The quote is from Colin Domnauer, "a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica," quoted in "'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans" (BBC).
Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture....
In a 1991 paper, two researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described cases of people in Yunnan Province who had eaten a certain mushroom and experienced "lilliputian hallucinations" – the psychiatric term for the perception of tiny human, animal or fantasy figures....
[O]ther known psychedelic compounds also usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says. "I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations."
Do rats see little rats?
Are there other substances that produce such specific hallucinations? I ingest Grok to see answers. None seem as consistent as L. asiatica, but here's a bit of what Grok seemed to know:1. DMT — "Machine elves or autonomous entities.... Geometric hyperspace: Bright, colorful, metallic or plastic-like environments with fractal patterns, tunnels, or sci-fi cityscapes...."
2. Salvia divinorum —"Sensations of becoming 2D, like a page in a book, or being pulled into conveyor belts, zippers, or wheels—described as 'reality unzipping' or merging with objects (e.g., turning into furniture)."
3. Ibogaine — "Encounters with deceased relatives, spirits, or symbolic entities.... Fractals, palaces, celestial realms, or intricate patterns building to immersive worlds.... Ancestral figures, doctorcitos (healing spirits), or hybrid beings..."
4. Ayahuasca —"Jungle archetypes: Serpents... jaguars... birds, or plant spirits.... Fractals, palaces, celestial realms, or intricate patterns building to immersive worlds.... Ancestral figures, doctorcitos...."
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69 comments:
Sounds like a Donovan song.
The headline made me expect a pub in Ireland and the warning was to make sure the leprechauns were good and dead before you eat them. Cut in too soon and they’ll run away screaming.
I’ve always wondered about psychedelic experiences—why do you see odd but recognizable things behaving within the bounds of some basic rules? If the brain is short-circuiting, why don’t you just get static, like a TV on the fritz?
“And you've just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving low
Go ask Alice
I think she'll know”
The brain isn't short-circuiting, it's arranging sensory input in unusual ways. The images produced have no real value, in spite of what veteran trippers like to think. Normal consciousness evolved for a reason: to give us a reasonably accurate analog of external reality, so that we would be able to interact with it successfully.
Dems will want to franchise these restaurants.
One could interpret a phenomenon that occurs across geographic and cultural demographics with no connection to each other as reliable testimony, and therefore one can only see the tiny humans when temporarily provided biologically by a potion or food. Haven't there always been stories of "little people" throughout human history?
If the "consider the context" people are serious about their doctrine then let's take into account the very large picture provided by all of human existence, it's oral and recorded histories.
When I scroll on TikTok, I often get little stories of people smoking salvia and turning into a chair or a road sign or something and going through decades of life in that form then waking up and it's just 15 minutes later.
Thanks Poulin, but doesn't that just move the same problem back a step? The brain is arranging sensory input in unusual ways, so it's still functioning almost normally and stays within the rules despite the chemical interference.
I suppose the answer is that it's a form of survivorship bias--if the chemicals push the brain beyond the rules, you are having an overdose and you die.
Another win for Jonathan Swift.
"... "lilliputian hallucinations" – the psychiatric term for the perception of tiny human, animal or fantasy figures.."
Yeah, I looked through a window and surprise what I saw
Fairy in boots are dancing with a dwarf
If anyone doubts Black Sabbath's power-trio roots, watch especially Bill Ward on drums in this 1970 live version of...
Fairies Wear Boots
Going home late last night
Suddenly I got a fright
Yeah, I looked through a window and surprise what I saw
Fairy in boots are dancing with a dwarf
Alright now!
Yeah, fairies wear boots, and you gotta believe me
Yeah, I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no lies
Yeah, fairies wear boots, and you gotta believe me
I saw it, I saw it with my own two eyes
Alright now!
So I went to the doctor, see what he could give me
He said, "Son, son, you've gone too far
'Cause smokin' and trippin' is all that you do"
Yeah!
Would be even funnier if Peter Dinklage and friends were at the next table.
Attack of the Mushroom People…
Tim --- From an evolutionary standpoint, the brain that functions "almost normally" is at a disadvantage to the one that functions normally. Say, for instance, you're hunting in the jungle and a jaguar starts running towards you. If you're in a normal state of consciousness, you realize that the jaguar is going to kill you and you say to yourself "I better run." If you are tripping at the time, you think that the jaguar is your soul-mate, and he is approaching you to share with you the secrets of the universe. You die. So the problem isn't so much the chance of overdose, it's the chemical interference itself.
Like, I guess, many commenters here, the way I perceive the passage of time has accelerated as I get older. What was a month now passes in what seems a week. A week is now a day. Given that my store of remaining time is more and more limited, this is troubling.
If we can find a safe drug that slows this time perception down, I am a buyer.
This is a top ten all time post on my list of "Reasons I follow this blog."
Reports of people seeing little people came up in a Coast to Coast broadcast recently. I don't quite remember what the context was. I don't think they were talking about China, however.
I should pass a suggestion to IEEE to amend best practices docs to avoid certain restaurants takeout for power plant watchstanders.
This was covered in the Disney film "Darby O'Gill and the Little People" (1959)
Do rats see little rats?
I would tell you, but they say 'never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.'
Poulin, I don't understand why you keep talking about evolution. The topic under discussion is not a primitive hunter in the jungles of Africa, it's a person in a restaurant in China ingesting something a person in the jungles of Africa doesn't have access to and so evolution has noting to do with it.
People who see little people are the luckiest HBO's Game of Thrones fans in the world.
The Gnome Mobile (1967). Walter Brennan was trippin'.
There's always the rye ergot, which has a history of making Europeans see witches everywhere. So when it seems like there's witches about, there might be a fungus among us.
"Do rats see little rats?"
The bigger the rat, the harder it is to scare them away.
That is odd! Another example of "there are things we don't understand out there".
"Do rats see little rats?"
They say that's why Jeffrey Epstein sleeping with the fishes.
Maybe the little people are always there but our brains automatically filter them out because there are too f’ing many of them crawling all over the place all the time.
I wonder whether the atahuasca users who see "jungle archetypes" are naive users. It rather beggars belief that, say, an Inuit person would see jaguars if not prompted... but then, I've read that baby birds (was it chickens? Or am I totally misremembering and it was, like, lambs?) react to a hawk-shaped shadow before they've ever seen a hawk, or something like that, so what do I know?
I'm not a big fan of mushrooms, but I'll eat them when they're unavoidable; these, I kind of want to try.
I'm tempted to go with FredSays 's hypothesis at 7:41.
But do they program cheap?
Those little people were let loose into simulation by the people that listened to Steve Martin album "Let's Get Small" while tripping. It was the seventies. Things like that happened back then.
A whole new liminal space invasion.
That everyone sees the same thing - little people - suggests that the insights gained through tripping may not really be "personal insights into the user's psyche," but more some run-of-the-mill chemical interaction with the human brain. Disappointing, in a way.
Poulin, I don't understand why you keep talking about evolution.
Also, the legs are coming out from under the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Somewhere on the other side of the wall, groups of little people keep reporting remarkably consistent hallucinations of giants eating Chinese food.
@ChrisSchuon, Looks like someone else here has been reading about large mathematical errors in evolutionary fixation!
Sixth dimension beings.
All the mushroom eaters report seeing little people, but do the little people look the same to all the mushroom eaters?
Like, say Chinese mushroom eaters see little people who look Chinese, but do the little people look Chinese to Swedes who try these mushrooms in Sweden or do Swedes see little blonds with blue eyes?
Do Chinese mushroom eaters who consume the mushrooms in Sweden see the blonde, blue-eyed little people or do they still see little Chinese people and vice versa?
Thanks to Bob Boyd @7:59, I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue moment about a science fiction/fantasy series from the... late seventies? Early eighties? Something about... all the magic being real, only we've trained ourselves out of seeing it. Darn it, I can't get any closer than that.
There is of course Heinlein's Magic, Inc., but it wasn't that, although it fits Bob Boyd's hypothesis pretty well.
I think I still prefer FredSays's though. I shall step carefully - give them a chance to get out of the way.
The way Greek realist philosophy and its descendants approached the issue raised by the "things we see" when we take "magic" mushrooms was to say that our primary, basic rational thought is that there are beings. And of these beings, we all think to ourselves that there are various forms of being such as animal vegetable mineral. And we go on through life thus refining our understanding of being and its forms. And our memory can recall truths about beings. But also we have the strange capability to seem to see beings while all along we know they are not beings, they are what we call imaginary. "Imaginary" means they look like beings but they are produced in our mind, not found in the world. This is my understanding of the tradition of realist philosophy.
And, yes, I do know there is also a tradition of idealist philsophy which, I think, painted irself into a corner by the time of Kant and has never emerged. And I do know that there are other cultures which have never asked themselves what their rational basis is. But I don't have to give up rational conclusions merely because others don't ask why they think what they think. And I don't have to give up philosophic realism just because philosophic idealism failed. And those are the two main objections I have heard in my life to the conclusions of philosophic realism.
The question of what is an imaginary being and what is a real being is one of the great issues in life. That is specially true now because we're in contact with many different cultures which have many different answers to the question: what is a real and what is an imaginary being. Furthermore we are in contact with the way digital systems can manipulate pictures so that they are no longer a record of a being but they from the imagination; they are imaginary or about non-beings.
America's founders accepted philosophic realism in that they began their political thought with the natural law, with truths that were self-evident about human beings. This country now has many people who consider that philosophy failed when philosophic idealism failed and they have adopted Marxism or the social sciences which are the systems that filled the void. But, as Nietzche saw, these systems are the void, they do not fill it. And, as he saw, when people in general come to understand that their culture is telling them that there is no reason for anything, that they live in an irrational world, they will become irrational. Or some will. Usually the more rational people are, the more it bothers them to be told the world is irrational. Some go nuts. Screamimg at the sky. Following tyrants. Stealing without shame. Drugs.
But what most people are doing is simply rejecting the whole framing of the situation and holding by a tradition. All the big traditions are basically rational, as I understand the conclusions of analysis by philosophic rationalists, even if the traditions differ at certain points - on whether there are such beings as fairies, on which dreams are reliably about real beings, on seeing what future beings will do, and so on. Strangely, in the world today, traditions are more rational than the "rationalist" left although traditionally the left was more rational than basically rational traditions which were often encrusted with incredible superstitions.
I'm not a philosopher at all. I'm just an example of how someone conscious of being in the tradition of philosophic realism thinks about our times. I see that bringing forward the American tradition brings forward a reasoned approach to the world of beings while the left tradition, springing as it does from the failure of philosophic idealism (which was taken as the failure of philosophy or reason itself) brings forward an irrational approach.
The times set before you life and death. Choose life. Understand our Constitution and uphold it.
Ever since his last trip to China, Tim Walz has been trying figure out how to bring thousands of these little people to Minnesota to open daycares and vote Democrat.
Murakami must have ingested that mushroom when he wrote 1Q84, and perhaps some other books as well.
I told my wife about this post. Without looking up from her book she said, "Don't trust the little people. They're assholes" and went back to reading.
that explains what that guy in hollywood was taking.
What, no leprechauns?
The first "Men in Black." Little people living in a locker, honoring their founder: O Kay can you see?
This type of hallucination is a known phenomenon in people who have lost much of their eyesight. It has something to do with the way the brain processes the distorted images the eye is picking up. Maybe the mushrooms are messing with the eye more than the brain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations
"Do rats see little rats? "
Yes, we call them mice.
There is no evidence that the little people are not real.
They should test this by publishing a report about how growing numbers of people are seeing [new made up thing] and see if people start report seeing that now.
Mary Beth -
Perhaps there would be an increase in people reporting seeing little people, but it would be difficult to tease out whether they are "following the crowd" or reporting things that they saw, but were too embarassed to reveal before it became known that other saw them too.
I've had LSD three times (last time 1982) and Psilocybin mushrooms maybe 8-times (last time 2023). I have never had hallucinations while fellow trippers reported patterns colors and other transient visual effects. What happens to me is it turns on my adhd with super hyper focus. So therefore I get involved in doing lots of different things from hiking in the mountains, lifting weights, playing golf, going to a grateful Dead show and last but not least, working all day long with a chainsaw on the side of Sierra Nevada mountains.
I have no desire to see little people crawling across my plate. My experiences indicate that instead of short-circuiting my brain, what these substances do is completely open up my primary electrical channels allowing higher throughput.
Like, say Chinese mushroom eaters see little people who look Chinese, but do the little people look Chinese to Swedes who try these mushrooms in Sweden or do Swedes see little blonds with blue eyes?
Iceland has a fascination with "Huldufólk" (which means "Hidden People"), who are described as elves or gnomes believed to live in nature. It is a widespread belief, and actually influences (and occasionally halts or changes) things like road and building construction.
Curiously, Iceland also has psychedelic mushrooms that grow in grassy areas where cows or sheep tend to graze. Historically, Iceland had exceedingly little to eat, so historical Icelanders almost certainly consumed these mushrooms as a part of their diet. Coincidence? In any event, the Hidden Folk were not seen as small Chinese people.
Fleas the size of rats
Sucked on rats the size of cats
And ten thousand hemorrhoids
Split into small tribes
I tried the mushrooms once… my wife and I ate a spaghetti dinner with friends that had the mushrooms sent south by friends who’d moved to Oregon, where they were plentiful.
We had some fairly wigged-out laughs. And then - out of the blue - I heard a still, small voice tell me, “Do not involve yourself with this”.
And I never did them again.
Little girls would love this. And so would parents—no doll stuff to clutter the house.
Do rats see little rats?
"You know, once I was crazy. You see that button hole? Rats used to come out of that!"
I'm suspicious of this happening without the consumer's previous knowledge of what others have experienced. The power of suggestion, in other words.
.5 Beer -- Makes men see enlarged muscles under their shirt.
Some of those effects aren't very specific, but maybe that's also true of the mushrooms. And how many of the effects are cultural? If you try Ayahuasca in the Amazon, you may see jaguars, but in Manhattan?
"Doctorcito?" "'Doctorcito' is Spanish for "little doctor" or "doc," often used affectionately, and refers to a popular bilingual children's book about a boy helping his grandmother with medical needs, highlighting language bridging and family care."
I guess it helps get the kids started early in their careers as drug dealers.
Bob Boyd, given the recent stories about Chinese birthing centers in e.g. Houston, I think the invasion has progressed beyond needing Gov. Walz.
Howard, what kind of chain is good for cutting granite?
The prevalence of certain flavors of ghost / haunted house stories in the late 19th and early 20th century is some times blamed on the hallucinatory effects of low-level carbon monoxide exposure from indoor gas lights.
Are the little people naked? If not, what do they wear?
Bob Boyd said...
"Are the little people naked? If not, what do they wear?"
Underwear. Stolen underwear. It's a business operation.
If you would like to read an amusing quasi-scientific ethnobotanical journal article about this mushroom and its side effects, the mycologist David Arora (whom I have met several times) wrote it up in 2008. It's four or five pages, with some photos of the mushroom and the people who collect and eat it. You can download it in PDF format here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226076639_Xiao_Ren_Ren_The_Little_People_of_Yunnan
It's a real oddity. Hallucinogenic boletes, i.e. those related to porcini, with spongy pores on the undersurface of the cap instead of laminar gills, were unheard of before this discovery.
Touche, Fred. Gneiss one.
Jamie: That hawk/chicken thing you mentioned was written by Joseph Campbell in I believe his Primitive Mythology book. He called them engrams, which were somehow imprinted on the brain before birth through the experience of previous generations. Rather Lamarckian I think.
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