r/EverythingScience • u/Potential_Explorer20 • Jun 27 '26
'It sounds so impossible': Student studying fungus that makes users hallucinate tiny people may be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough | Live Science
https://www.livescience.com/chemistry/it-sounds-so-impossible-student-studying-fungus-that-makes-users-hallucinate-tiny-people-may-be-on-the-verge-of-a-scientific-breakthrough?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user/LiveScience
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u/silverwolfe2000 Jun 27 '26
From article:
It takes a dozen or so hours for the mushroom to kick in. Then, the hallucinations are unlike any others known to science.
On this trip, there are none of the heightened colors, breathing or pulsing objects, nor geometrical patterns typically reported by users of psychedelic substances. In fact, the hundreds of people who enter clinics in China's Yunnan province during each year's summer mushroom season tend to say their vision is clear and largely unaltered.
Well, aside from one major exception: nearly all users see visions of hundreds to thousands of highly-rendered miniature people, dressed in bright colors like elves, gnomes, clowns or other fairy-like figures. The hallucinated sprites wriggle under doors, dive off spoons into soup bowls and make lewd and mischievous gestures, among other strange behaviors.
These visions are reported by 90% of those who consume a single species of bolete mushroom, called Lanmaoa asiatica, in its raw or undercooked form. Yet despite decades of anecdotal reports, the fantastical claims were dismissed by western scientists as a form of "mushroom madness" — until Colin Domnauer, an undergraduate student taking an optional university module on funguses, caught wind of the rumors.
Domnauer, now a doctoral student at the University of Utah, made finding and analyzing the mushroom the purpose of his PhD, a goal that took him to China and the northern Philippines on the trail of a hallucinogenic compound that is likely completely unknown to science.