Meet The Mushroom That Makes People Have The Exact Same Hallucination

Biologist Colin Domnauer is reopening an old case that Chinese health officials stopped caring about. Every summer, residents of Yunnan province come to hospitals complaining that they are hallucinating little elf-like people. They would see little people marching under their doors, climbing over their walls and clinging to their furniture.

Health officials took care of this. He looked into this a few years ago and found that this was the reason lanmaoa asiaticaA mushroom that has been eaten in Yunnan for years. It is believed to have a rich, umami flavor, and locals know you have to cook it well, not to bring out that flavor, but to eliminate the hallucinogenic properties of the mushroom.

Scientists call these “Lilliputian hallucinations”, a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or imaginary figures. If you’ve seen the show Adult Swim Common side effectsYou may be familiar with the surreal trippiness of this apparently very real form of mushroom-based hallucination. What makes this particular hallucinogenic mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, in different cultures.

It’s always the little elven people.

This mushroom makes people experience the same hallucinations

The BBC reports that similar cases were reported in China in the early 1990s and even earlier in Papua New Guinea. It was here that researchers investigating “mushroom madness” ultimately dismissed the accounts as cultural myth after chemical tests found nothing. This makes sense as this species was not formally described until 2015.

Domnauer visited mushroom markets in Yunnan and asked vendors which of these mushrooms was making people look at little people? all sellers said L. Asiatique. Genetic testing confirmed its identity, and laboratory studies showed that the extract caused dramatic behavioral changes in rats. Domnauer later found the same species in the Philippines, despite its different appearance, meaning the mushroom and its effects are much more widespread than anyone might have guessed.

Interestingly, the active compound is not psilocybin, a hallucinogenic chemical found in shrooms that people take recreationally or medicinally. Hallucinations take 12 to 24 hours. Onset and can last for a long time, sometimes so long that hospitalization and careful monitoring is required. The trip can last so long that it is impractical as a recreational drug, which is why no cultures knowingly use mushrooms as a psychedelic. Not yet, at least.

What still remains to be understood is how this fungus produces such reliable, persistent hallucinatory visions around the world, in all cultures. Finding those answers could open up new insights into brain disorders and human consciousness, while offering researchers a whole new area of ​​fungal chemicals to play with.