Big mushrooms Little people Big problems..
I just learned about Lanmaoa asiatica, and I have officially gone down a rabbit hole that I probably shouldn't have gone down.
It's a mushroom eaten in southwestern China, particularly Yunnan Province, where it's known as jian shou qing. Apparently it's delicious. There's just one small problem.
You better cook the damn thing long enough.
Because if you don't, you might start seeing little people.
And I don't mean the usual description of a psychedelic experience — colors changing, walls breathing, strange patterns or some bizarre dreamlike trip.
I mean little people.
Tiny humanlike figures walking across your plates. Climbing furniture. Marching around rooms. Going underneath doors. Sometimes dozens or even hundreds of them, apparently existing right there alongside the normal world.
These are called Lilliputian hallucinations, after the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput in Gulliver's Travels.
And here's where this gets absolutely fascinating.
People in Yunnan are so familiar with this phenomenon that properly cooking these mushrooms is simply part of eating them. Researcher Colin Domnauer described going to a mushroom hot-pot restaurant where the server reportedly set a timer for 15 minutes and warned them not to eat the mushrooms before the timer went off — or they might see little people.
Hospitals in the region routinely see cases involving the mushroom, and researchers have documented this strangely specific recurring hallucination.
Think about how bizarre that is.
If ten people took some random hallucinogenic drug, you might expect ten wildly different experiences. One person sees geometric patterns. Somebody sees a dragon. Somebody thinks the ceiling is melting.
But with this mushroom, there's this recurring theme:
Little people.
Scientists are now trying to figure out exactly what chemical in the mushroom causes this. And that's another strange part of the story: researchers haven't found the familiar psychedelic compounds you might expect, such as psilocybin or muscimol. Whatever is producing this extraordinarily specific effect may be something we don't fully understand yet.
Which brings me to the completely scientifically irresponsible portion of today's program.
What if the mushroom isn't making you see things that aren't there?
What if it's temporarily allowing you to see something that's already there?
Maybe somewhere beside our ordinary perception — fourth dimension, fifth dimension, sixth dimension, take your pick — there are thousands of tiny people going about their tiny lives while completely unaware that we're here.
And every summer some guy in Yunnan doesn't cook his mushrooms for the full 15 minutes and suddenly looks down at the kitchen table and goes:
"SON OF A BITCH. THERE THEY ARE."
No, there is absolutely no scientific evidence that Lanmaoa asiatica opens a portal into the tiny-people dimension.
But until scientists figure out exactly why one mushroom can make completely unrelated human brains produce such strangely similar imagery...
I'm keeping the little door open.
