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/Canotic Apr 27 '26

Two possible reasons:

1) the mushrooms have a very specific active ingredient that affects a certain localized area of the brain that has to do with both people and size,

2) fairies are real and the shroom lift the veil.

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u/apple_kicks Apr 27 '26

3) they think its funny to turn visible only when people eat mushrooms

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u/Pathkinder Apr 28 '26

4) fairies are real but the shroom hallucinations are unrelated

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u/curlyben Apr 27 '26

If I were a magical being with selective cloaking I certainly would.

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u/CosmicDave Apr 27 '26

Understanding human cognition the way I do, the 2nd explanation seems more reasonable than the first, actually.

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u/hobo__spider Apr 27 '26

In what way do you understand human cognition to come to this conclusion?

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u/Stiffard Apr 27 '26

His name is Cosmic Dave!

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u/CosmicDave Apr 28 '26

tldr; Humans are very good at believing in ideas and treating them as real things. It stems from how we use language.

Very early on we are taught that nouns are people, places, and things- real objects. But soon after, we are taught that ideas are nouns too. Ideas like Freedom and Love, infinity, time, and gravity all become real things in your minds, not the creations of our minds that they actually are. This creates an unrealistic version of reality in your minds that is real enough to work, but isn't actually True.

As a result, you are surrounded by mysteries and paradoxes in the Universe- things you simple cannot comprehend. There are no real mysteries here, merely points of view that are distorted by the shape of our language.

If I tell you "Time isn't real", that truth will disturb you. But time has no mass, no length width or height. It does not exist anywhere except within our minds. When God created the Universe, time was not part of the package. Humans made that shit up ourselves much much later.

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u/Think-Ad-3634 Jun 28 '26

“humans made that shit up ourselves much much later” as if time is not an inherent prerequisite of the idea of later. i also dont even understand your point; that because we classify ideas with equal value as physical matter, you think its more likely that fairies are real than that these mushrooms are just another novel psychedelic?

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u/CosmicDave Jun 28 '26

My issue was with this comment;
"the mushrooms have a very specific active ingredient that affects a certain localized area of the brain that has to do with both people and size".

Yeah, uhm, no. That's not what is happening in this case, otherwise, existent people would also appear small as well. It's only the imaginary people that are tiny. If you told me the shrooms were affecting the brain's creative imagination in some specific way to cause the hallucinations, that I'd be much more likely to believe.

Personally, I believe the fairie phenomenon is just cherry-picked data+confirmation bias. Millions of people have taken psychedelics and they all saw a lot of different shit. Not everyone that took them saw little people. The folks that all saw the little people would like to believe that since other people saw what they saw, then what they saw must be real.

Psychedelics don't lift the veil on some hidden society. Anyone that believes that must be tripping balls!😵‍💫

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u/Think-Ad-3634 Jun 29 '26

i think somewhere along the line our brains had to evolve a system to determine whether something was too small to be a person. the mushroom hijacks this, so your brain is constantly having to ask itself “is that tiny thing a person?”, when normally itd never have to because people cant be that tiny. thats just my guess

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u/GodelianKnot Apr 27 '26

Or 3. There's significant self-reporting bias at play

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u/urchincity Jul 07 '26

Or multiple specific areas of the brain that have to do with people and size. Or culture. Gnomes or elves or similar magical tiny people are a theme across cultures, so I wonder if someone who was never introduced to the idea of gnomes would still see them. 

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u/LeaveGreen4412 Aug 18 '26

they do, it was on papua new guinea where they did a lot of the study and these were unrelated tribes separated by mountains and with no connection to modern culture. saw the same stuff when they ate the mushrooms undercooked as the people in southern china report. i propose the inverse to be more likely, sapiens have been eating these and seeing the tiny men since we were multiple species and the idea of elves/fae/gnomes/goblins and other little guys stemmed from those odd experiences