A mushroom that makes people have the exact same hallucination

mathieuh

DMT also commonly induces visions of elves (the so-called "machine elves"). Having tried DMT several times I can't say it's something that ever happened to me personally but lots of people report seeing elves on DMT.

nl

It'd be amusing to try to trace legends of "little people" to incidence of these particular mushrooms. Not sure how you'd do that though.

Mistletoe

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsn3.70583 More info about what metabolites may be involved. I sent the Vice article to my girlfriend and she had a good question and wondered if the mice treated with it see even smaller little mice.

r721

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717442

flr03

I hallucinated gnomes after I took medicine they prescribed me at the hospital, following a bike accident.

keiferski

I wish there was a simple concept to explain this phenomenon: the appearance of widespread unified action (a "conspiracy" in the literal sense of the word), but only because the effects of doing X manifest themselves the same way in different places/people, often for biological reasons but more broadly for structural ones. I guess you could call it something like, "system-limited emergence," in the sense that different systems can have similar outputs if they are structured the same way. In other words, the idea is that differing groups of people don't see elves because they are all accessing some hidden reality full of elves, but rather because the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location. This maybe seems obvious for mushrooms or other substances, but I think the same concept applies to other phenomena too: the spread of ideas, political actions, etc. Or maybe I've just been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.

GuB-42

One thing from the article that isn't clear. Do people who see little people actually believe they are real, even when they know about the potential effect of these mushrooms? This is a fundamental difference between psychedelics such as psilocybin and deliriants like datura. Usually, with psychedelics, you know that what you are seeing is not real, or at least, that it is not normal. With deliriants, even if you know exactly what you took and the effect it has, the crazy things you are seeing feel real and perfectly normal until the effect wears off. What make me feel goes to the psychedelic side is that description talk about something wonderful, or at least worthy of attention. If it was a hallucination in its purest sense, the presence of little people would be no weirder than that of a cat or a dog. But the fact that it is generally considered unpleasant and not used for recreational or spiritual purposes is more of a deliriant thing.

adrianN

Where in the brain do visual hallucinations happen? I remember hearing that we can crudely reconstruct images from live scans of the brain. Does that work with hallucinations?

trick-or-treat

The elves are always there. The mushroom just lets us see them.

oxonia

Is this where Smurfs (Smurves?) came from?

rbanffy

It's fun to imagine there might be ways to tailor the chemistry to create highly specific imaging and sensations. Probably limited to imagery we have evolved with, because that's what must be embedded in our fundamental brain structure, but intriguing nevertheless.

animal531

There's a matching eye/brain condition where older people very rapidly develop cataracts or other eye problems and they spontaneously start seeing little people everywhere. Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.

philipwhiuk

This article ended before it really got interesting. I was hoping it would actually go into the brain chemistry and controlled trials underway.

alfiedotwtf

Turn on the TV and I tune to snow, the ask a room full of people who have just smoked marijuana what the collectively see.

invader

So they discovered Can-D from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch? Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...

1970-01-01

Quite a light article. There are entire lives dedicated to finding out what is really real and what is just a perception of reality. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-imagining-it/

TacticalCoder

There was a game called: "Little Computer People" [1]. I call those the... "Little Shrooms People" . [1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People#/media/...

Lucasoato

> The trip can last so long that it’s impractical as a recreational drug, which is why no culture seems to use the mushroom intentionally as a psychedelic. Not yet, at least. NOT YET

rsynnott

>That’s where researchers investigating “mushroom madness” ultimately dismissed the accounts as cultural myth after chemical tests turned up nothing. Makes sense since the species wasn’t formally described until 2015. [..] Domnauer visited Yunnan’s mushroom markets and asked vendors which of these mushrooms is the one that’s making people see little people? All the vendors said L. asiatica. This is a surprisingly common research failure mode. Actually talking to people is important. > Genetic testing confirmed its identity, and lab studies showed that extracts cause dramatic behavioral changes in mice Presumably, causing them to see little mice.

imglorp

Interesting paper that generalizes "Lilliputian Hallucinations" a little to other contexts: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Lilliputian-Hallucinat...