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jsw97 2 hours ago [-]
Whenever I hear these stories about multiple cultures having the same hallucination, I think that we have to give some weight to the possibility that the little people are real and the mushrooms just let us see them.
fhdkweig 1 hours ago [-]
I believe that it is because we all have the same basic brain structure. The part of the brain that controls speech is in the same location in each person. So is motor control, vision, etc.
Maybe having the same chemical stimulants going through the same basic processing hardware causes the same outputs. But that's just like my opinion man.
unsupp0rted 1 hours ago [-]
What's more likely:
1. There are invisible tiny people that only a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way can let you see
2. There aren't invisible tiny people but a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way makes you hallucinate a specific thing
tzs 16 minutes ago [-]
You have missed a case:
0. There are tiny people who are not invisible but there is something that makes it so humans ignore them. That specific mushroom interfered with whatever that is so that we can see them.
An argument for #0 and in favor of #2 is the #2 requires the mushroom to cause an hallucination that includes a lot of generated detail to be realistic and consistent with how an actual tiny person would behave and affect the world.
#0 on the other hand is just turning something off.
An argument for #0 over #1 is that #0 does not require actual invisibility. If there were actually invisible tiny people we still probably would have discovered by now the physical mechanism that can make things invisible, which w e have not. Unless we are going to consider magic or psychic powers or some other such thing completely beyond known physics we can almost certainly rule out actual invisibility.
hmokiguess 44 minutes ago [-]
3. Both, it’s schroedinger tiny people enabled by quantum mushroom gateways
nsxwolf 9 minutes ago [-]
What if we all take the mushrooms and sit in the same room and write down what we see and compare notes?
What if we all see the exact same thing
russdill 35 minutes ago [-]
This would be laughably easy to disprove. Just put multiple people in the same room and have them privately describe what they see.
_alternator_ 37 minutes ago [-]
Depends on your definition of what "real" means. Does it mean that people really have the experience of seeing little people? If so, then in that sense it's real. Or does it mean that these little people exist in some other way, outside of the mind and potentially accessible to other physical means of intervention? Probably not.
elwell 25 minutes ago [-]
Third question: Is there a difference?
gwbas1c 1 hours ago [-]
The article explains that other medical phenomenon cause the same hallucinations, such as macular degeneration.
eqmvii 2 hours ago [-]
something something machine elves...
elwell 24 minutes ago [-]
Why do people say "something something...", and why does it irk me?
Pokemon Go figured out how to do this without the mushrooms.
MichaelZuo 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah if it’s literally 90%+ people report the same thing… that seems impossible to explain even with a novel psychoactive substance…
How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
zardo 51 minutes ago [-]
> How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
How could an index finger contain an entire movie? presses play
devmor 1 hours ago [-]
> How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
I understand what you’re trying to say, but this sentence could be an argument against DNA. It’s also chemical compounds that contain an entire script of what our species can and cannot do - and much more.
culi 7 hours ago [-]
> Now, three completely independent cultures have reported the same specific type of hallucination, and two cases are attributed to the same DNA-verified mushroom species. That indicates that these bizarre psychological effects aren't cultural manifestations or coincidences—they must have a shared underlying chemical and neurological basis.
Rubroboletus sinicus is another species under investigation. Another bolete.
The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong also wrote in Baopuzi around 300 CE about this effect from a mushroom and it seems to be common knowledge in pockets of China. Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén.
I also found this bit funny from the Wikipedia:
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
account42 6 hours ago [-]
> Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén.
"Little people people" or does the second rén have a different meaning here?
eloisius 6 hours ago [-]
The effect of reduplicating is to make it diminutive. It like adding -ito to the end of a Spanish noun.
Eloissssss 3 hours ago [-]
The usual Chinese expression to describe the mushroom hallucinations is 见小人 (jiàn xiǎo rén), literally “see tiny people.”
Usually there isn't a second 人 (rén) being reduplicated here.
人人 does mean “everyone,” but that's a different construction, and Chinese noun reduplication isn't generally equivalent to adding Spanish -ito. You may also see 小人儿 (xiǎo rénr), where 儿 is a colloquial/diminutive suffix.
plucas 5 hours ago [-]
Are you sure? I thought that's what "xiǎo" was doing here, with "rén" being repeated meaning "everyone".
eloisius 4 hours ago [-]
I would defer to a native speaker, but Chinese is extremely contextual, and even native speakers often can’t tell you the formal rules of usage for something like this. There’s a lot more listening to register and intuiting intent required than with English. The same phrase used in different way can have a different function. In this usage it does not sound like plural “people” to my ears.
You can say something like 「你看！可愛的狗狗」 and it’s “look! A cute doggy” (reduplicating 狗 gǒu). On the other hand you could say 「人人都知道她是小三！」 and it means “everybody knows that she’s (his) mistress!” (reduplicating 人 rén).
z2 3 hours ago [-]
I think this first example is spot on. Though a sibling comment's Wikipedia link doesn't mention it, there is a diminutive or hypocorism use that I feel is best translated into English with the -y or -ie suffix.
狗狗 doggy
猫猫 kitty
鸟鸟 birdie
宝宝 baby
And it kind of works for verbs too:
看看 [take a] looky
eloisius 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with that Wikipedia page.
> Reduplication is sometimes employed in verbs and adjectives to enhance the effect of them.
> 胖胖的 pàng pàng de ('quite fat') from 胖 pàng ('fat')
This is the exact opposite of how I'd understand it. Saying someone is 胖 is just calling them fat (rude), but 胖胖的 is teasing, cute, chubby, etc.
Maybe they are not just little but socially oriented (i.e., a people person).
bossyTeacher 6 hours ago [-]
It's funny how the Wikipedia article call hallucinations "ill effects". I am yet to hear people call caffeine effects "ill effects". People and their sociocultural biases, uh?
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
> I am yet to hear people call caffeine effects "ill effects". People and their sociocultural biases, uh?
Coffee has well known ill-effects, I think every coffee drinker at one point have drank too much and felt them themselves. Apparently such a big topic that it isn't just a section of the Caffeine page, it has it's very own Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_toxicity
vintermann 2 hours ago [-]
There are a lot of people with a cultural bias toward hallucinations, who want really hard to get high off anything that could allegedly make them high.
But despite that, this mushroom is not a popular recreational drug. Much like amanita muscaria, which certain people insist must be great if used right, is common as dirt, and yet is so unpopular as a drug that it isn't even restricted.
By these same accounts, you'll get sick. It's unpleasant. Not even the most enthusiastic "psychonauts" seem to manage to take joy in this thing, little people or not.
microtherion 1 hours ago [-]
That does not seem to stop people from taking Ayahuasca, which seems to very commonly make people sick.
blks 3 hours ago [-]
Unknowingly taking psychedelic substances is nothing positive, however positive outlook you may have on them.
dns_snek 6 hours ago [-]
> People and their sociocultural biases
No, intent matters. If you drugged someone with caffeine (or someone drank it not knowing what it was) then their symptoms would also be called ill effects.
clarionbell 6 hours ago [-]
Seeing things that don't exist is generally detrimental to your short term survival.
gyomu 6 hours ago [-]
Arguably the long term survival and flourishing of the human species is due to humans being able to “see things that don’t exist”.
FeepingCreature 5 hours ago [-]
What a wild claim. You can't just say it's arguable, you have to actually argue it. Personally I think it's true but only in a metaphorical way that doesn't apply to hallucinogenic drugs; inasmuch as it applies to hallucinogenic drugs, it's false.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
I dunno if it's so wild, but maybe I'm zooming out way too much. The example that came to my mind was "mathematics", something that doesn't "exists" but we "see" it everywhere and humanity got massively improved thanks to it. Electricity would be another example :) I guess how wild the claim is depends on how charitable you read it.
FeepingCreature 5 hours ago [-]
Right, and I think any serious civilizational benefit of drugs in the sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven, and benefit in the hallucinatory regime doesn't exist. That's sorta what I mean: "where big, false; where true, not big."
gyomu 4 hours ago [-]
> any serious civilizational benefit of drugs in the sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven
If you do want to get into the "where big":
Shamanic/ritual/religious/social practices that wholly involve hallucinatory experiences (both with and without the aid of hallucinogenic substances) are well attested and documented throughout human development.
So the existence is there; if you want to argue that actually it was a Bad Thing for human collectives, from Siberia to the Amazon, from 50k years ago to the present day, to engage in these practices and that they'd have been much better off Not Doing It, I guess the burden of that proof is on you?
FeepingCreature 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think it was a Bad Thing; I'm not at all convinced it was a Good Thing. A Thing not being actively deleterious is enough to reach fixation.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
> sub-hallucinatory regime is at least unproven, and benefit in the hallucinatory regime doesn't exist
It's a interesting train of thought if nothing else. How would we "prove" a thing like "humanity benefits from being able to create, share and read books?" for example? Or that we can organize in grassroot movements? It's also really hard to qualify directly, as the impact is so indirect.
Same with psychedelics, a lot of scientists, researchers, creatives or even business-people attribute psychedelic usage to some of their success in their fields, but how can we really know if it was because of that or not?
imtringued 4 hours ago [-]
People don't see math or electricity with their eyes and it is simultaneously hard to argue that their physical counterpart doesn't exist. Your examples are things you can't see but exist.
Your analogy is exactly backwards.
embedding-shape 4 hours ago [-]
> People don't see math or electricity with their eyes and it is simultaneously hard to argue that their physical counterpart doesn't exist. Your examples are things you can't see but exist.
How is that different from psychedelics? We can "see" their physical counterparts (and chemical reactions) in people's head and body as they trip too.
wizzwizz4 2 hours ago [-]
I have a camera. Suppose I rub course-grained sandpaper all over its lens. Now the camera sees scratches, instead of the outside world. But those scratches are real! We can see their physical counterparts if we study the camera. Clearly, the camera has been much improved.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting analogy, but what does it mean? What is your point here?
microtherion 1 hours ago [-]
Steve Jobs seems to have connected having a vision in the metaphorical way you describe with his youthful experimentation with LSD.
close04 5 hours ago [-]
I read it as “we can see with our imagination”. We build, we invent, we follow our “hallucinations” whether they come from drug use or just an active imagination giving revelations.
bossyTeacher 5 hours ago [-]
I couldn't have phrased it better.
dpoloncsak 2 hours ago [-]
Not sure if it's the same here, but I've been told your usual 'trip' off psilocybin bearing mushrooms is really just a form of food-poisoning
pjerem 1 hours ago [-]
You should read a little about it and I think you would change your mind.
The adverse effects of psilocybin are well known and documented and we know for sure that it’s not physically dangerous.
For the trip part we mostly know how it work and how interact and it can be healing (or bad trip depending on the context).
Still you may have have digestive adverse effects, not because of poisoning but because the human gut cannot digest crude mushrooms.
But you will not be physically sick per se like you would be with a bacteria or a toxin, your immune system will not fight anything.
breezybottom 2 hours ago [-]
What's funny about that? If people started hallucinating from coffee that would be considered an ill effect.
awestroke 6 hours ago [-]
The large majority of people want absolutely nothing to do with hallucinations
cactusplant7374 5 hours ago [-]
The religious will love them if they arrive naturally. There are even a few studies that administered psilocybin to religious professionals. They described it as the most profound experience of their life.
LoganDark 6 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about caffeine dependence? For many people, caffeine itself feels beneficial.
nick__m 3 hours ago [-]
Caffeine is beneficial; it's not just a feeling. It has a neuroprotective effect shown in animal model of ALZ and a statistically significant effect in humans that decaffeinated beverages don't provide.
I wasn't meaning to say it's not actually beneficial, I just don't like how often people get dependent on it without realizing. (As in, I wouldn't really mind if people knew they are dependent, but being completely oblivious to it is sort of offputting.)
bregma 4 hours ago [-]
So does social media. Keep scrolling man, just one more hit.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
So does meth.
15 minutes ago [-]
yreg 8 hours ago [-]
The researchers seem pretty convinced that this mushroom causes the hallucinations yet they do not describe trying it out in an experiment.
Surely the most straightforward way is to undercook the mushrooms and run a blind controlled experiment where participants eat the shrooms and report on hallucinations.
What stopped them?
novia 7 hours ago [-]
> the trips it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the extraordinarily long duration of these trips and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself.
> These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect.
> lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours
I’ve been to parties longer than that.
ramon156 5 hours ago [-]
Well, sign yourself up!
rbanffy 4 hours ago [-]
That time is long past, but I still embrace my inner dude.
culi 7 hours ago [-]
Sounds very similar to an anti-cholinergic/delirious effect rather than a psychedelic one. More similar to Datura than Psilocybe
carljungslabtek 5 hours ago [-]
It kind of does, just because people see spiders and all other kinds of “real” things on datura or benadryl, but I “tripped” on benadryl a few times in high school and it was very “non-euclidean” every time. The laws of physics were not obeyed, and the hallucinations are a lot scarier than goofy little people falling over themselves.
So if the experiences really are real, it sounds to me like something wholly unique. Apparently there are no recorded deaths from the lilliputian mushrooms, and the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.
There are psychedelic phenethylamines that last 24 hours or more, so I don’t think the duration is a sign of anything really.
krisoft 2 hours ago [-]
> the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.
Maybe what causes the effect is not directly in the mushroom, but it needs first to metabolise into it? As in maybe the effect is caused by molecule A, but the mushroom only contains B which then breaks down into A. (for example by the liver or perhaps intestinal microbiome.)
bossyTeacher 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think you can put Datura in this scale at all. Datura is borderline psychotic inducing. More damage you might not heal from than funny visuals.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
We're talking psychedelics, they're all borderline psychotic inducing, that's why we like and consume them :)
Datura is definitively a different beast, and definitely something I'd recommend others to stay away from even if I and my friend was dumb enough to consume it when we were young. LSD, mushrooms and friends are 100x better and more fun.
bossyTeacher 2 hours ago [-]
> they're all borderline psychotic inducing
No, they are not. Let's not generalize. There is nothing funny or therapeutic about psychosis. We are leaving the dark ages of psychedelics. We don't need to bring them back.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
What? Every psychedelic can be dangerous, as always it's more about set and setting than the actual chemical you're using. Most of them can be "psychotic inducing" used the "right" (wrong) way, absolutely.
bossyTeacher 11 minutes ago [-]
Again generalising. Psychdelics, if you are not predisposed to psychotic breaks, can cause anxiety and similarly overwhelming emotions. They last 12 hours max. And this mescaline and LSD mostly. Datura can potentially last 2 days. It is dangerous, end of. Also datura is not considered a psychdelic. Hallucinogenics and psychdelics are not equivalent. Datura is referred to as a delirant. With psychdelics, you can estimate dosage much easily. With datura, it is much harder because it is naturally not as evenly distributed in the actual source plant. So you can easily overdose. It's like trying to split a shroom choc that melted but the distribution among areas can be several times over the other areas.
In my opinion, the combination of not able to estimate dosage and losing the ability to tell reality from fiction for up to 2 days alone puts datura in its own separate category.
Someone tripping in psychdelics or even Salvia is really a different category to Datura where the line between reality and fiction is thin. No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably but moving coherently and overall looking sane while doing things that on closer look don't make sense.
lukan 7 hours ago [-]
Do you volunteer?
3 day non stop trip sounds .. not great, if it ain't great.
bragr 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know. 3 days, even if it is great, doesn't sound great. Trip reports from long lasting research chemicals all seem pretty awful.
mettamage 6 hours ago [-]
Sure, I'd do it. One bad month tops. I can take that.
piker 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe the prospect of seeing tiny people? Stops me!
Dilettante_ 6 hours ago [-]
What's wrong with tiny people? ;)
beng-nl 5 hours ago [-]
They have tiny hands
tclancy 3 hours ago [-]
And tiny little feet. Drive around in tiny cars, going beep beep beep.
Is the argument that even if you'd do such an experiment with consent of the participants, it'd be unethical? Or are we just assuming this will be done without the consent of the participants?
nextaccountic 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter if it's actually unethical. It just has to be approved by a board.
carlosjobim 2 hours ago [-]
Or what? The board is going to kick their asses?
wizzwizz4 1 hours ago [-]
Yes. All the time the rest of the organisation spends on mandatory ethical training, the ethics board spends on martial arts.
criddell 3 hours ago [-]
I think the implication is that it would never get by the IRB.
colordrops 7 hours ago [-]
They might be neurotoxic.
stuaxo 6 hours ago [-]
All the best stuff is.
/s
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
Ordinary psychedelics are thought to induce neuroplasticity.
someothherguyy 2 hours ago [-]
neuroplasticity and neurotoxicity aren't mutually exclusive, and its not a phenomenon in of itself that has some positive meaning. for instance, all addictive substances "induce neuroplasticity"
wellthisisgreat 8 hours ago [-]
Tiny people
forestrywat 8 hours ago [-]
Presumably the fact that experimenting on oneself is not considered particularly ethical or repeatable for science?
derektank 8 hours ago [-]
There’s nothing unethical about self experimentation. There are many notable examples of it in the history of science. Most notable is probably Barry Marshall’s decision to self-dose with helicobacter pylori, in an effort to prove that the bacteria caused ulcers. They did, he treated himself with antibiotics, and he was later awarded a Nobel for the research. Werner Forssman also won a Nobel for work partially derived from self-applying a cardiac catheter.
wraptile 7 hours ago [-]
Barry Marshall's story is so iconic that I read it every time despite knowing it very well.
That being said one claim here would be that allowing self-experimentation would pressure people into self experimenting due to how our academia and labs are structured these days i.e. a junior scientists could be pressured into self experimentation by their superiors. So this is definitely not as clear-cut as one might think.
VBprogrammer 7 hours ago [-]
> Barry Marshall's story is so iconic that I read it every time despite
As someone who suffered badly with ulcers in my teens I'm particularly grateful for his work. One course of antibiotics and I never had that problem again.
Zobat 6 hours ago [-]
> Barry Marshall's story is so iconic...
More so for him and his collaborator having dinner each year when the Nobel prizes were announced in anticipation of the call from the Nobel Prize Committee. Legends.
jpfromlondon 1 hours ago [-]
evidently you are unfamiliar with experimental science or clinical trials, like it or not self experimentation and the consumption/administration of psychoactive substances is considered unethical, rightly or wrongly.
In the case of self-testing it raises concerns of objectivity, not just in terms of perception and observation but with regards to bias and intent, throwing into question the results and reasons for the study.
kapep 6 hours ago [-]
> There’s nothing unethical about self experimentation.
If people get rewarded for self experimentation, either directly with prices or indirectly with fame and success, more people will try do it. That certainly does raise ethical concerns. It worked out for people you mentioned but there will be many others who might harm themselves doing it.
dwattttt 8 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure what ethical considerations come up when testing a medical hypothesis by self-administration. Famously Barry Marshall overturned decades of medical doctrine when he ingested helicobacter pylori, and demonstrated its role in gastritis (and I think providing evidence for peptic ulcers).
mrgriscom 38 minutes ago [-]
Self-experimentation allows one to conduct science without the imprimatur of the IRB. IRBs, in the name of ethics, fashion themselves as the sole arbiter of what science may be done. Ergo, any loophole that circumvents their authority is prima facie "unethical".
yreg 8 hours ago [-]
That's the feeling I got, that they've tried it out on themselves, but (understandably) neglect to mention it. Which is a shame, because the self-censorship isn't helpful in regards of getting to the bottom of this.
It's probably not ethical. How repeatable it is is for an experiment to decide, if it was possible to arrange ethically.
yreg 8 hours ago [-]
What's unethical about it? It sounds the locals consume it anyway. If the experiment is blind you can even tell the participants what is it about beforehand without losing too much validity.
leni536 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know much about standard ethical frameworks used in these kinds of experiments, but giving hallucinogens with unknown long term health effects to participants feels somewhat unethical to me.
Also, to get stronger results you would probably want to conduct the experiment on participants who don't have an expectation of seeing little people, so that rules out locals or people who heard of or eaten the mushroom before.
bonoboTP 7 hours ago [-]
Everything's unethical that seems kinda weird or icky to middle aged HR schoolmarm Karens who like to sit on committees and wiggle their fingers and clutch their pearls, like the good church ladies they are, at the naughty boys.
UpsideDownRide 6 hours ago [-]
There were some very questionable experiments done in the name of science that lead to development of ethics guidelines. Being respectful of other people is hardly pearl clutching
5 hours ago [-]
anon48293 8 hours ago [-]
Ethics are just someone else’s opinion.
Something isn’t ethical or unethical, somebody just doesn’t like it. They might have a reason for it at best.
reichstein 6 hours ago [-]
Ethics is what people agree on. Not doing unnecessary harm is usually easily agreed on. Don't exploit people who know less it's also on the list. Doesn't mean we didn't learn something valuable from KZ camp experiments, we just don't think it outweighed the costs. And we don't like, or want to encourage, people who think it did.
There are very strict rules for scientific experiments _because_ we know that without them, just guided by "common sense" or "be reasonable", someone would get blinded by ambition or "the potential" and go further than the majority want to accept.
Anyone can "experiment" without it being an accepted scientific experiment. But then they're personally responsible for any and all bad outcomes. If you follow the rules and get the experiment pre-approved, you'll likely be covered by your employer's insurance and free from criminal liability .
That's a very good incentive.
anon48293 3 hours ago [-]
But people don’t agree on ethics. That’s the whole reason you have ethics boards. Otherwise the scientists wouldn’t need one since they already thought the same.
I agree there ought to be rules, but ethics is just a word to make things sound fair when it’s just an authoritative decision, often taking bad arguments (like religious ones or public misconceptions) unnecessarily into account.
s1artibartfast 8 hours ago [-]
I assume knowlege of the experiment could influence the outcome.
I think you would have to dose people without knowledge of that phenomenon
QuantumNomad_ 8 hours ago [-]
Couldn’t you get consent from the participants to consume hallucinogenic substances but also getting them to agree that there will be a number of trials and they won’t know which one if any of them will actually contain it?
So instead of a single experiment where half of the people get it and half don’t, the experiment will be repeated ten times with the same people over a few months, different meals each time and in total each person will get hallucinogens in their food either zero or one times.
And then you see what effects people report and if that correlates well with who was actually given the hallucinogens, and if there is a lot of placebo among the rest of the people each time that they were not given hallucinogens.
freehorse 7 hours ago [-]
1. The main problem I imagine is not consent but ethics approval. You are probably gonna find some experienced psychonauts curious enough to want to try, but getting it approved by an ethics committee I imagine being tricky.
2. Multiple times per person over months risks attrition which gonna mess it up, and the statistical power increase you get could be offset by that (eg if a person gets it they may not be motivated to come again for the placebo). On the other hand ppl may be more motivated if they know they are gonna get it at least once so dunno.
3. Placebo with hallucinogens is always tricky. I would use psilocybin as (extra or only) control, esp if you test for little ppl. This way you can test if they report more tiny ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
leni536 8 hours ago [-]
What if the hallucinogen has long term health effects? What if tiny people show up for a participant years from the experiment, while driving?
I guess you can be upfront about unknown unknowns, and most human experiments have some of those, but I assume there are standards to keep those to a minimum.
eru 6 hours ago [-]
> I assume knowlege of the experiment could influence the outcome.
That's why you do randomisation and double-blinding.
theelous3 4 hours ago [-]
> Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself
Coward, basically. I have no idea why on earth you'd travel the world looking for a specific hallucinogen and then just try to sequence it and toss it, and then waste everyone's time writing papers saying you essentially have a hunch about the mushroom's effects.
Beyond terrible science.
dluan 6 hours ago [-]
These are pretty famous mushrooms in China. Right now Yunnan mushroom hot pot is all the rage, basically in every city in the country. It's also led to lots of tourists in Yunnan wandering around foraging for wild mushrooms. The problem is that there's hundreds of different types of mushrooms with varying levels of toxicity, and unless you grew up in the area and know what you're doing it's easy to get mixed up. There's plenty of videos on chinese social media of people giggling in hospital beds geeked out their gourds pointing at little people.
customguy 33 minutes ago [-]
I tried to find the psilocybin ones with friends once, just kids (well we were 15) with a few books about mushrooms from the library haha. We grabbed anything that "kinda looked like them", then put them all on the kitchen counter, tried to divide them into piles of the same things and find out what is what... but things just became less clear instead of obvious.
So I decided to look up mushroom poisoning (in the dictionary) and some stuff about potential asphyxiation ~18 (IIRC, it's been a while) hours later made decide no, the risk of dying in my sleep next night is NOT worth it, into the trash it goes.
farfatched 5 hours ago [-]
Link? (To any of the above.)
adzm 8 hours ago [-]
Those who have used DMT often talk about machine elves. I imagine there is a part of the brain that specifically recognizes humanoid figures even in the distance that is getting overstimulated.
birdsongs 7 hours ago [-]
This is obviously just anecdotal, but when I was 6 I got very ill with the flu and was in bed for days. Super high fever and was quite out of it.
I had a, idk, spell one afternoon where I saw this quilt we had on the wall open up at all the squares, and thousands of tiny people/elves poured out. They marched around carrying little boxes and were all around me.
I remember it so vividly more than 30 years later because it freaked me out so much. Tried telling my parents about it and they just dismissed it as a nightmare, but I swear I was awake, just out of it with fever.
Anyways, it was early 90's, and I know I was close to the dangerous temperatures of high fever. Perhaps the brain does interesting hallucinations in these situations?
Have never hallucinated or had anything like that happen since.
boorang 6 hours ago [-]
likewise, the opening to Comfortably Numb always resonates.
phist_mcgee 6 hours ago [-]
I've hallucinated with fevers before, and they do feel surprising that you swear you are awake, but perhaps you're really in a twilight between awake and asleep and the dreams break through.
birdsongs 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah. To be clear I don't think anything mystical happened, it was just my brain doing very odd thing outside of its default state.
OroPla 5 hours ago [-]
I've read about someone "exploring" the DMT realm with the machine elves by putting a hundred or so willing participants into that state and they found that multiple participants encountered the same machine elf, so there's more going on than just that.
Also, machine elves are not all humanoid. Some of them are complex geometrical shapes that are too complicated to parse. It was very fascinating to read about this phenomenon. I remember that what people described felt like some kind of Internet that is accesses with your consciousness.
DaiPlusPlus 3 hours ago [-]
> multiple participants encountered the same machine elf
Repeat the experiment and instruct the participants to ask the Elf for the solution to P=NP and let’s see what happens!
NoMoreNicksLeft 1 hours ago [-]
>Some of them are complex geometrical shapes that are too complicated to parse.
What happens if you see Brown Jenkins?
TonyStr 7 hours ago [-]
Remember when stable diffusion would create image soups full of horrifying humanoid faces and figures? I imagine something similar happens when you dull the brain in the right way.
colordrops 7 hours ago [-]
Assuming your model of reality is materialist and all of reality is created by grey matter, then yes.
wraptile 7 hours ago [-]
your eyes are usually closed during DMT trip so I don't think your hypothesis stands.
xboxnolifes 6 hours ago [-]
Thankfully your brain continues working even when your eyes are closed.
misja111 7 hours ago [-]
I bet there is some mushroom species in Europe as well that contains that substance. All those stories about dwarfs, trolls etc. and especially in woody area's, they must have come from somewhere.
trencedamp 7 hours ago [-]
There's some variety of little people myth in most cultures. There's also giant myths in most and there's no mushroom for that.
I think those kinds of myths are just natural progressions of exaggerations and oral storytelling
Schmerika 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
aflinik 7 hours ago [-]
Not sure about the exact same active substance, but Amanita muscaria is the obvious candidate. It's also commonly shown as part of the imagery in stories involving tiny people: the Smurfs, Super Mario (it's the power-up that makes Mario bigger/smaller), Fantasia, Alice in Wonderland, and so on.
decimalenough 2 hours ago [-]
Amanita muscaria is iconic because it's the shroomiest looking shroom that ever shroomed, but by all accounts A. muscaria intoxication is not particularly pleasant:
> effects can range from mild nausea and twitching to drowsiness, cholinergic crisis-like effects (low blood pressure, sweating and salivation), auditory and visual distortions, mood changes, euphoria, relaxation, ataxia, and loss of equilibrium (like with tetanus)
> In cases of serious poisoning the mushroom causes delirium, somewhat similar in effect to anticholinergic poisoning (such as that caused by Datura stramonium), characterised by bouts of marked agitation with confusion, hallucinations, and irritability followed by periods of central nervous system depression. Seizures and coma may also occur in severe poisonings.
Swedish tradition has it that trolls would replace human babies with their own babies. It does not take a long leap of imagination to to see how this could be used as an excuse for the practice of putting unwanted/deformed babies out into the forest ”for the wolves”. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how common that practice might have been, since it would presumably stem from prehistoric times)
fragmede 7 hours ago [-]
The question is could that possibly relate to Neanderthals or Denisovans co-exisiting with homo sapiens.
Jolter 7 hours ago [-]
Not in Sweden, as far as science knows. It’s a more likely explanation than orangutans, but not by much.
tokai 4 hours ago [-]
Nobody lived in Sweden at that time.
dbspin 3 hours ago [-]
Since dwarfs (little people) actually exist, I don't think we need to reach into psychedelics for an explanation.
decimalenough 2 hours ago [-]
The hallucinations here involve not dwarfs, but tiny people only a few inches tall.
dash2 8 hours ago [-]
> One person told me that while they were eating soup, the little people were jumping off their spoon into the bowl and swimming around. As they scooped a bite, the little people remained in their mouth.
There’s definitely scope for a horror story here…
cubefox 7 hours ago [-]
Or a Disney animation.
2 hours ago [-]
ulrikrasmussen 7 hours ago [-]
I think this is so fascinating because the hallucinations sound unlike anything else produced by psychedelics and other psychoactive substances, so I really look forward to learning what the mechanism is.
From the stories I've read it also doesn't sound people are experiencing outright delirium although the experience can probably be pretty stressful if you don't know what is happening.
farfatched 5 hours ago [-]
Do we understand the mechanism behind any hallucinations?
ulrikrasmussen 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe not, I don't know. But at least we understand the pharmacology of many of them, which I guess is what I actually meant.
Wondering if the hallucination also occurs to other animals?
Would dogs taking the L. asiatica see little humans or little dogs? Probably neither, but then does that mean the fungus had targeted humans genetically?
fodkodrasz 6 hours ago [-]
> does that mean the fungus had targeted humans genetically?
very utilitarian and anthropocentric world view.
Why would a random thing in the world specifically targeting humans with some niche effect? Did cocoa plant target humans specifically with its pleasing flavor (after having been heavily processed), while being toxic for many other animals?
cachius 6 hours ago [-]
Why would a random thing in the world specifically target anything? Nature throws things against the wall and keeps what sticks.
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedychrum_rutilans, a parasite on a parasite. Did it target beewolves specifically? And now its hosts are dying, was it his fault he chose the 'wrong' target?
Not the anthropocentricity is to criticise, but the idea of nature targeting. OP asked a well meaning question where sth. can be be learned from. Thank you.
fodkodrasz 5 hours ago [-]
The whole targeting phrasing mixes cause and effect. Evolution, as we currently understand it, is working differently: it is random effects and seeing what sticks, as you phrased, not targeting anything specifically.
The level of consciousness where the phrase targeting makes sense is way higher.
cachius 1 hours ago [-]
Right, and I think now I understand you better:
>> targeted humans
With utilitarian and anthropocentric world view you mean the 'target thinking' ascribing intention to nature, and not what is targeted, which are only incidentally humans here.
elliotec 5 hours ago [-]
We know with extremely high certainty that classical psychedelics effect other animals similarly given the neuroscience [1]. But this is not a classical psychedelic. We don't know how it works yet, what receptors it operates on, or what the pharmacology is doing.
So would dogs see little humans or little dogs? We can't say for sure. But the best guess might actually be most likely little dogs, or maybe little smells of little dogs. Dogs show conspecific preference (species-focus) while we show facial preference [2] and they have a strong focus on olfactory sense while we're more visual. The vividness might show up in ways we can't really perceive through smell like they can.
And the answer to "does that mean the fungus has targeted humans genetically" is almost definitely no. The study the article is based on [3] mentions that lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom, appear across cultures' folklore, and are reported in alcohol withdrawal, dementia, and macular degeneration. The effect seems fundamental to how the human mind and brain work. So it's more likely that the mushroom is disrupting something and the brain is resolving that disruption into little people, because that's what it does with pattern matching.
This mushroom is an ectomycorrhizal symbiote of the Yunnan pine tree, is ancient with the genus being at least 5 million years old compared to modern humans 300k, and requires undercooking which isn't compatible with human targeting so it doesn't make sense to have any genetic human target.
The fungus supplies a non-targeted disruption and the resulting little people content we describe is the human brain's response. A dog getting the same disruption would resolve it into whatever a dog's machinery produces, or maybe they metabolize it into nothing recognizable.
Absolutely brilliant show. Highly recommend it to anyone. Feels like a hyper condensed version of the X-files but with a decent sense of humour to it as well.
Season two will be out next year and I am curious to see how it goes. Towards the end of season one, the side effects were starting to get interesting, possibilities of it turning dark abound.
I'm just glad that after Joe Bennets previous show Scavengers Reign got axed after one season that we will finally get to see some of his stuff expanded.
vsviridov 35 minutes ago [-]
I found a great sense of unease watching Scavengers Reign. So much so I haven't finished it yet...
smnscu 3 hours ago [-]
I thought Common Side Effects was great, then I watched Scavengers Reign. Absolutely mindblown. Possibly the best scifi _thing_ I've ever watched.
There's still hope for a second season FWIW. At least the story is mapped up, if not more preprod stuff, it's been a while since I looked into it.
yanhangyhy 7 hours ago [-]
its a hot online topic when talking about YunNan province of china.its a land of all kinds of mushrooms/(and bugs). If you eat mushroom hotpot in there, the waiter will lock the pot and put a timer on the table, before the time limit hit, you cannot open and eat..cooks long time helps reduce the chance of position.
Somewhere there are tiny people going "Don't let the giants eat those mushrooms!"
undebuggable 8 hours ago [-]
Most of weird European and Middle Eastern legends and fairy tales originate from drugs or encountering real artifacts or phenomenons which they couldn't explain. Look up how cyclops appeared in mythology.
ghgr 8 hours ago [-]
In case you're wondering like me, I think parent is referring to elephant skulls being mistaken for one-eyed, giant creatures.
undebuggable 7 hours ago [-]
Ancient Greeks were finding skulls of dwarf elephants during masonry works and quarrying in Sicily.
anentropic 4 hours ago [-]
Wasn't that later debunked though?
tclancy 2 hours ago [-]
You mean about there being no Cyclopes? They got to you too, huh?
Schlagbohrer 8 hours ago [-]
I assume the global mythology around dragons comes from finding dinosaur bones
lesostep 7 hours ago [-]
Well, eastern dragons always reminded me more of a giant oarfish. And some central europe dragons weren't that far off, being described as flying snakes.
I think "every culture has a dragon" is kinda misleading.
"Every culture has a creature that got translated as a dragon" seems closer to the truth. The creatures themselves have a great variety between them.
s1artibartfast 8 hours ago [-]
Seems like many bones would do. Whales would be a lot more common i imagine.
luxuryballs 2 hours ago [-]
which could imply that gnome outfits and elf garb originated from people seeing them and then drawing it
AnodicElegy 4 hours ago [-]
Domnauer is overstating the "little people" effect here. Seeing miniaturized people seems to be only one of several manifestations associated with these mushrooms. This Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom) is a lot more informative. To me, it sounds like it could actually be a serotonergic substance, but it's not clear. I hope they find the active constituent!
qwertyboy 7 hours ago [-]
Annoyingly misleading title. From the article:
Lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom. There are myths about tiny people in pretty much every culture's folklore. People have also reported these hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal, dementia, macular degeneration and other neurological conditions. So, it seems like this phenomenon is fundamental to how the human mind and brain work, but we don't know what causes it or how to treat it.
That's what makes this mushroom different — it reliably produces this effect
j16sdiz 7 hours ago [-]
What make this research paper different -- this is the first genetic study of this mushroom.
I once spoke with a family member who was experiencing hallucinations of little people at the moment. So I guess if you want to experience this at home you can try giving yourself a head wound. Not as active or vivid as described I think though, they just said that the little people were hanging out up in curtains peering at us.
lesostep 7 hours ago [-]
That reminded me. Almost 20 years ago, there was a city folktale that some species of Convolvulus could get you high, and my friend tried it and then described seeing little knights playing|fighting on a wallpaper. I was a designated spotter, and didn't know what to do, so I just wrote down everything she said. Still should have a notebook somewhere.
(It was 2 specific species out of 200, and I hope that not mentioning which part of the plant she ingested would deter people from trying. The plant is also slightly poisonous, could weaken your kidneys. Weak kidneys no fun)
culi 6 hours ago [-]
Probably meant Ipomoea (morning glory. It's actually a fungus on the seeds not the plant itself)
neuroelectron 55 minutes ago [-]
I thought they were specifically called the machine elves, or is that a different shared hallucination?
guerrilla 6 hours ago [-]
Nothing like that in Europe? Explain gnomes and ferries.
toilet 6 hours ago [-]
Ferries are a type of public transport people use to traverse bodies of water.
reverius42 6 hours ago [-]
And Gnomes are popular desktop environments.
ra 7 hours ago [-]
I've often wondered if the fairies and leprechauns of Ireland and the pixies of Cornwall were due to some psychoactive mushroom people used to eat.
noduerme 8 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised they sent it for analysis and no one just ate one to check for hobbits...
luxuryballs 2 hours ago [-]
This means it's possible that commonly depicted clothing of gnomes and elves in art first originated from people seeing them and then drawing it!
andrewstuart 8 hours ago [-]
I can imagine the packaging of it being sold commercially
LoganDark 9 hours ago [-]
I can't wait until this compound is identified and available somewhere (incl. black markets). I would love to try it just out of curiosity.
Yuitea1 7 hours ago [-]
Realistically speaking, this substance causes irreversible damage to the kidneys and nervous system, so trying it is not recommended.
LoganDark 6 hours ago [-]
I would be inclined to agree in that case, but how do you know?
waysa 6 hours ago [-]
Why wait? Book a flight to Yunnan, order a tasty mushroom soup or get a fresh batch from the markets.
jamiek88 8 hours ago [-]
Fortunately, it’s inevitable. :D
karim79 7 hours ago [-]
Goddamn ant men. Can't get rid of 'em.
roncesvalles 7 hours ago [-]
Babe wake up, a new psychedelic drug just dropped.
Yuitea1 7 hours ago [-]
I’m curious—do the people who have eaten these mushrooms see the same kind of "tiny people," or is "tiny people" just another name for the hallucination?
LoganDark 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's possible to exactly compare the experiences to see if one person's "tiny people" is the same as another person's "tiny people", but TFA does talk about literally seeing tiny people and not just calling something else "tiny people".
Maybe having the same chemical stimulants going through the same basic processing hardware causes the same outputs. But that's just like my opinion man.
1. There are invisible tiny people that only a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way can let you see
2. There aren't invisible tiny people but a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way makes you hallucinate a specific thing
0. There are tiny people who are not invisible but there is something that makes it so humans ignore them. That specific mushroom interfered with whatever that is so that we can see them.
An argument for #0 and in favor of #2 is the #2 requires the mushroom to cause an hallucination that includes a lot of generated detail to be realistic and consistent with how an actual tiny person would behave and affect the world.
#0 on the other hand is just turning something off.
An argument for #0 over #1 is that #0 does not require actual invisibility. If there were actually invisible tiny people we still probably would have discovered by now the physical mechanism that can make things invisible, which w e have not. Unless we are going to consider magic or psychic powers or some other such thing completely beyond known physics we can almost certainly rule out actual invisibility.
What if we all see the exact same thing
How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
How could an index finger contain an entire movie? presses play
I understand what you’re trying to say, but this sentence could be an argument against DNA. It’s also chemical compounds that contain an entire script of what our species can and cannot do - and much more.
Rubroboletus sinicus is another species under investigation. Another bolete.
The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong also wrote in Baopuzi around 300 CE about this effect from a mushroom and it seems to be common knowledge in pockets of China. Mushrooms that have this effect are collectively called xiǎo rén rén.
I also found this bit funny from the Wikipedia:
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
"Little people people" or does the second rén have a different meaning here?
Usually there isn't a second 人 (rén) being reduplicated here.
人人 does mean “everyone,” but that's a different construction, and Chinese noun reduplication isn't generally equivalent to adding Spanish -ito. You may also see 小人儿 (xiǎo rénr), where 儿 is a colloquial/diminutive suffix.
You can say something like 「你看！可愛的狗狗」 and it’s “look! A cute doggy” (reduplicating 狗 gǒu). On the other hand you could say 「人人都知道她是小三！」 and it means “everybody knows that she’s (his) mistress!” (reduplicating 人 rén).
狗狗 doggy 猫猫 kitty 鸟鸟 birdie 宝宝 baby
And it kind of works for verbs too: 看看 [take a] looky
> Reduplication is sometimes employed in verbs and adjectives to enhance the effect of them.
> 胖胖的 pàng pàng de ('quite fat') from 胖 pàng ('fat')
This is the exact opposite of how I'd understand it. Saying someone is 胖 is just calling them fat (rude), but 胖胖的 is teasing, cute, chubby, etc.
Coffee has well known ill-effects, I think every coffee drinker at one point have drank too much and felt them themselves. Apparently such a big topic that it isn't just a section of the Caffeine page, it has it's very own Wikipedia page! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine_toxicity
But despite that, this mushroom is not a popular recreational drug. Much like amanita muscaria, which certain people insist must be great if used right, is common as dirt, and yet is so unpopular as a drug that it isn't even restricted.
By these same accounts, you'll get sick. It's unpleasant. Not even the most enthusiastic "psychonauts" seem to manage to take joy in this thing, little people or not.
No, intent matters. If you drugged someone with caffeine (or someone drank it not knowing what it was) then their symptoms would also be called ill effects.
If you do want to get into the "where big":
Shamanic/ritual/religious/social practices that wholly involve hallucinatory experiences (both with and without the aid of hallucinogenic substances) are well attested and documented throughout human development.
So the existence is there; if you want to argue that actually it was a Bad Thing for human collectives, from Siberia to the Amazon, from 50k years ago to the present day, to engage in these practices and that they'd have been much better off Not Doing It, I guess the burden of that proof is on you?
It's a interesting train of thought if nothing else. How would we "prove" a thing like "humanity benefits from being able to create, share and read books?" for example? Or that we can organize in grassroot movements? It's also really hard to qualify directly, as the impact is so indirect.
Same with psychedelics, a lot of scientists, researchers, creatives or even business-people attribute psychedelic usage to some of their success in their fields, but how can we really know if it was because of that or not?
Your analogy is exactly backwards.
How is that different from psychedelics? We can "see" their physical counterparts (and chemical reactions) in people's head and body as they trip too.
The adverse effects of psilocybin are well known and documented and we know for sure that it’s not physically dangerous.
For the trip part we mostly know how it work and how interact and it can be healing (or bad trip depending on the context).
Still you may have have digestive adverse effects, not because of poisoning but because the human gut cannot digest crude mushrooms.
But you will not be physically sick per se like you would be with a bacteria or a toxin, your immune system will not fight anything.
https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/27/12/3737
https://www.health.harvard.edu/diet-and-nutrition/harvard-st...
Surely the most straightforward way is to undercook the mushrooms and run a blind controlled experiment where participants eat the shrooms and report on hallucinations.
What stopped them?
> These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect.
From when this same story was covered in January
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-m...
I’ve been to parties longer than that.
So if the experiences really are real, it sounds to me like something wholly unique. Apparently there are no recorded deaths from the lilliputian mushrooms, and the long onset is weird too because anticholinergics come on very quickly.
There are psychedelic phenethylamines that last 24 hours or more, so I don’t think the duration is a sign of anything really.
Maybe what causes the effect is not directly in the mushroom, but it needs first to metabolise into it? As in maybe the effect is caused by molecule A, but the mushroom only contains B which then breaks down into A. (for example by the liver or perhaps intestinal microbiome.)
Datura is definitively a different beast, and definitely something I'd recommend others to stay away from even if I and my friend was dumb enough to consume it when we were young. LSD, mushrooms and friends are 100x better and more fun.
No, they are not. Let's not generalize. There is nothing funny or therapeutic about psychosis. We are leaving the dark ages of psychedelics. We don't need to bring them back.
In my opinion, the combination of not able to estimate dosage and losing the ability to tell reality from fiction for up to 2 days alone puts datura in its own separate category.
Someone tripping in psychdelics or even Salvia is really a different category to Datura where the line between reality and fiction is thin. No smiling silly at the wall or laughing uncontrollably but moving coherently and overall looking sane while doing things that on closer look don't make sense.
3 day non stop trip sounds .. not great, if it ain't great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_committee
/s
That being said one claim here would be that allowing self-experimentation would pressure people into self experimenting due to how our academia and labs are structured these days i.e. a junior scientists could be pressured into self experimentation by their superiors. So this is definitely not as clear-cut as one might think.
As someone who suffered badly with ulcers in my teens I'm particularly grateful for his work. One course of antibiotics and I never had that problem again.
More so for him and his collaborator having dinner each year when the Nobel prizes were announced in anticipation of the call from the Nobel Prize Committee. Legends.
In the case of self-testing it raises concerns of objectivity, not just in terms of perception and observation but with regards to bias and intent, throwing into question the results and reasons for the study.
If people get rewarded for self experimentation, either directly with prices or indirectly with fame and success, more people will try do it. That certainly does raise ethical concerns. It worked out for people you mentioned but there will be many others who might harm themselves doing it.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
Also, to get stronger results you would probably want to conduct the experiment on participants who don't have an expectation of seeing little people, so that rules out locals or people who heard of or eaten the mushroom before.
Something isn’t ethical or unethical, somebody just doesn’t like it. They might have a reason for it at best.
There are very strict rules for scientific experiments _because_ we know that without them, just guided by "common sense" or "be reasonable", someone would get blinded by ambition or "the potential" and go further than the majority want to accept.
Anyone can "experiment" without it being an accepted scientific experiment. But then they're personally responsible for any and all bad outcomes. If you follow the rules and get the experiment pre-approved, you'll likely be covered by your employer's insurance and free from criminal liability . That's a very good incentive.
I agree there ought to be rules, but ethics is just a word to make things sound fair when it’s just an authoritative decision, often taking bad arguments (like religious ones or public misconceptions) unnecessarily into account.
I think you would have to dose people without knowledge of that phenomenon
So instead of a single experiment where half of the people get it and half don’t, the experiment will be repeated ten times with the same people over a few months, different meals each time and in total each person will get hallucinogens in their food either zero or one times.
And then you see what effects people report and if that correlates well with who was actually given the hallucinogens, and if there is a lot of placebo among the rest of the people each time that they were not given hallucinogens.
2. Multiple times per person over months risks attrition which gonna mess it up, and the statistical power increase you get could be offset by that (eg if a person gets it they may not be motivated to come again for the placebo). On the other hand ppl may be more motivated if they know they are gonna get it at least once so dunno.
3. Placebo with hallucinogens is always tricky. I would use psilocybin as (extra or only) control, esp if you test for little ppl. This way you can test if they report more tiny ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
I guess you can be upfront about unknown unknowns, and most human experiments have some of those, but I assume there are standards to keep those to a minimum.
That's why you do randomisation and double-blinding.
Coward, basically. I have no idea why on earth you'd travel the world looking for a specific hallucinogen and then just try to sequence it and toss it, and then waste everyone's time writing papers saying you essentially have a hunch about the mushroom's effects.
Beyond terrible science.
So I decided to look up mushroom poisoning (in the dictionary) and some stuff about potential asphyxiation ~18 (IIRC, it's been a while) hours later made decide no, the risk of dying in my sleep next night is NOT worth it, into the trash it goes.
I had a, idk, spell one afternoon where I saw this quilt we had on the wall open up at all the squares, and thousands of tiny people/elves poured out. They marched around carrying little boxes and were all around me.
I remember it so vividly more than 30 years later because it freaked me out so much. Tried telling my parents about it and they just dismissed it as a nightmare, but I swear I was awake, just out of it with fever.
Anyways, it was early 90's, and I know I was close to the dangerous temperatures of high fever. Perhaps the brain does interesting hallucinations in these situations?
Have never hallucinated or had anything like that happen since.
Also, machine elves are not all humanoid. Some of them are complex geometrical shapes that are too complicated to parse. It was very fascinating to read about this phenomenon. I remember that what people described felt like some kind of Internet that is accesses with your consciousness.
Repeat the experiment and instruct the participants to ask the Elf for the solution to P=NP and let’s see what happens!
What happens if you see Brown Jenkins?
I think those kinds of myths are just natural progressions of exaggerations and oral storytelling
> effects can range from mild nausea and twitching to drowsiness, cholinergic crisis-like effects (low blood pressure, sweating and salivation), auditory and visual distortions, mood changes, euphoria, relaxation, ataxia, and loss of equilibrium (like with tetanus)
> In cases of serious poisoning the mushroom causes delirium, somewhat similar in effect to anticholinergic poisoning (such as that caused by Datura stramonium), characterised by bouts of marked agitation with confusion, hallucinations, and irritability followed by periods of central nervous system depression. Seizures and coma may also occur in severe poisonings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria#Symptoms
Swedish tradition has it that trolls would replace human babies with their own babies. It does not take a long leap of imagination to to see how this could be used as an excuse for the practice of putting unwanted/deformed babies out into the forest ”for the wolves”. (Disclaimer: I don’t know how common that practice might have been, since it would presumably stem from prehistoric times)
There’s definitely scope for a horror story here…
From the stories I've read it also doesn't sound people are experiencing outright delirium although the experience can probably be pretty stressful if you don't know what is happening.
Would dogs taking the L. asiatica see little humans or little dogs? Probably neither, but then does that mean the fungus had targeted humans genetically?
very utilitarian and anthropocentric world view.
Why would a random thing in the world specifically targeting humans with some niche effect? Did cocoa plant target humans specifically with its pleasing flavor (after having been heavily processed), while being toxic for many other animals?
Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedychrum_rutilans, a parasite on a parasite. Did it target beewolves specifically? And now its hosts are dying, was it his fault he chose the 'wrong' target?
Not the anthropocentricity is to criticise, but the idea of nature targeting. OP asked a well meaning question where sth. can be be learned from. Thank you.
The level of consciousness where the phrase targeting makes sense is way higher.
>> targeted humans
With utilitarian and anthropocentric world view you mean the 'target thinking' ascribing intention to nature, and not what is targeted, which are only incidentally humans here.
So would dogs see little humans or little dogs? We can't say for sure. But the best guess might actually be most likely little dogs, or maybe little smells of little dogs. Dogs show conspecific preference (species-focus) while we show facial preference [2] and they have a strong focus on olfactory sense while we're more visual. The vividness might show up in ways we can't really perceive through smell like they can.
And the answer to "does that mean the fungus has targeted humans genetically" is almost definitely no. The study the article is based on [3] mentions that lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom, appear across cultures' folklore, and are reported in alcohol withdrawal, dementia, and macular degeneration. The effect seems fundamental to how the human mind and brain work. So it's more likely that the mushroom is disrupting something and the brain is resolving that disruption into little people, because that's what it does with pattern matching.
This mushroom is an ectomycorrhizal symbiote of the Yunnan pine tree, is ancient with the genus being at least 5 million years old compared to modern humans 300k, and requires undercooking which isn't compatible with human targeting so it doesn't make sense to have any genetic human target.
The fungus supplies a non-targeted disruption and the resulting little people content we describe is the human brain's response. A dog getting the same disruption would resolve it into whatever a dog's machinery produces, or maybe they metabolize it into nothing recognizable.
Pretty damn cool.
[1] https://consciousnesslibrary.org/research/29070-correlation-... [2] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/40/43/8396 [3] https://consciousnesslibrary.org/research/27751-phylogenomic...
Season two will be out next year and I am curious to see how it goes. Towards the end of season one, the side effects were starting to get interesting, possibilities of it turning dark abound.
I'm just glad that after Joe Bennets previous show Scavengers Reign got axed after one season that we will finally get to see some of his stuff expanded.
There's still hope for a second season FWIW. At least the story is mapped up, if not more preprod stuff, it's been a while since I looked into it.
this tv show ( meet youself, cast by Liu yifei, who also played Mulan(2020)) has a short part is about the 'tiny people': https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jVoza_qE3ww
And cannabis. It's hippy heaven.
I think "every culture has a dragon" is kinda misleading.
"Every culture has a creature that got translated as a dragon" seems closer to the truth. The creatures themselves have a great variety between them.
Lilliputian hallucinations predate this mushroom. There are myths about tiny people in pretty much every culture's folklore. People have also reported these hallucinations from alcohol withdrawal, dementia, macular degeneration and other neurological conditions. So, it seems like this phenomenon is fundamental to how the human mind and brain work, but we don't know what causes it or how to treat it.
That's what makes this mushroom different — it reliably produces this effect
The Unexplained Laser Experiment That Breaks Reality
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5YiFEghnrw
(It was 2 specific species out of 200, and I hope that not mentioning which part of the plant she ingested would deter people from trying. The plant is also slightly poisonous, could weaken your kidneys. Weak kidneys no fun)