Magic mushrooms, an informal group of fungi that contain the naturally occurring psychedelic substance psilocybin, are known for inducing powerful hallucinations. They can induce feelings of euphoria, a sense of belonging in the world, and distort reality by messing with the brain’s visual cortex, turning the world into a trippy, shimmering pocket dimension full of pulsating geometric patterns.
Now we’re hearing about a lesser-known species, known for its umami-forward flavor in China, which can induce far more specific hallucinations — when not prepared correctly by a chef, that is.
As the BBC reports, the mushroom, Lanmaoa asiatica, can cause you to see countless tiny people everywhere you look. Doctors in the Yunnan province of China are treating hundreds of cases a year of people having visions of small, “pint-sized, elf-like figures” crawling around and climbing up walls.
“At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,’” University of Utah doctoral candidate in biology Colin Domnauer told the broadcaster.
“It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there,” he added.
The hallucinations can last a very long time, up to three days after a 12-to-24-hour onset, and often result in hospitalizations. That’s considerably longer and more severe than the average psilocybin trip.
“One elder tribesman in Papua New Guinea describes this effect, explaining how ‘he saw tiny people with mushrooms around their faces. They were teasing him, and he was trying to chase them away,’” Donmauer wrote in a November piece for the University of Utah.
“When I lifted the tablecloth higher, the heads came off and stuck to the bottom of the cloth and the bodies kept marching in place… I did this many times, at two-minute intervals, and each time they were there, marching and grinning… I measured them, too… they were [one inch] high,” a professor in Yunnan told Donmauer, recounting his own trip.
Domnauerhas been trying to hunt down the origins of the mushroom and investigate how it affects the brain, producing such surprisingly similar hallucinations in different people.
“It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time,” he told the BBC. “I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more.”
The appearance of tiny humans after ingesting the mushrooms does appear in academic literature, describing them as “liliputian hallucinations,” or “elusive little people.”
Even Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist known for being the first to synthesize, ingest, and learn about the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), failed to identify the molecules that caused the mysterious hallucinations.
The mushrooms got their formal Latin name in 2015, yet many questions remain about their psychedelic qualities, a gap Donmauer is hoping to fill with his research.
In experiments involving mice, he found that the animals fell into a stupor after being administered extracts of the mushroom.
Donmauer has also determined that the L. asiatica mushrooms do not contain psilocybin, the substance that gives magic mushrooms their hallucinogenic qualities.
The main thing that sets it apart is that trips don’t vary greatly depending on the individual, unlike those triggered by psilocybin which can differ greatly.
The “perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported,” Donmauer told the BBC. “I don’t know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations.”
The researcher has yet to eat the mushroom himself. Given the length of the trips and the chances of being hospitalized, we can’t blame him.
“While many questions remain, one thing is for certain: Lanmaoa asiatica reminds us that the world of mushrooms, even those found in markets and on dinner plates, conceals mysteries and wonders we’ve yet to imagine,” Donmauer wrote in his piece for the University of Utah.
“Somewhere between traditional folklore and modern biology, between the wild forest floor and the sterile scientific laboratory, lies a story still unfolding, a story that may begin with something as seemingly innocuous as a bowl of mushroom soup,” he added.
More on magic mushrooms: Evidence Grows That Tripping on Shrooms Might Increase Your Lifespan
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