NOT YET
Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-imagining-it/
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.
Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.
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.
I call those the... "Little Shrooms People".
[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People#/media/...
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.
It was interesting. But I can't exactly recommend it because it felt like I stopped breathing and died.
As an aside, they didn't make it home from their mushroom-stealing afternoon until the end of the the series.
I started reading into this from my interest in neuropsychiatry, but what is most interesting is that visual hallucinations are really quite rare in the schizophrenic population. Most visual hallucinations, it seems, have nothing to do with mental illness.
So these mushrooms change the mind in a very specific way, but no more strange than putting on red tinted glasses.
Speaking as someone who has involuntary hallucinations, this is a reality taken for granted by most people. I have very different hallucinations when I am dep[ressed vs when I am manic. And you are on the right track in my opinion that "the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location."
That is quite characteristically distinct to the “endogenous” appearance of other figures when using serotonergics, that almost certainly arise from intra CNS activity
The first time I saw something what one could call a giant machine elf I guess. Though the thought occurred to me much later. It looked a bit like Galactus from the Marvel comics, but friendly. I stood in the palm of its hand. The second time I saw a jester. I definitely didn’t think about seeing a jester beforehand as I wasn’t really aware that they could be a thing.
My first trip was very meaningful. My second trip was mostly interesting. In part because I kept one eye closed and the other open to see what would happen.
I think the "little people" in the article are more fairy sized or smaller. The BBC article linked to at that article says they were seen on dishes.
>What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.
And in the hobbit there was already pipe smoking folks (although it's less emphasised probably because it was written as more as a book for children - or at least a child).
I mean sure, he wrote the lore sitting in trenches during a war, most of the universe was sorted out before he wrote _The Hobbit_ at all. I was, I thought clearly but I guess not, specifically referring to the Trilogy.
Biologist Colin Domnauer is reopening an old case that Chinese health officials seem to have stopped caring about. Every summer, residents of the Yunnan province check into hospitals with complaints that they’re hallucinating tiny elflike people. They would see the little dudes marching under their doors, scaling their walls, and clinging to their furniture.
Health officials used to care about it. They looked into it some years back and found that the cause was Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom that’s been eaten in Yunnan for years. It’s supposedly got a rich, umami flavor, and locals know that you have to cook it thoroughly, not to bring out that flavor, but to kill off the mushroom’s hallucinogenic properties.
Scientists call these “lilliputian hallucinations,” a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures. If you’ve seen the Adult Swim show Common Side Effects, you may be familiar with the surreal trippiness of this apparently very real form of mushroom-based hallucination. What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.
It’s always the little elf dudes.
The BBC reports that similar cases emerged in China in the early 1990s and even earlier in Papua New Guinea. 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. Genetic testing confirmed its identity, and lab studies showed that extracts cause dramatic behavioral changes in mice. Domnauer later found the same species in the Philippines, despite its different appearance, meaning the mushroom and its effects are more widespread than anyone realized.
What’s fascinating is the active compound isn’t psilocybin, the hallucinatory chemical found in shrooms people take recreationally or therapeutically. The hallucinations take 12 to 24 hours. to begin and can last for a long time, sometimes long enough to require hospitalization and careful observation. 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.
Still a lot to understand how this fungus produces such reliable, consistent hallucinatory visions across the world, across cultures. Finding those answers might unlock new insights into brain disorders and human consciousness, while offering researchers a whole new realm of fungal chemicals to toy around with.
