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?
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...
3 day non stop trip sounds .. not great, if it ain't great.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
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.
I think those kinds of myths are just natural progressions of exaggerations and oral storytelling
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?
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.
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
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.
(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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.