'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans (www.bbc.com)
from silence7@slrpnk.net to world@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 03:49
https://slrpnk.net/post/33178207

#world

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Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz on 23 Jan 2026 04:28 next collapse

Oh lol yeah, I’ve had a couple chinese friends from over there tell me we should hang out and try as much, I guess mushrooms don’t count as drugs in Yunnan.

I should be able to try some over the summer.

b_tr3e@feddit.org on 23 Jan 2026 05:41 collapse

Idk, but 12 to 24 hours trippin’ doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. To most people four hours are funny but slightly exhausting, eight defiitely too much and I don’t even want to think of 24…

Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz on 23 Jan 2026 07:21 next collapse

Eh, I’m sure they wouldn’t offer if it was unpleasant.

b_tr3e@feddit.org on 23 Jan 2026 23:25 collapse

As far as I understood the article the shrooms were not offered for their psychedelic effect but as ordinary food - with the advice to cook them long enough to eliminate the psychoactive bits.

Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz on 24 Jan 2026 02:13 collapse

Correct, by the restaurants. But that doesn’t stop individuals from suggesting we eat the mushrooms that make you trip. I’ve heard people from Yunnan have a reputation for this sort of thing.

30p87@feddit.org on 23 Jan 2026 09:02 collapse

14 hours of LSD was OK, with enough time and starting early with enough sleep, that’d be a lot of fun

bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 23 Jan 2026 04:39 next collapse

As seen in the show Common Side Effects

LodeMike@lemmy.today on 23 Jan 2026 05:15 collapse

The characters look like they are regular at Little Bits from R&M. Is C.S.E. good?

bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 23 Jan 2026 05:25 next collapse

It’s fantastic

loutr@sh.itjust.works on 23 Jan 2026 08:07 collapse

As is Scavengers reign, the creator’s previous show.

pntha@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 09:29 next collapse

phenomenal

Blackfeathr@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 12:54 next collapse

As an aficionado for good animation and storytelling, it is very good, I highly recommend it.

MonkeMischief@lemmy.today on 24 Jan 2026 17:37 collapse

(whispers) “Little Biiiiiits!

Jilanico@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 04:54 next collapse

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliputian_hallucination

random_character_a@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 04:59 next collapse

There has to be something similar in nordics. Old pagan beliefs are jam packed with little people.

tal@lemmy.today on 23 Jan 2026 06:43 next collapse

I mean, there are a number of cases in mythologies where you can find common elements. I’d buy that in some cases, there might be common elements causing it, but I don’t think that it’d need to be a common hallucinogen.

Off-the-cuff, some examples:

bstix@feddit.dk on 23 Jan 2026 06:54 next collapse

Also, the Smurfs

andallthat@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 07:18 collapse

Gargamel, The Movie. An old man living alone with his cat is slowly driven to madness by the soup of mushrooms he always boils in his cauldron.

einkorn@feddit.org on 23 Jan 2026 08:30 next collapse

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria

random_character_a@lemmy.world on 24 Jan 2026 08:29 collapse

Very common, can certainly get you fucked up and destroy your internal organs, but no cases that would have reported seeing little people.

discocactus@lemmy.world on 24 Jan 2026 03:52 collapse

Some native American tribes too. Apache for example.

leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 23 Jan 2026 05:26 next collapse

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/0a9a56a6-2a53-45fe-9be9-ae8c4f2dbb9a.webp">

aesthelete@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 07:21 collapse

Hahaha first thing I thought of

treadful@lemmy.zip on 23 Jan 2026 05:50 next collapse

“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,’” says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica.

I’m not sure if I would take them seriously.

LodeMike@lemmy.today on 23 Jan 2026 06:17 collapse

I would have taken them seriously;)

nialv7@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 06:19 next collapse

What if those little people are real and the mushroom just allows us to see them?

photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 23 Jan 2026 07:07 next collapse

Occam’s razor: are they real beings such that we can’t usually see them and they don’t interact with our universe in ways we can otherwise measure, or is it more likely that they’re hallucinations caused by a chemical that make our brains think funny thoughts?

nialv7@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 07:30 collapse

i think there’s an easy way to check. ask two people having this hallucination if what they are seeing is consistent with each other.

photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 23 Jan 2026 07:47 next collapse

People on drugs don’t usually make the most reliable observers. But I suppose if you can insulate the trippers from one another their answers wouldn’t influence each other. Then you could interview them about the same scene and see if you get different answers. Again, these wouldn’t be reliable observers and idk how eloquent their answers would be under the influence.

All of this to say I’d put my money on drugs causing hallucinations, as we have decades of research which confirm this.

Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip on 24 Jan 2026 07:20 collapse

There’s always the possibility that our brains filter out aspects of reality for the sake of our sanity, or for some other unknown reason, and that these drugs lift the filter, so to speak, which is also proven to be true to a degree, like how shrooms sort of break down established beliefs/definitions and understanding, and I suspect that phenomenon is probably being misconstrued or inaccurately extrapolated on to assume the filter is about seeing something extrinsic about reality and not just revealing the internal processes of our minds.

AndyMFK@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 23 Jan 2026 10:03 next collapse

These mushrooms produce pretty consistent results. From what I’ve heard, most people that eat them report seeing tiny men. Wayyy more consistent and specific of a hallucination then eating a standard cubensis mushroom.

I’m not claiming there’s anything more than a hallucination going on here, but it is fascinating how specific and consistent the results are. Makes you wonder about the future of hallucinogens, perhaps one day we can synthesise specific trips, kind of like a total recall situation where you could choose what you want to experience

axexrx@lemmy.world on 23 Jan 2026 13:29 next collapse

Sounds way more consistent than any halucinogen with a common theme that people see. Like DMT makes people see the ‘machine elves’ but afaik it’s well less than 50% of people / experiences who see them, and they take wildly different forms for different people. I also think a lot of that is psychosomatic- people going into an experience expecting to see something specific will sometimes synthesize that experience for themselves.

The effects of deleriants tend to be more reliable, from my understanding, like dramamine making people see people who aren’t there / are dead. Which was a really uncanny experience when i tried it; youre not hallucinating the experience, but rather the memory of it having just happened, almost like waking up from a dream over and over. Like id looks up at the empty chair in my room and think ‘wasnt my brother just there talking about walking in the woods? Oh wait, he couldnt have been, he passed away 3 years ago’ i also kept hallucinating a cigarette, like id think I had just had ine between my fingers, had just taken a drag, and go to take another, then think I must have dropped it, only to realize there was no smoke in the room, I was just falsely remembering.

I suspect these mushrooms have a mild deleriant compound in them, although even then were talking very consistent results.

hector@lemmy.today on 23 Jan 2026 16:14 collapse

Lots of trip reports on delerients involve talking to devils and demons and the like.

Earthman_Jim@lemmy.zip on 24 Jan 2026 07:14 collapse

Okay, but again, the question remains: how much of that is power of suggestion and priming/expectation?

axexrx@lemmy.world on 24 Jan 2026 16:55 collapse

Exactly. To my understanding, when people see demons, theyre being what they imagine a demon to look like, with no coherence between experiencers unless they already had a shared framework for those entities. Its similar to my seeing people I knew, memory/ imagination combined with a dream like state, innthe case of demons, probably with a component of chemically induced fear contributing.

Id be curious to see more in depth testing on these mushrooms. Do the small people all have the same size between experiencers? Similar clothing, attributes, actions and movements, etc?

In other words, how much of the e tities is defined by the user and how much the drug?

hector@lemmy.today on 23 Jan 2026 16:13 collapse

You have any further reading on this?

some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world on 24 Jan 2026 01:26 collapse
phutatorius@lemmy.zip on 23 Jan 2026 10:12 collapse

Very specific psychiatric symptoms can occur even when there’s nothing actually there. There are quite a lot of special-purpose structures in the brain, and if they’re triggered by something like a tumor, you can hear things that aren’t there, see things, smell things, become impulsive, experience intense emotions: all from direct physiological causes. So while it’s comforting to believe that those little people represent some form of reality that is only revealed to these mushroom-eaters, there is plenty of precedent that says that it’s not necessarily so, and reproducibility of the perceived phenomena doesn’t necessarily imply that those perceptions correspond to any objective reality.

BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world on 24 Jan 2026 06:20 collapse

It’s one of the Common Side Effects

SillyDude@lemmy.zip on 23 Jan 2026 08:39 next collapse

I thought those looked like boletes. Which I’ve heard can be hallucinogenic, but those also had analysis showing it’s just a small amount of regular psilocybin. This is neither psilocybin nor muscimol, pretty interesting. I’d eat them raw.

Wikipedia:

Chemical and genomic analyses have shown that the Lanmaoa asiatica does not contain any known psychoactive compounds such as psilocybin or muscimol. It is likely that there remains an unknown hallucinogenic compound yet to be discovered in this species.[3][6] Chemical analysis of Lanmaoa asiatica has identified numerous compounds and their pharmacological activity has been studied, but as yet none of them have been linked to the reported psychoactive effects.[7][8][9][10]

BarrelAgedBoredom@lemmy.zip on 23 Jan 2026 13:20 next collapse

I had the exact same thought when I read this haha! But when I went looking for which bolete variety had psilocybin I couldn’t find it

hector@lemmy.today on 23 Jan 2026 16:11 collapse

Interesting. I thought it was a bolete too. There is one other hallucinogenic bolete, the blue meanie, in central europe and I don’t know where else. It is a giant one too I believe. Psilocybin I believe.

Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca on 23 Jan 2026 09:04 next collapse

This is just really effective advertising from Big Mushroom.

JasonDJ@lemmy.zip on 23 Jan 2026 09:33 collapse

<img alt="Animated clip from TV show “Avatar: The Last Airbender” in which Sokka, under the influence of “Cactus Juice”, tries to attract the attention of a mushroom cloud, hoping it is friendly. " src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/a2a4fcb0-3e6b-46c7-b7ce-046d0d606f10.gif">

phoenixz@lemmy.ca on 24 Jan 2026 19:18 collapse

In research he is preparing for publication, chemical extracts from lab specimens produced behavioural changes in mice similar to those reported in human.

So did these mice see little mice as well?