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.
> 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.
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.
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 timy ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
From when this same story was covered in January
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-m...
They might be neurotoxic.
Tiny people
Maybe the prospect of seeing tiny people? Stops me!
I assume knowlege of the experiment could influence the outcome.
I think you would have to dose people without knowledge of that phenomenon
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.
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 timy ppl in the new mushroom vs psilocybin.
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.
Presumably the fact that experimenting on oneself is not considered particularly ethical or repeatable for science?
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it.
It's probably not ethical. How repeatable it is is for an experiment to decide, if it was possible to arrange ethically.
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.
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.
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.
> 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…
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.
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.
Assuming your model of reality is materialist and all of reality is created by grey matter, then yes.
your eyes are usually closed during DMT trip so I don't think your hypothesis stands.
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
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.
Folklore’s roots go deeper than a single species.
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 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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717442 previously.
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.
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.
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
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.
In case you're wondering like me, I think parent is referring to elephant skulls being mistaken for one-eyed, giant creatures.
I assume the global mythology around dragons comes from finding dinosaur bones
Seems like many bones would do. Whales would be a lot more common i imagine.
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.
Paper in Mycologia https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00275514.2026.2...
Half of the plot of Common Side Effects :)
I'm surprised they sent it for analysis and no one just ate one to check for hobbits...
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.
Fortunately, it’s inevitable. :D
I can imagine the packaging of it being sold commercially
Awesome