. There are tiny people who are not invisible but there is something that makes it so humans ignore them. That specific mushroom interfered with whatever that is so that we can see them.
An argument for #0 and in favor of #2 is the #2 requires the mushroom to cause an hallucination that includes a lot of generated detail to be realistic and consistent with how an actual tiny person would behave and affect the world.
#0 on the other hand is just turning something off.
An argument for #0 over #1 is that #0 does not require actual invisibility. If there were actually invisible tiny people we still probably would have discovered by now the physical mechanism that can make things invisible, which w e have not. Unless we are going to consider magic or psychic powers or some other such thing completely beyond known physics we can almost certainly rule out actual invisibility.
If they aren't invisible, my cat would have caught and killed dozens of them, and then I'd be smelling their rotting corpses around my house and slipping on their bodies.
Also presumably they'd end up in many pictures, which even if we somehow ignored them still in all photographs AI would still see, as would car lidar systems, etc.
(I guess the likelier theory is that a mushroom that causes hallucination is causing hallucination)
Also of course the tiny people do not seem to causally interact with their physical environment in any measurable way (at least to observers of the test subject) so that already strongly points towards hallucinations but that kind of thinking isn't how you get a grant.
What if we all see the exact same thing
That also describes data centers ;)
0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=ufDqfQxPnJo
How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
How could an index finger contain an entire movie? presses play
There are some hallucinogens that only produce auditory hallucinations. We don't really have a reason to think those are real sounds.
There are others that will not make you visually hallucinate in the regular sense, but will mess with how your brain interprets what you see - scrambling your internal visual object classifiers, so to speak - so that distinct things sort of melt together in your mind.
Hallucinogens are wild. But I think they are the same as any other drug that has predictable effects, like alcohol or pot.
Maybe it throws us for a loop because subjective experience of hallucinogens are so bizarre and varied and often intense. They truly do weird things to us.
I understand what you’re trying to say, but this sentence could be an argument against DNA. It’s also chemical compounds that contain an entire script of what our species can and cannot do - and much more.
So I decided to look up mushroom poisoning (in the dictionary) and some stuff about potential asphyxiation ~18 (IIRC, it's been a while) hours later made decide no, the risk of dying in my sleep next night is NOT worth it, into the trash it goes.
And foraging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzi0odGy4M
I had a, idk, spell one afternoon where I saw this quilt we had on the wall open up at all the squares, and thousands of tiny people/elves poured out. They marched around carrying little boxes and were all around me.
I remember it so vividly more than 30 years later because it freaked me out so much. Tried telling my parents about it and they just dismissed it as a nightmare, but I swear I was awake, just out of it with fever.
Anyways, it was early 90's, and I know I was close to the dangerous temperatures of high fever. Perhaps the brain does interesting hallucinations in these situations?
Have never hallucinated or had anything like that happen since.
It's also not the topic we're here to discuss. Go be mad elsewhere, please.
Also, machine elves are not all humanoid. Some of them are complex geometrical shapes that are too complicated to parse. It was very fascinating to read about this phenomenon. I remember that what people described felt like some kind of Internet that is accesses with your consciousness.
Repeat the experiment and instruct the participants to ask the Elf for the solution to P=NP and let’s see what happens!
What happens if you see Brown Jenkins?
> effects can range from mild nausea and twitching to drowsiness, cholinergic crisis-like effects (low blood pressure, sweating and salivation), auditory and visual distortions, mood changes, euphoria, relaxation, ataxia, and loss of equilibrium (like with tetanus)
> In cases of serious poisoning the mushroom causes delirium, somewhat similar in effect to anticholinergic poisoning (such as that caused by Datura stramonium), characterised by bouts of marked agitation with confusion, hallucinations, and irritability followed by periods of central nervous system depression. Seizures and coma may also occur in severe poisonings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Symptoms
In Russia, it's instantly recognizable as a poisonous mushroom - it's a symbol of "danger" that's as obvious as a skull-and-crossbones. Here, in America, most people I've talked to don't even know what it is.
I think those kinds of myths are just natural progressions of exaggerations and oral storytelling
Swedish tradition has it that trolls would replace human babies with their own babies. It does not take a long leap of imagination to to see how this could be used as an excuse for the practice of putting unwanted/deformed babies out into the forest ”for the wolves”. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how common that practice might have been, since it would presumably stem from prehistoric times)
There’s definitely scope for a horror story here…
From the stories I've read it also doesn't sound people are experiencing outright delirium although the experience can probably be pretty stressful if you don't know what is happening.
this tv show ( meet youself, cast by Liu yifei, who also played Mulan(2020)) has a short part is about the 'tiny people': https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVoza_qE3ww
And cannabis. It's hippy heaven.
Season two will be out next year and I am curious to see how it goes. Towards the end of season one, the side effects were starting to get interesting, possibilities of it turning dark abound.
I'm just glad that after Joe Bennets previous show Scavengers Reign got axed after one season that we will finally get to see some of his stuff expanded.
There's still hope for a second season FWIW. At least the story is mapped up, if not more preprod stuff, it's been a while since I looked into it.
Would dogs taking the L. asiatica see little humans or little dogs? Probably neither, but then does that mean the fungus had targeted humans genetically?
So would dogs see little humans or little dogs? We can't say for sure. But the best guess might actually be most likely little dogs, or maybe little smells of little dogs. Dogs show conspecific preference (species-focus) while we show facial preference [2] and they have a strong focus on olfactory sense while we're more visual. The vividness might show up in ways we can't really perceive through smell like they can.
And the answer to "does that mean the fungus has targeted humans genetically" is almost definitely no. The study the article is based on [3] mentions that lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom, appear across cultures' folklore, and are reported in alcohol withdrawal, dementia, and macular degeneration. The effect seems fundamental to how the human mind and brain work. So it's more likely that the mushroom is disrupting something and the brain is resolving that disruption into little people, because that's what it does with pattern matching.
This mushroom is an ectomycorrhizal symbiote of the Yunnan pine tree, is ancient with the genus being at least 5 million years old compared to modern humans 300k, and requires undercooking which isn't compatible with human targeting so it doesn't make sense to have any genetic human target.
The fungus supplies a non-targeted disruption and the resulting little people content we describe is the human brain's response. A dog getting the same disruption would resolve it into whatever a dog's machinery produces, or maybe they metabolize it into nothing recognizable.
Pretty damn cool.
[1] https://consciousnesslibrary.org/research/29070-correlation-... [2] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/43/8396 [3] https://consciousnesslibrary.org/research/27751-phylogenomic...
very utilitarian and anthropocentric world view.
Why would a random thing in the world specifically targeting humans with some niche effect? Did cocoa plant target humans specifically with its pleasing flavor (after having been heavily processed), while being toxic for many other animals?
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedychrum_rutilans, a parasite on a parasite. Did it target beewolves specifically? And now its hosts are dying, was it his fault he chose the 'wrong' target?
Not the anthropocentricity is to criticise, but the idea of nature targeting. OP asked a well meaning question where sth. can be be learned from. Thank you.
The level of consciousness where the phrase targeting makes sense is way higher.
>> targeted humans
With utilitarian and anthropocentric world view you mean the 'target thinking' ascribing intention to nature, and not what is targeted, which are only incidentally humans here.
I think "every culture has a dragon" is kinda misleading.
"Every culture has a creature that got translated as a dragon" seems closer to the truth. The creatures themselves have a great variety between them.
Lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom. There are myths about tiny people in pretty much every culture's folklore. People have also reported these hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal, dementia, macular degeneration and other neurological conditions. So, it seems like this phenomenon is fundamental to how the human mind and brain work, but we don't know what causes it or how to treat it.
That's what makes this mushroom different — it reliably produces this effect
(It was 2 specific species out of 200, and I hope that not mentioning which part of the plant she ingested would deter people from trying. The plant is also slightly poisonous, could weaken your kidneys. Weak kidneys no fun)
The Unexplained Laser Experiment That Breaks Reality
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5YiFEghnrw
I'm not advising eating undercooked boletes but that would possibly result in finding new species that have this effect