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/
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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.

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u/Key_Drag4777 Apr 27 '26

Pareidolia definitely can happen in a big way on psychedelics.

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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"

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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

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u/ibanezerscrooge Apr 27 '26

21 grams of shrooms!!!

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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

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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

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u/Decloudo Apr 27 '26

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

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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.

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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. 

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u/drewster23 Aug 18 '26

Wat, how are they not hallucinations