{"id":893844,"date":"2026-10-25T06:36:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-25T06:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/893844\/"},"modified":"2026-10-25T06:36:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-25T06:36:13","slug":"it-makes-you-hallucinate-tiny-pint-sized-people-and-scientists-have-no-idea-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/893844\/","title":{"rendered":"It makes you hallucinate tiny, pint-sized people \u2013 and scientists have no idea why.\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seeing strange people in your house is never a good sign \u2013\u00a0especially if they\u2019re miniature, elf-like creatures jumping around, scaling the walls and crawling on the floor. But don\u2019t worry, if you\u2019ve recently had a meal involving a specific type of mushroom<\/a>, then you haven\u2019t lost your mind. The mushroom is the culprit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The official, clinical term for these visions is\u00a0Lilliputian hallucinations<\/a>, named after the tiny inhabitants of the fictional island in the novel\u00a0Gulliver\u2019s Travels\u00a0by Jonathan Swift. These hallucinations can occur in conjunction with different conditions, such as schizophrenia or alcohol withdrawal, among others.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But none of those causes produce Lilliputian hallucinations as reliably as\u00a0Lanmaoa asiatica\u00a0\u2013 if consumed raw or undercooked. A reddish-in-colour species<\/a> of bolete mushroom, it was only formally\u00a0described and named<\/a>\u00a0by scientists in 2015.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rich in umami flavour,\u00a0L. asiatica\u00a0is a locally popular food in the Yunnan Province in China, sold in markets and featured in many restaurant menus. But it comes with a warning \u2013\u00a0don\u2019t eat it before the 15-minute timer goes off, a precaution adopted by most restaurants selling the mushroom. If you do, \u201cyou might see little people,” as recounted<\/a> to the BBC by Colin Domnauer, doctoral researcher in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, USA. <\/p>\n

The history<\/p>\n

Although the mushroom is most famous for occurring in the Yunnan Province, where locals refer to it as ‘Jian shou qing’, and the little people it conjures up as ‘xiao ren ren’, it actually pops up independently in two other places.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Cordillera Administrative Region in the Philippines, it\u2019s known as ‘Sedesdem’, and the elf-like creatures as ‘ansisit’. In 2024, DNA sequencing performed by Domnauer has confirmed that, although they look different from each other, both mushrooms represent the same species.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Reports of a wild mushroom giving people visions of miniature creatures have also come from Papua New Guinea, and date back to the 1930s. When missionaries visited the Western Highlands, they came across a wild mushroom local communities called ‘nonda’ \u2013 after consuming it, they appeared to go temporarily insane, which was later dubbed ‘mushroom madness’. One of the features of that madness were Lilliputian hallucinations.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, an American author Gordon Wasson and French botanist Roger Heim, who specialised in mycology (study of fungi), visited Papua New Guinea in search of the culprit of this madness. The collected specimens were sent for testing to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist famous for discovering LSD, but he didn\u2019t find anything of interest. And so, no further research was done.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In December 2025, Colin Domnauer\u2019s supervisor visited Papua New Guinea to search for the same mushrooms, but he failed to find any.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could be the same species, which would be surprising because Papua New Guinea typically doesn\u2019t share species found in China and the Philippines,\u201d\u00a0Donmauer told the BBC.<\/a><\/p>\n

If it\u2019s not the same species, it would make the mystery even \u201cmore interesting from an evolutionary perspective,\u201d according to Donmauer. It would mean the same strange effects evolved completely independently in different mushroom species and in different parts of the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The story might go back even further \u2013\u00a0as Donmauer\u00a0mentions<\/a>, an ancient Daoist text from the 3rd\u00a0century CE refers to a ‘flesh spirit mushroom’ which, if consumed raw, allows one to \u201csee a little person\u201d and \u201cattain transcendence immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

The symptoms\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chemical and genomic analyses performed on\u00a0L. asiatica\u00a0at the\u00a0Dentinger Lab<\/a>\u00a0at the Natural History Museum of Utah uncovered that it doesn\u2019t carry either of the gene clusters that build the two best-known fungal hallucinogens \u2013\u00a0psilocybin of ‘magic mushrooms’ and ibotenic acid of the fly agaric.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, whatever is causing the Lilliputian hallucinations is like no other known psychedelic compound out there, working via a mechanism not described by science as of yet.<\/p>\n

\u201cSearching for an unknown psychoactive compound is a very exciting position to be in, a frontier towards expanding our understanding of the brain and mind,\u201d Donmauer\u00a0told Psychedelics.co.uk.<\/a><\/p>\n

And the tiny creatures suddenly appearing in front of the unlucky consumer aren\u2019t the only weird thing about the effects of this mushroom. For one, the trips produced by\u00a0L. asiatica\u00a0are unusually long, lasting anywhere from one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours. In some cases, they cause hospital stays due to side effects such as delirium and dizziness.\u00a0Every year, a hospital in the Yunnan Province treats hundreds of these cases<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Most known psychedelic compounds tend to\u00a0produce varied alterations to reality<\/a>, not only from person to person but from one experience to another. But not\u00a0L. asiatica, in which the little people hallucinations are reliably and repeatedly reported.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations,\u201d Donmauer\u00a0told the BBC<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Further research into\u00a0L. asiatica\u00a0will not only uncover details about its psychedelic qualities but answer bigger questions concerning consciousness and the connection between mind and reality. More than that, it could help scientists understand what causes spontaneous Lilliputian hallucinations outside of consuming the mysterious mushroom.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Top image: L. asiatica. Credit: Ruanxian Dai, Zhantao Duan, Bin Han, Yating Peng, Lan Zhu, Yuan Shen, Qiang Meng, CC BY 4.0<\/a>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seeing strange people in your house is never a good sign \u2013\u00a0especially if they\u2019re miniature, elf-like creatures jumping…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[97],"class_list":["post-893844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}