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Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified
- jambalaya8 1mo agoThat'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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- vsviridov 1mo agoHalf of the plot of Common Side Effects :)
- ColdStream 1mo agoAbsolutely 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.
- smnscu 1mo agoI thought Common Side Effects was great, then I watched Scavengers Reign. Absolutely mindblown. Possibly the best scifi _thing_ I've ever watched. 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.
- vsviridov 1mo agoI found a great sense of unease watching Scavengers Reign. So much so I haven't finished it yet...
- playerm1 1mo agoSame here. That was definitely a "nuke it from orbit" type planet for me.
- LoganDark 1mo agoI can't wait until this compound is identified and available somewhere (incl. black markets). I would love to try it just out of curiosity.
- jamiek88 1mo agoFortunately, it’s inevitable. :D
- Yuitea1 1mo agoRealistically speaking, this substance causes irreversible damage to the kidneys and nervous system, so trying it is not recommended.
- waysa 1mo agoWhy wait? Book a flight to Yunnan, order a tasty mushroom soup or get a fresh batch from the markets.
- andrewstuart 1mo agoI can imagine the packaging of it being sold commercially
- undebuggable 1mo agoMost 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.
- ghgr 1mo agoIn case you're wondering like me, I think parent is referring to elephant skulls being mistaken for one-eyed, giant creatures.
- Schlagbohrer 1mo agoI assume the global mythology around dragons comes from finding dinosaur bones
- s1artibartfast 1mo agoSeems like many bones would do. Whales would be a lot more common i imagine.
- lesostep 1mo agoWell, 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.
- undebuggable 1mo agoAncient Greeks were finding skulls of dwarf elephants during masonry works and quarrying in Sicily.
- anentropic 1mo agoWasn't that later debunked though?
- dash2 1mo ago> 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. There’s definitely scope for a horror story here…
- cubefox 1mo agoOr a Disney animation.
- conception 1mo agoI’m pretty sure The Borrowers already did this one.
- yreg 1mo agoThe 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. What stopped them?
- comboy 1mo ago> What stopped them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_committee
- embedding-shape 1mo agoIs 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?
- criddell 1mo agoI think the implication is that it would never get by the IRB.
- nextaccountic 1mo agoIt doesn't matter if it's actually unethical. It just has to be approved by a board.
- carlosjobim 1mo agoOr what? The board is going to kick their asses?
- wizzwizz4 1mo agoYes. All the time the rest of the organisation spends on mandatory ethical training, the ethics board spends on martial arts.
- noduerme 1mo agoI'm surprised they sent it for analysis and no one just ate one to check for hobbits...
- Schlagbohrer 1mo agoAwesome
- recursivecaveat 1mo agoI 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.
- lesostep 1mo agoThat 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)
- culi 1mo agoProbably meant Ipomoea (morning glory. It's actually a fungus on the seeds not the plant itself)
- NetMageSCW 1mo agoWhat is it with fungus and hallucinations?
- culi 1mo agoPlenty of plants that cause hallucinations too. But fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. Maybe there's more overlapping biochemistry and pathways there
- adzm 1mo agoThose 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.
- wraptile 1mo agoyour eyes are usually closed during DMT trip so I don't think your hypothesis stands.
- xboxnolifes 1mo agoThankfully your brain continues working even when your eyes are closed.
- TonyStr 1mo agoRemember 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.
- colordrops 1mo agoAssuming your model of reality is materialist and all of reality is created by grey matter, then yes.
- birdsongs 1mo agoThis 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.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- misja111 1mo agoI 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.
- trencedamp 1mo agoThere's some variety of little people myth in most cultures. There's also giant myths in most and there's no mushroom for that. I think those kinds of myths are just natural progressions of exaggerations and oral storytelling
- Schmerika 1mo ago[dead]
- Jolter 1mo agoFolklore’s roots go deeper than a single species. 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)
- ipsum2 1mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717442 previously.
- yanhangyhy 1mo agoits 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. 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 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVoza_qE3ww
- dudefeliciano 1mo ago> all kinds of mushrooms/(and bugs) And cannabis. It's hippy heaven.
- ra 1mo agoI've often wondered if the fairies and leprechauns of Ireland and the pixies of Cornwall were due to some psychoactive mushroom people used to eat.
- qwertyboy 1mo agoAnnoyingly misleading title. From the article: 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
- j16sdiz 1mo agoWhat make this research paper different -- this is the first genetic study of this mushroom.
- karim79 1mo agoGoddamn ant men. Can't get rid of 'em.
- Yuitea1 1mo agoI’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?
- LoganDark 1mo agoI 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".
- ulrikrasmussen 1mo agoI 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.
- farfatched 1mo agoDo we understand the mechanism behind any hallucinations?
- ulrikrasmussen 1mo agoMaybe not, I don't know. But at least we understand the pharmacology of many of them, which I guess is what I actually meant.
- OGWhales 1mo agoI'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.
- roncesvalles 1mo agoBabe wake up, a new psychedelic drug just dropped.
- culi 1mo ago> 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).
- account42 1mo ago> Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén. "Little people people" or does the second rén have a different meaning here?
- eloisius 1mo agoThe effect of reduplicating is to make it diminutive. It like adding -ito to the end of a Spanish noun.
- plucas 1mo agoAre you sure? I thought that's what "xiǎo" was doing here, with "rén" being repeated meaning "everyone".
- eloisius 1mo agoI 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).
- guerrilla 1mo agoNothing like that in Europe? Explain gnomes and ferries.
- toilet 1mo agoFerries are a type of public transport people use to traverse bodies of water.
- reverius42 1mo agoAnd Gnomes are popular desktop environments.
- dluan 1mo agoThese 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.
- farfatched 1mo agoLink? (To any of the above.)
- dluan 1mo agoHere's one where you can probably make out what's happening lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0tyEhRWAHs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0tyEhRWAHs And foraging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzi0odGy4M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzi0odGy4M
- customguy 1mo agoI 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.
- pavel_lishin 1mo agoYep. 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.
- agnosticmantis 1mo agoWondering 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?
- fodkodrasz 1mo ago> 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?
- cachius 1mo agoWhy 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 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.
- fodkodrasz 1mo agoThe 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.
- cachius 1mo agoRight, and I think now I understand you better: >> 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.
- caniscrator 1mo ago[flagged]
- alpineman 1mo ago"Using DNA sequencing"...sure bro
- user20180120 1mo agoWhat about DMT and a laser experiment? The Unexplained Laser Experiment That Breaks Reality https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5YiFEghnrw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5YiFEghnrw
- jmkd 1mo agoSomewhere there are tiny people going "Don't let the giants eat those mushrooms!"
- AnodicElegy 1mo agoDomnauer 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 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!
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- luxuryballs 1mo agoThis means it's possible that commonly depicted clothing of gnomes and elves in art first originated from people seeing them and then drawing it!
- jsw97 1mo agoWhenever 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.
- eqmvii 1mo agosomething something machine elves...
- teddyh 1mo ago<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=On_the_Origin_of_the_%22Influencing_Machine%22_in_Schizophrenia&oldid=1345146294 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=On_the_Origin_of_...>
- xgkickt 1mo ago>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. That also describes data centers ;)
- teddyh 1mo agoIt’s the Torment Nexus.
- elwell 1mo agoWhy do people say "something something...", and why does it irk me?
- Yiin 1mo agothink 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.
- neuroelectron 1mo agoI thought they were specifically called the machine elves, or is that a different shared hallucination?
- hnbad 1mo agoWhen sparkies complain about "angry pixies" in the breaker panel, that's not what they mean.
- hmokiguess 1mo agoHa! No way. So fun! So, anyways, my friend is asking where can I buy some.
- culi 1mo agoI 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
- driggs 1mo agoIt'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.
- infinite_spin 1mo agoThe Hippy in me: "let's meet our new friends." The CEO in me: "I need hundreds of think pads."
- HarHarVeryFunny 1mo agoThe interesting thing is how any drug has such a specific "tiny people" effect, and what that says about how our brain works. The fact that many people report the same thing seems to imply there is a common cause based on how our perceptual system works - a separation of classification/identification (it's a person) from size determination. There seems to be a similar effect in very young children who think they can sit on a tiny dollhouse chair, or in a tiny toy car. I wonder how specific this "tiny people" effect is - is it just tiny people, or also tiny animals, or maybe distorted size perception in general (with the tiny people being the most noticeable part of that)?
- throwaway260124 1mo agoDoes it work on other animals? Do they see tiny people or tiny cats?
- wglb 1mo agoPaper in Mycologia https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00275514.2026.2670968 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00275514.2026.2...