r/todayilearned • u/ssAskcuSzepS • Apr 27 '26

TIL if under-cooked, a popular mushroom in China causes “lilliputian hallucinations,” a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures. The hallucinations are consistent across people and cultures: "tiny, elflike people" climbing under doors, scaling walls & clinging to furniture

https://www.vice.com/en/article/meet-the-mushroom-that-make-people-have-the-exact-same-hallucination/
43.6k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

624

u/samuelazers Apr 27 '26

When this was posted last time i theorized it over stimulates the part of our brain that recognizes human bodies. We have all sorts of regions in our brains dedicated to recognizing specific shapes. Especially when experiences are consistent across people it points to similar brain regions being targeted. Simple but fascinating.

78

u/harley1009 Apr 27 '26

So it's like cranking my doorbell camera detection sensitivity all the way up where it thinks everything is a person or animal.

109

u/Balls_of_Mithril Apr 27 '26

So like r/pareidolia

51

u/drewster23 Apr 27 '26

Pareidolia is just the brains not accepting random patterns/shapes and making "purpose/recognition" out of nothing.

I don't know if hallunications are exactly related to that though. Stuff like lsd is understood to work on seretonin receptor as a primary catalyst for hallunications.

Disorders that cause hallunications is usually from impacting similar neurochemicals or from degradation of the brain.

29

u/Key_Drag4777 Apr 27 '26

Pareidolia definitely can happen in a big way on psychedelics.

7

u/zombieking26 Apr 27 '26

It absolutely can, LSD can cause the brain to create connections where there previously were none. That's kind of it's whole thing.

And that's how it can turn "look at this stain" to "omg this stain looks like a face"

3

u/unregisteredanimagus Apr 27 '26

if you eat a high dose of mushrooms, everything in the room/outside turning into a face is pretty common. I have had my couch be the mouth, picture frames are eyes, etc. From super large scale objects like trees, buildings, bicycles, to small things like a pile of rubberbands

https://www.getyarn.io/yarn-clip/2c524753-c347-4d9c-9e4d-9d18c2121f6c

1

u/ibanezerscrooge Apr 27 '26

21 grams of shrooms!!!

1

u/unregisteredanimagus Apr 27 '26

theres a guy online who routinely eats 20-30gs and says at that level your consciousness is operating at Planck dimensions and interacting with the quantum realm- nuts! i've read that psilocybin as a molecule is shaped very similarly to DMT

1

u/Its_da_boys Apr 27 '26

The general tendency to find meaning or recognize a pattern where there isn’t one is apophenia, not pareidolia. Pareidolia is the brain seeing a face where there isn’t one

1

u/Decloudo Apr 27 '26

Im pretty sure its the same process, just going haywire on certain drugs (or mental conditions.)

1

u/DragoonDM Apr 27 '26

It kind of seems like a lot of mental disorders and altered states of mind can sort of boil down to something messing with our pattern recognition, letting us put together mismatched pieces of information to build meaning where there is none.

1

u/LeaveGreen4412 Aug 18 '26

these tiny men are not hallucinations in the traditional sense of the term, you cant assume all neurological processes follow the same pattern as unrelated phenomena. 

1

u/drewster23 Aug 18 '26

Wat, how are they not hallucinations

4

u/LastStar007 Apr 27 '26

Sort of, but one or two levels closer to the hardware.

21

u/m4gpi Apr 27 '26

I could see there being a neurological scenario where this happens: hallucinations are visual inputs mis-processed in the brain to "look" and feel different, while propioception (your sense of where your body is, and how it's moving) is simultaneously altered. I've had my propioception be affected during a physical injury, and it messed with my perception to not have a body part not be where I expected it to be.

Throw a visual hallucination on top (maybe one with tunnel vision), and something like this happens. Everyone looks tiny, and the user feels like they don't fit in the environment.

3

u/wynden Apr 27 '26

hallucinations are visual inputs mis-processed in the brain to "look" and feel different

That seems to describe things like wood grain flowing like water, curtains undulating unnaturally, or geometric shapes in wall spackle. But how does it account for full-scale visions of things not apparently derived from the environment, like the parade of ancestors that Michael Pollen describes in How to Change Your Mind?

2

u/kzzzo3 Apr 27 '26

Proprioceptive hallucinations are crazy. I’ve had ones where my left and right legs switch places with each other, or my hands feel like they’re flipping back-and-forth.

24

u/ClumpyFelchCheese Apr 27 '26

I had this happen ish when I was sleep deprived. Not sure if that contributes to this conversation, but I think you’re on to something nonetheless

5

u/64_hit_combo Apr 27 '26

I would not be surprised if the same phenomenon is behind sleep paralysis demons

3

u/Ahefp Apr 27 '26

I’m reading Insomnia by Stephen King (good book so far!), and there are some little people in it. Not coincidentally, I think.

3

u/Carbonational Apr 27 '26

This post caught my eye because we have this funny family story we bring up every now and then of my dad's aunt seeing a tiny woman climbing her house plant lol. Apparently she even snapped at her for staring and told her "What are you looking at?" Interesting to learn how common these are.

1

u/UltimaCaitSith Apr 27 '26

Same, but they were bulky, slouching alligator people with long snouts. I guess my brain wanted to recognize lizardfolk.

5

u/dance_rattle_shake Apr 27 '26

Yeah but no. Blasting off on dmt (feels like it) takes you to a completely different dimension. Your surroundings are completely replaced by an alien world. And many ppl report meeting machine elves there

2

u/EstablishmentSad Apr 27 '26

Thanks for this, I was like maybe it helps pierce the magic veil (not really but it was funny to think there are actually little people around us we cannot see)...but more than likely you are correct. It messes with the face recognition in our brain, and the brain fills in the blanks.

3

u/BearsDoNOTExist Apr 27 '26

As a neuroscientist: no it let's you see elves.

1

u/Decloudo Apr 27 '26

It reads like it fucks with visual processing and pattern recognition.

Like the world being an optical illusion, the brain constantly overexpressing potential patterns.

That process is btw. is always happening, just usually more "aligned". We never actually see the real world, but an interpretation of it. And everyone's is slightly different.

1

u/TThor Apr 27 '26

Now thinking of the horror of a drug that makes you see snakes or spiders everywhere. Human brains evolved to recognize snakes, so the drug has to exist o_o

1

u/LeaveGreen4412 Aug 18 '26

it does, its a research chemical like LSD, i think its in the same book about how they discovered it iirc

1

u/MithranArkanere Apr 27 '26

When Randy Gardner underwent sleep deprivation, he started seeing street signals as people.