Lilliputian Hallucinations and the Kingdom of the Small

00:00:03
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.

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Speaker 3: Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.

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Speaker 2: In today's episode, we're going to be covering a topic that has definitely made the rounds recently, but hopefully digging into some new angles on it for you here, maybe discussing it in slightly different ways. The basics of the story are this in your non province in southwestern China. This is located on the borders of me and Maher, Vietnam and Laos. There grows a particular species of bolite mushroom called Lanmaua asiatica. This is a mushroom with plentiful culinary uses. Like it's used. You can buy it at the market, you can order it in restaurants. But if you consume it undercooked or certainly if it's assumed raw but even under cooked, its consumption can produce a particular type of hallucination known as a Lilliputian hallucination, and can do so with a fair degree of certainty. We'll get into the percentages as we go here, but there's again a particular type of hallucination associated with these mushrooms, and it's quite startling.

00:01:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is interesting because I think because we tend to assume that the content of hallucinations is idiosyncratic. Like when a person takes a compound that makes them hallucinate, you can with some regularity predict that they will hallucinate if they ingest it, but you can't usually say what the hallucination is going to be of even you know, it'll be different between different people, and it'll be different for the same person and on different trips, different times they take it. It is really curious that you could have different people at different times taking this one psychedelic compound or whatever comes from this one particular food source, and it not only triggers hallucinations, but tends to trigger hallucinations of the same thing, of the same type. And that would be these Liliputian hallucinations. So what exactly are these?

00:02:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it is important to note, yeah, distress everything he just said, because I think, again, most of our understanding of psychedelics, and certainly most people listening to the show's experiences with any psychedelics, it's going to be those classical psychedelics. It's going to be things like LSD and psilocybin where you can have two people take the same dose of the same substance with the same set and setting and have highly different experiences. And with this there you're almost guaranteed to see tiny people swarming all over the place. And that feels more like magic to us, right, because you hear tales with classical psychedelics and more well known psychedelics where people say, oh, did you see the maybe you might see the machine ls or maybe you'll see the spider weaver or whatever you know, archetype is being invoked, and that does sound like, oh, well, maybe I've pressed through into some sort of magical world where something absolute exists outside of our own experiences. But for the most part, yeah, it's just it's in reality. It's going to be highly different depending on you know, when what you're taking, when you're taking who you are.

00:03:28
Speaker 3: Right, you can promise to open the doors of perception, but you can't guarantee what's going to walk through. But apparently in some cases you can have a pretty good prediction about what's going to walk through, and this is one of these cases.

00:03:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, So a note before we get into more of the particulars about Lilyputian hallucinations and this particular mushroom we mentioned the scientific classification land Maua asiatica. The genus land Maua was named after Chinese naturalist Land Mao. This was a Ming dynasty botanist who was very interested in bolites. And as for Liliputian hallucinations, this name stems from the tiny six inch tall people from the island of Lilipute in Jonathan Swift's seventeen twenty six work Gulliver's Travels. Even if you haven't read it, you're familiar to the little people that like tie the man to the ground, and this image has been invoked in just across media as a result. But lily Putian hallucinations, it's a particular type of visual hallucination, and I was reading I originally read about this in passing years ago in Oliver Sachs's twenty twelve book Hallucinations, Like early on he mentioned he's just talking about in general how hallucinations work, in the different forms they can take, and he mentions Liliputian visions and says little beings, elves, dwarfs, fairies, imps are curiously common in these hallucinations, and then talks about them, you know, in terms of other forms of hallucination like micropsia or macropsia, where you see, you know, things that are bigger or smaller, changes in size and so forth. Really getting into that sort of Alice in Wonderland realm where suddenly size changes.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, like types of visual distortion there. But yeah, the little Putian hallucinations being not just a visual distortion of objects in the environment, but a projection of little beings like little imps or fairies or elves into the environment.

00:05:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there are there different forms of according to sex, there are different types of hallucination that are possible that could invoke perception of a tiny person or tiny people like. He brings up that some of these things can be brought on by the use of cannabis, mescaline, LSD, or other hallucinogenic drugs, But elsewhere in the book he discusses a host of neurological conditions that can bring about this sort of hallucination or something like it. Some of the little people hallucinations in general, he reports, involved singular entities, such as a devil sitting on the end of your bed, but others in like a hallmark of lily Putian hallucinations involve multitudes, the kind of swarming of you know, hundreds or thousands of individuals. Sometimes they're described as marching or kind of like boiling in and out of things.

00:06:25
Speaker 3: I've got some detail on this in a minute.

00:06:28
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sex discusses a woman with Parkinson's disease who saw little people that she called Chucky's running around her bed at night, talking to each other and gesturing, which she couldn't under She couldn't hear what they were saying. This one apparently took on a frightening air. But this does not seem to I don't know. Maybe you can speak to this as well, Joe, But from when I was reading most people describing lily Putian hallucinations, there doesn't necessarily seem to be anything nefarious about them. It's just kind of happening.

00:06:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, I haven't read anything about them overwhelmingly being perceived one way or another in terms of intent, like are they good creatures? Are they bad creatures? I've read individual reports, like there's one famous report from hundreds of years ago of like a monk who sees them running around in the church, and they're mischievous there, they're playing pranks. But yeah, I don't know if overall they are usually perceived as as harmful, helpful, or neutral, though often actually in one source I'm going to get to in just a minute, they are often described as kind of joyful or fun, though that fun may or may not be at your expense.

00:07:36
Speaker 2: I guess, yeah, yeah. Sex describes a woman with Charles Bonnet syndrome. This causes visual hallucinations and people with low vision, and in this case there's kind of they're different things. She experienced. So she saw tall men almost quasi death figures at the foot of her bed, as well as quote little people a few inches high, like elves or fairies with little green caps, climbing up the sides of her wheelchair. And she also would see adorable children picking pieces of paper up off the floor and climbing stairs like kind of like imaginary stairs and like the peripheral area of or a vision.

00:08:13
Speaker 3: This is really interesting because the two types of visions described here are both examples of hallucinations that get people a little bit freaked out because of the commonly reported content that people like compare notes and share. I'm sure you've read about the like the hat man or the shadow man, where people I mean, there are different reasons people have this, but especially people who have edge of sleep hallucinations or sleep related disorders will often report having this perception of like a tall, shadowy man standing at the foot of their bed, often with a hat or something like this. And people sometimes get freaked out about this because they compare notes and they're like, wait a minute, how are we seeing the same guy? That shouldn't be happening, because again of the same intuition we have that our hallucinations, if they're really hallucinations, should be idiosyncratic. We shouldn't be seeing similar things. That almost makes you think there is something else out there.

00:09:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, then you think you're in a Stephen King novel right now.

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Speaker 3: I don't think there's any reason to believe that there is actually, you know, a long, tall shadow man going around everybody's bed at night.

00:09:22
Speaker 2: But there are to come back to our death episodes, there are shared cultural motifs, yes, and so it gets a little complicated when you talk about, you know, psychedelic visions.

00:09:32
Speaker 3: Well, I would say another thing is that you could have commonly occurring content in hallucinations because of certain you know, ways that the human brain is wired that we have that certain types of perceptual content that we're likely to see in certain environments tend to trigger things that are very common in human experience. Like we certainly are hardwired to look for human shapes, to look for people, because we are people and we're social, you know, and so like we can easily interpret just kind of random noise within an ambiguous sensory environment as people shaped or maybe being like people. So I think that that's an easier way to interpret, like where the man standing at the foot of the bed comes from. You're like half awake, or you've got some kind of perceptual issue going on because of the edge of sleep or something causing a hallucination, and you see a you know, vertical kind of signal of darkness or something in your room, maybe triggered by a coat hanging on the wall or just a corner or the way the light works, and that reads in your brain. Your brain kind of cranks that up into tall man.

00:10:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, but in these lily Putian scenarios, it's these these lily Putian hallucinations, it's it's more like and I have to be. I'm gonna go ahead and skip ahead and just go ahead and mention that, like research into the particulars of this are still ongoing. Yeah, and these mushrooms are apparently not known to contain any known psychedelic compound, So this is not psilocybin. We're trying to figure out what it is and how it works. But like, the more I read about it, like the best way that I could sort of imagine what is actually happening, you know, as a layperson trying to imagine what's happening heurologically is it. It's kind of like the granular details of the world you're perceiving are taking on the form of people at a distance, Like there's something going on maybe with the way the brain is interpreting scale and minute details, and it just gets like rearranged and transformed into these visions of like little people boiling out of things and marching around.

00:11:45
Speaker 3: Maybe. I mean, like like you said, I think it is not fully understood yet. You know, research is ongoing, though these things have been known about for a long time. So are you okay if I do a section on what I was looking up about a little Apitian hallucination. Now, let's do it, okay. So I was reading about this in a couple of sources by a Dutch professor of clinical psychopathology at Leiden University named Jan Dirk Blohm. So first I came across his work in a book of his called A Dictionary of Hallucinations. This is published by Springer. This is the twenty twenty three edition. And in this book Blom describes Liliputian hallucinations as a hallucination featuring miniature people, objects, animals, or fantasy creatures. Obviously, as you said, named after Gulliver's travels. And he notes that descriptions of visions like this go back millennia. You know, you can go way back and find people describing seeing little swarms of people or creatures running around. But apparently the term Liliputian hallucination first appears in the medical literature in nineteen o nine, introduced by the French psychiatrist Raoul le Roi who lived eighteen sixty nine to nineteen forty one, after he personally had a hallucination of tiny people running around.

00:13:06
Speaker 2: Oh wow, does he reveal like what may have caused it?

00:13:10
Speaker 3: I did not dig into Laroy's backstory enough to know. So no, I don't know in his case what is thought to have caused it, if it was even known.

00:13:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean Sachs, for instance, mentions that sometimes these things are even tied to visual aurs and severe migraines. So to be clear, you don't have to eat some kind of mushroom to experience hallucinations like this. There are various causes, and we don't necessarily know all the causes.

00:13:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we don't always know why a cause causes it, you know, but you can correlate it with certain things, like Blomb does in this entry and in a paper I'm about to talk about. But Blom says they are most often described as quote, gay, joyous creatures dressed in brilliantly colored outfits that jump and dance, climb onto tables, leave through doors or windows, and march around like little troops of soldiers. There matches what you were reading about. Marching common thing, and Blom says that not unlike that. Much like these other entity experiences people have, they are often perceived as highly realistic. This is one thing that I think people who have never experienced hallucinations consistently misunderstand. We assume that if you're hallucinating something, it must feel somehow hazy, uncertain, unreal, kind of only half there. And this is the way it's often perceived in media, Like if somebody has a hallucination in the movies or in a TV show, it's often see through. It's often you know, they are just clear visual indications that this is not part of the rest of reality, that it is separate and less, less firm. But you know, it can be like this with hallucinations. There are different kinds of hallucinations that feel like they contain different levels of reality within them. Often it is not this way. You have to understand that lots of hallucinations are perceived as totally real. They look, feel and seem real in the same way that objects in our normal perception do.

00:15:17
Speaker 2: Yeah Sax mentions this a little bit too, pointing out that all of us can visualize mental limit well not all of us, as we've discussed, most of us can visualize mental images, but they're not projected into external space like a hallucination, and they also lack the detailed quality of a true hallucination. And so maybe part of that misconception for those of us who haven't experienced vivid, you know, actual hallucinations protected into space. We're sort of relying on while relying on cinema, but we're also relying on what we know about our own mental images and how amorphous they tend to be.

00:15:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, when people who are not familiar with visual hallucinations try to imagine what they're like, are our main point of comparison is our imagination. But that's not really what That's not what they're like because the imagination is like you're totally aware that it's voluntary and conscious. It's not fully integrated with the rest of your senses. It's not really like that. I think maybe the better comparison, though this doesn't exactly line up either, but in some ways the better comparison is dreams, where when you're in a dream, you don't realize you're in a dream and it feels real.

00:16:26
Speaker 2: Dreaming is also an interesting thing to bring up because media media versions of dreams are often not like dreams at all, but media can be so convincing that we end up following back on dream sequences we saw in TV when we think about what a dream is.

00:16:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, that's funny. So in this dictionary entry, Blom also references a paper that he's the author on called LeRoy's Elusive Little People, a Systemic Review on Liliputian Hallucinations. This was published in the journal Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews and twenty twenty one, and in this review he looks into what conditions are associated with Liliputian hallucinations. In particular, as opposed to just general hallucinations, they appear in conjunction with a lot of different conditions. He found that fifty percent of reports of Liliputian hallucinations were together accounted for by three causes. This would include a schizophrenia spectrum disorder, which is associated with diverse hallucinations, but also liliputi alcohol use disorders. So for example, in alcohol withdrawal, you know, for people who have extreme alcohol dependence during withdrawal, you know you might have read about like delirium tremens, so you can have Liliputian hallucinations there, and then also hallucinations associated with loss of vision. And then he says another thirty thirty six percent were caused by neurological diseases, for example with Parkinson's can experience little Putian hallucinations. One thing that is really interesting is that Blom says in ninety seven percent of case of documented cases, they appeared to be grounded. These little people running around in the hallucination. They were grounded in the sense that they're connected somewhat realistically to gravity and to the environment, so they interact with surfaces like floors, furniture, and tabletops. And there's ninety seven percent of cases. I read a lot of studies and I feel like you almost never get a result of ninety seven percent of anything.

00:18:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an astoundingly high percentage, Like it's almost a certainty, it would seem. And there are similar numbers that will get to based on people who are admitted to the hospital in nonprovince for having experienced these symptoms from consuming presumably, you know, undercooked mushrooms.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that nine percent of cases they're grounded. They're interacting in a somewhat physically realistic way with the environment. In only two percent of cases are they reported as floating in the air. So this would be a little people hallucination that travels along with the subject's gaye. You look and the hallucination moves with your gaze and that's two percent, and then in one percent they are reported as a fixed two dimensional projection upon a wall like a movie.

00:19:26
Speaker 2: An example of this that University of Utah my collegist, Colin dom Nauer brings up. We're going to come back to him because he's seemingly one of, if not the prime researchers on this topic in the West. He mentions a UNN professor who ended up consuming some of this mushrooms these mushrooms and then began to experience some symptoms and must have realized, oh, well, I guess they weren't cooked well enough and now I'm getting these side effects. But he was initially disappointed because he's like, I don't see little people anywhere where the lily Putian hallucinations. And then he looks under the tablecloth and he sees them marching around, and then you know, he puts the tablecloth down, and then he's able to like lift it up again, see them again grounded there under the tablecloth, and then is he lifts the tablecloth higher, all their little heads come off and are still stuck to the tablecloth, and the rest of their little bodies are marching in place. That's wild the idea, you know, that they're grounded like this, but also that you could turn away from them and then come back to them and see them in the same place. Like if we were going to just throw all reason out the window, you would just say, well, maybe the universe is just made of tiny, marching little dudes and that's all there is to it.

00:20:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, fascinating, So many interesting things about the consistency of these reports that Lilliputian hallucinations in particular are just they're physically integrated into the environment and have some kind of realistic connection to the physics and to the you know, the surfaces and geometry of what's around you. And Blom says in his twenty twenty one paper that this quote indicates that higher level regions of the perceptual network capable of seamlessly integrating sensory and hallucinatory content are involved in their mediation. Interesting fact from Blom's paper. I don't know if this is consistent with what you were reading about the mushroom triggered hallucinations in particular, but he says that historical reports of these visions mentioned that they rarely interact with the subject, you know, they're rarely interacting with the person seeing them. Rather they interact with the environment and you watch.

00:21:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, that does seem to be a recurring flavor. Again, it's almost like the idea that you're seeing through the veil and you're seeing that the world is made out of tiny little elves and they're just caring about what they're doing, which is I guess holding matter together. Yeah.

00:22:10
Speaker 3: So what are the underlying mechanisms causing Lilliputian hallucinations? Blom says this is not known, but there are a couple of major ideas that he puts forward in his research. He names these ideas. One is called perceptual release and the other is deafferentiation. He explains these two concepts in his twenty twenty one review. So I'm going to read a couple of quotes from him of deafferentiation, Blom writes, quote, the deafferentiation model states that loss of peripheral sensory input can lead to spurious activity of central networks normally involved in processing that input. It is thus applicable to close die hallucinations, hypnagogic hallucinations, and Charles Bonnet syndrome, including cases of HEMI and quadrantanopsia. Moreover, this mechanism has been described in Parkinson's disease, with the Lilliputian hallucinations appearing at dusk i e. Crepuscular or crepuscular hallucinations. So, if I'm understanding this explanation correctly, it is a Lilliputian hallucinations for some reason, may manifest from a disruption in the supply of sensory real sensory input from the environment, and at some point in the processing of that that like lack of feed in is it turns into supplying this extra vision of little people running around on the table.

00:23:38
Speaker 2: Oh wow. So to sort of come back to my earlier sort of attempt to understand it, it would it's more perhaps a situation where you're getting this this input about the world around you, and it's like, we don't have any details on all those little little corners of the thing. So we're gonna we're gonna replace those little details with people moving around. Possibly I'm just gonna fill in the blanks.

00:24:00
Speaker 3: The other hypothesis that he talks about is the idea is a perceptual release. Here, I'm going to read again from blom In this twenty twenty one paper. He says, quote. The perceptual release model states that indogenously mediated perceptual material, which during our waking hours normally remains below the threshold of consciousness, can break through the surface and be projected into the outside world. Also referred to as dream intrusion, The model characterizes Lilliputian hallucinations as a matter of dreaming while awake. A crucial difference while with dreaming, though, is that in this case only part of the perceived environment is replaced by hallucinatory content. And this is interesting because you see a similar thing with edge of sleep hallucinations that people have. You know, the hallucinations people have while they're falling asleep or while they're waking up from sleep are often a mix of perception of the room around them and dream content. You know, so you imagine, you see the room you're in, but you imagine seeing other things in the room very much alike these little people hallucinations running around on the furniture. And so, yeah, this hypothesis is there's some kind of mechanism in the brain that's indogenously generating imagery that is not actually coming from the senses. It's not from the environment, and you normally, while you're awake, the valve is closed on that stuff. But here, somehow the valve gets kind of partially opened, and that content starts spilling out and mixing with your incoming perceptual content.

00:25:40
Speaker 2: But again doing so in a very particular way in terms, because you know, when you're talking about dreams flooding into the real world, like, we can imagine that taking on various forms, but here the form is kind of particular, like little people, little things moving around.

00:26:00
Speaker 3: All right, So that's all I've got for now on little Aputian hallucinations in general. Again, the main line on it is it's very interesting but still not fully understood. You know, psychiatrists and neuroscientists are still working on it. But I guess the thing we need to come back to is the connection to the mushroom that we started with, the mushroom that people are eating in Unn province. Again, this is the len maua asiatica.

00:26:25
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, And I want to have a note include a note here on sources. One of the main articles that's been making the rounds and is great well worth seeking out is Rachel Newer's They Saw them on their dishes when eating the mushroom, making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans. This is on BBC dot Com and it covers recent and ongoing work by the University of Utah micologists Colin Domnauer and Brin Dentinger to fully understand the properties of the mushrooms. Yea, the mushroom is also studied considerably from both a mycology standpoint and a medical standpoint in China. So there are a lot of Chinese papers about this, many of which I was finding in translation, so not everything is untranslated. And then dom Nauer himself also wrote a twenty twenty five piece for the Natural History Museum of Utah titled Experts Explore New Mushroom which causes fairy tale like hallucinations, And there's also a video of him talking about the mushroom in that paper.

00:27:26
Speaker 3: But yeah, one thing to make clear here is that even though there is some new level of interest in this in English language publications, this doesn't mean it's like a newly discovered species or anything like this. This is like a long known mushroom that has been used in cooking in this part of China and is known of by people in other places around Asia as well.

00:27:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, our scientific understanding of it is certainly more recent, but yeah, people have been experiencing this mushroom for centuries and centuries. Soya's down to the brass tacks of exactly what this mushroom is as far as we can understand it. So first of all, again, it is a bolite. It is lan Maua asiatica, and it's bolite, by the way, is a designation both as a general type of capped mushroom, which includes the likes of edible Porsini mushrooms, as well as things like the poisonous Satan's bolite, which look up a picture of it, it looks very satanic. It can tell like I should probably not eat this satanic mushroom. But under modern classifications, bolite is also an order of fung guy and it also contains non elite mushrooms like some puffballs. But lan Maua asiatica is a bolite in both senses of the world. So, as don Nauer relates in his Natural History Museum of Utah, piece, humans have known about mushrooms like this for a very long time, and then within the modern Western history of psychedelic research. Knowledge of this seems to go back at least to the nineteen thirty Things get a little foggy here. We were discussing this a little bit off Mike, but the story goes that in nineteen thirty four, Western explorers in the western highland of Papua New Guinea learned that consumption of a wild mushroom locally known as nanda could result in visions were that, at least at one point were described as tiny people with mushrooms around their faces.

00:29:24
Speaker 3: So we were talking about this off mic before we got started. I ended up spending a lot of time trying to track down these old sources and find these reports. I did track down the sources, including this really early one that keeps getting referenced by a Catholic missionary who lived in the Western Highlands. So this paper is called Ethnological Notes on the Mount Hagen Tribes Mandated Territory of New Guinea, with special reference to a tribe called the Mogai. This was published in Anthroposts in nineteen thirty six by a Catholic missionary named Reverend William Ross, so he was in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In this article, he's describing the customs and way of life of the people around Mount Hagen. Unfortunately for our purposes, he doesn't say anything at all about Lilliputian hallucinations. He says that he's talking about like the different stimulants or you know, pharmacologically active things that people around there consume. He says, really, there isn't much use of stimulants or narcotics by the locals. A few of the older people and the tribes smoke tobacco, but for the most part, quote, the only quasi narcotics or stimulants used are are ginger called kobana and a kind of wild mushroom called nanda. And then all he says about Nanda is quote, the wild mushroom called Nanda makes the user temporarily insane. He flies into a fit of frenzy. Death is even known to have resulted from its use.

00:30:53
Speaker 2: It is used.

00:30:54
Speaker 3: Before going out to kill another native or in times of great excitement, anger or sorrow. And then so, yeah, nothing about little Pusian hallucinations there. There's another relatively early paper referencing the nanda nanda mushroom called mushroom Madness in the New Guinea Highlands. This is by the Australian anthropologist Marie Ray. I looked this up. This is also kind of interesting. It documents how the mushroom is used by the people of the Western Highlands. It says that sometimes it is eaten and it will make people display unusual behavior patterns. She says sometimes men who take it go into fits of aggression, the rare people are rarely injured from them, and that women who take it kind of like dance and flirt and converse openly about taboo subject matter and sexual subject matter. But again no reference I could find in here to visions of little people. So to the extent that this particular mushroom is associated with little Pusian hallucinations. I think that comes in later sources. Could be in the work the comments on it in the later in the sixties, I think by R. Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim.

00:32:06
Speaker 2: Yeah. Lawson and him apparently collected specimens from this area in Papula, New Guinea and brought them back to Albert Hoffman to test, and these tests turned up apparently nothing of real interest, And then researchers largely dismissed these tales as more cultural than pharmacological and like moved on to other you know at the time, more interesting substances.

00:32:28
Speaker 3: And Rob correct me if this doesn't match with your reading. But based on what I was reading, this might have been mentioned in the article by Rachel Nuer or in the one by Colin Domnauer that they weren't sure actually that this is the same type of mushroom or related to the mushroom consumed in You Non Provence. That it seems like it could be just a different thing, maybe a different pharmacologically active mushroom.

00:32:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's my understanding as well, that less certainty about the Papua New Guinea mushroom maybe a stronger case to be made for a particular psychedelic bow leap that's been reported in part of the Philippines, like a remote part of the Philippines. But for the most part, all of the attention is on Maua asiatica in You Non Province. Again, this is one where you can go to the markets when it's in season and buy it. You can you can see from the photos on some of these articles, like they're just big bushels of the stuff. It's it's growing, it grows in the wild and that it is foraged, but there seems to be no shortage of them.

00:33:29
Speaker 3: And one thing I think we should make clear if we haven't already said this, I don't think we've talked about this yet. Based on everything I was reading, this is a mushroom that is used as food. It is not something like psilocybin mushrooms that is consumed specifically because you want to hallucinate or have a psychedelic experience.

00:33:51
Speaker 2: Right right, I think that's very key. So with with something like psilocybin on the whole, nobody is consuming psilocybin for the taste. People are putting up with the taste, masking the taste in various ways in order to have the experience the psychedelic experience of the psilocybin. It's the other way around with this substance. People are regularly eating it because it tastes good. It's supposed to have a really nice yumami flavor to it, uh, and so it is. It's cooked, generally, properly cooked, and then consumed for this express reason. And as far as I can tell, based on these these accounts that have been reading, there are no known cases of people taking lam maua asiatica recreationally or even as part of like a religious or spiritual practice. Now it's possible that some you know, some sort of traditional indigenous usage like that is just simply is simply unknown. Now it may have been lost a time, but or is it not reported on, Yeah, or is not reported on. But for the most part, this is like this is a known, not uncommon side effect, but one that is not desired. It just ends up being, you know, being an accidental case. And then in many cases people want to having to go to the hospital for it.

00:35:09
Speaker 3: More like a form of food poisoning exactly.

00:35:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, And when you look at the details of the of the trip that ensues, you can really understand why. Like, for instance, we've talked about on the show before in our episodes on psychedelics that when it comes to study of therapeutic properties of say psilocybin and LSD, there's often more of a tendency to use psilocybin because the duration is shorter, whereas LSD has a much longer duration. If you're trying to fit your study into a work day, psilocybin is probably going to be a better fit than LSD, you know, which is going to be you know, in excess of eight hours, so it's something like ten to twelve hours, whereas these Liliputian hallucinations associated with len malay asiatica they can last for like two days. So it's like you'll go to sleep at night having these hallucination, then you'll wake up again to them in the morning, that sort of thing.

00:36:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's often a delayed onset, so it might be like twelve or twenty four hours before the symptoms begin after you eat the undercooked mushroom and then and then it could go on for days afterwards.

00:36:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, and let's see, I was looking at a paper. This is a twenty twenty five paper by die at All titled Untargeted Metabolomic Analysis using up lcs MS reveals metabolic changes associated with len Malla asadica poisoning. This was in Food Science and Nutrition. But basically the part I zeroed in on is that it doesn't seem to impact internal organs aside from causing some potential gastro intestinal unrest. Much can be said of classical hallucinogens as well. The main danger in something that factors into some of these hospital stays, according to them, is just increased risk of accident or self harm, assumingly due to the just the disruption of your perception of reality, Like, are you going to be able to avoid tripping over the cat if you're also seeing tiny elves boil out and climb the side of the cabinet?

00:37:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know.

00:37:23
Speaker 3: While on the subject of the psychedelic properties of this mushroom, one thing that I think is worth mentioning is that it looks a little bit psychedelic if you do a cross section of it.

00:37:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:37:35
Speaker 3: Have you seen those where they like cut it and you look inside and it's got these strange wavy lines of blue and you know, blue and gray and violet or whatever.

00:37:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is that's the bruising And apparently one of the main names for it locally, and you nonprovidence is and I apologize for any butchering of the Mandarin here jian shao hing, which translates to something like to turn blue in the hand, because not all Belites bruise blue, but a number of them do. So this is not something unique to this species. But you can imagine this may have been like very vital information in the foraging of the thing. You know, there are all these little tricks of the trade, and they may differ a little bit from one foraging culture to the next, but you need to be able to figure out what you're foraging differentiated from other mushrooms that may not be beneficial and may not be good to eat, and so you know, there's all stuff like bruising and what are the gills look like and so forth.

00:38:37
Speaker 3: Yeah. Did we mention also that it does not seem to be closely related to other psychedelic mushrooms.

00:38:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is this is really really fascinating. We mentioned that they don't seem to contain any known psychedelic compounds from other mushrooms, and domnall Are in his paper. One of his papers points out that it actually is probably more closely late to just say the Porsini mushroom, the state mushroom of Utah. He points out, yeah, than to any known psychedelic mushroom, certainly your psilocybin mushrooms and so forth.

00:39:09
Speaker 3: Well, it would have this in common that Portini mushrooms are used in cooking, you know, get used for flavor. Usually you get them dried and they make a really good mushroom stock.

00:39:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Portinis are good, and again portini primarily a food mushroom. Much like Mala asiatica. It is a food that again is one that is foraged in the wild during its peak summer months, sold in markets, served in restaurants packs. Again nice, ummmy flavor. And it's just apparently, you know common knowledge, you just need to cook it enough in order for it to be safe to eat. And there are a lot of foods like that, right, I mean just in our day to day world. You know that, Well, I need to actually cook this bacon all the way.

00:39:52
Speaker 3: You need to cook chicken all the way.

00:39:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and any never We've talked about these before in our Dangerous Foods episodes from the pastans.

00:40:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't want eat raw beans? Yeah, that's serious.

00:40:04
Speaker 2: But again, there are plenty of cases of people consuming undercooked la Malla asiatica ending up being admitted to the hospital. And it's something like ninety six percent of those cases involve people having these ELUCUTIONI hallucinations.

00:40:19
Speaker 3: Oh wow, I don't think I saw that detail. Ninety six percent of the people who have len Malla asiatica poisoning report that they're seeing little people exactly.

00:40:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. So again we get a very high percentile here. Yeah, other interesting things that dominall reports the points that Union is home to forty percent of the world's wild edible fung gui, which I thought was pretty impressive. So this is an area with deep foraging roots. You know, people have been making use of various edible mushrooms in this area for a very long time. It sounds like a very very micophilic culture, mushroom loving culture. Again, these are sold in markets, served in restaurants. In twenty twenty three, then US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, a known Chinese food enthusiast, reportedly ate some of these during an official visit to China, but of course suffered no side effects because they were properly prepared. But yeah, I had to listen back, like I vaguely remembered hearing about this, But yeah, there were like NPR stories about this from the time. Another thing we already talked about, How okay, that doesn't seem like people are taking these consuming these mushrooms on the whole for anything other than food purposes, and then they experienced the psychedelic properties as an unwanted side effect. I think it's also interesting that, you know, we think about classical hallucinogens, we think about psilocybin mushrooms in particular, and we think about these sort of the visionary experiences that are often tied to them. You know that I'm going to have an experience that means something, and it may end up meaning something in a way that mainly more negative, it mainly more positive. But it's about me, it's about the cosmos, it's about ends up being there's some sort of insight into myself or the universe. But that does not seem to be the case with len malla asataka here, like people who consume them, they see the little people, but there's no sense that like there's any insight into the world or anything like that. It's a it's a very different trip in that regard.

00:42:25
Speaker 3: It is not commonly reported as being either enjoyable or revelatory.

00:42:30
Speaker 2: Yeah or yeah, not at all life changing and or you know, aside from the fact that I think if you saw this stuff your life would it would be something you remembered for a very long time because it is certainly novel, but just maybe there's not much to really gain from it on it like a personal level. So it wasn't until I believe twenty fourteen that my cologists in you non province actually sequenced the mushroom, and it was after this that was given like a proper scientific name. And there's again so much that still needs to be unraveled about how this is interacting with the human mind and our perception. But again, people have been experiencing this sort of thing for centuries upon centuries, and it's here that we get into another interesting area of contemplation, like, to what extent could experiences like this, you know, certainly regional experiences with some sort of regionally available mushroom, or just littly putian hallucinations in general, to what extent might they be connected to folkloric and mythological traditions of little people.

00:43:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's always tempting to make this connection in multiple ways, Like to you find an experience people have, whether you know, citing something in the environment that looks kind of like a fantasy character, or certain types of hallucinations people are prone to, you wonder if that has anything to do with the origins of these cultural motifs or images.

00:43:52
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Now we should definitely stress that traditions of little people occur throughout human cultures across vast stretches of both time and space, and as always, we never want to err in attributing meaningful cultural motifs or imaginary beings to a single factor. Be that factor something like aligned with geo mythology or pharmacology or some other discipline, you know. As fascinating as all of these potential explanations are, I feel like we always need to acknowledge the potential influence of multiple factors, and always acknowledge the potential power of human artistic creation.

00:44:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a point we make on the show a lot. You don't necessarily have to explain a fantastic image by way of an experience. Creative imagination is very powerful. Our minds are roiling with images and ideas, and they always have been, you know, all throughout the millennia. So there's not always a need to say if people imagined a type of creature that it necessarily came from an experience of a certain type or seeing something of a certain type, though it certainly could have and it's interesting to imagine.

00:44:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, while not attempting to explain everything via exposure to len mala asiatic hallucinations, it is interesting to compare some of these symptoms to various traditions of little people, particularly in the Chinese tradition. And actually dom Nawer gets into this a little bit, and he points out that a prominent Dallist text from the third century CE refers to a flesh spirit mushroom, which, according to the text, if consumed raw, allows one to see a little person and attain transcendence immediately. WHOA, now in that, I mean we are talking about transcendence. So this does seem to sort of blur the line between the sort of life changing, insightful psychedelic experiences that may be more closely aligned with something like psilocybin and what we're largely talking about with these Liliputian hallucinations.

00:45:55
Speaker 3: Well, I could imagine that whether one perceives a hallucinatory experience as meaningful or life changing could have at least as much to do with the cultural context and processing as it does with the specifics of the experience and how that relates to the pharmacology.

00:46:13
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you could have a situation where like a common farmer eats these mushrooms, and maybe that farmer does have something really insightful to take away from it that has more to do with them and how they look at the world. But they also might just have a very mundane response to it, like I saw little people everywhere. Don't know what that was about, but that was weird. Whereas yeah, like a Dallast scholar might have a totally different insight and might have different ideas to attach to what they are perceiving. Yeah, so this would if I'm understanding his reference correctly, I think this is the mushroom Raljie has described by the alchemist Gihong who lived two eighty three through three p. Forty three CE. There are various mushroom is described in this text. They have names in translation like black cloud spirit mushroom or tiger spirit mushroom, female cannabis spirit mushroom, and so forth, and they have at times various fantastic attributed powers, like enabling one to travel around on clouds. Oh. So you know, it's uh, you know, it's it's very tempting to look at these and think, well, you know, we're talking about ancient catalogs of psychedelic properties of different naturally occurring organisms, uh, which which may well be the case. So you know, hidden in some of these and maybe you know, kind of exkewed through time and and and varied accounts. You know, we may have an actual evidence of of you know, of ancient familiarity with these substances. Now, I also looked at a paper titled a Historical Quest for Little People Hobbits in English and Chinese Literature, and this is by Yakman Kai published in the International Journal of Compared Vrative Literature and Translation Studies. This paper compared literary accounts of little people in Western and Chinese literature, and the author's compilation is I think rather useful for our purposes here, because on the Chinese end of things, the author charts the discussion of little people from around seven to seventy BCE to seventeen eighty eight, charting the source texts and their attributed heights. And so the different heights range in size from about three point five eight centimeters to one hundred and seven point four centimeters, so roughly between one point four inches and three point five feet. But a lot of the heights are going to be less than thirty five centimeters or one point one feet, and some of them are more in like the twenty five centimeter range.

00:48:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, my understanding of Liliputian hallucinations is that they generally involve, you know, creatures and people described as being like less than a foot tall more on the matter of a few inches.

00:48:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think on the whole, it would be reckless to say that Lilliputian hallucinations are responsible for all traditions of people of diminutive stature in folklore and mythology, because clearly they're just other things going on. And there are also people that are of a much smaller statue stature for various reasons, and we would observe them in real life, and there are all sorts of different ideas get attached to them. But one of the sources that the Outthor draws from is of course the famous Chinese text that we've discussed on the show before, the Shanghaijing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas you.

00:49:34
Speaker 3: Wonder, full text, great creatures and mythology.

00:49:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's almost kind of difficult to describe what it is because it's we've talked about this before. Go back and listen to our episodes in the archive wherever you get your audio podcasts. But it's kind of an ancient travel guide it's kind of a work of mythic geography, and it's also a bestI area in many respects.

00:49:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's been a while since we did those episodes, so I I don't want to get details wrong and how I'm characterizing it, but my memory of it is that it is a fascinating blend of like encyclopedia in trees or you know, an imagine geography with illustrations of what you find here. But it's also very focused on creatures and beings and it has a kind of poetic literary quality as well with illustrations.

00:50:25
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's something like eighteen books. It has no known author, though it's often attributed to the mythic ruler You the Great, who quelled the Great Flood of China during the during ancient times. But in Chronicling the World, it covers more than a few lands with tiny people in them. And to be clear, sometimes these mentions of tiny people are themselves tiny. Like this book covers a lot of ground, so you're like, they'll just be like one short paragraph that's like, oh, yeah, there's short people here. They had to fight birds, and then in the next land, and then you're like, whoa you just casually mentioned into place where there were tiny people or some sort of strange creature made out of indescribable flesh, and then you moved on to the next mythic province.

00:51:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, and next here's a guy with a mouth in his stomach.

00:51:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's sort of thing. So but yeah, there there are people in it, said to be in the three to four foot range. There are people so small that they can be carried off by birds. And the copy I have is the the Ann Burrel translation, which I think we've discussed in the past, Like people go back and forth on what's the best way to translate some of these concepts and these creatures and places, And sometimes there's a tendency to focus more on the on the original like Mandarin words, and then other times it's like, well, what is this, what would this be an English? And and Barrel tends to side more with like, let's translated into English as much as possible. So, for instance, there is mention of in her translation of mushroom people. Sometimes this is translated more as bacteria people, but yeah, they are said to appear like a meek fungus. And there are accounts in other texts of silver female trees that give birth to these people at daybreak and then they die at sunset, and this happens like every day. And in other texts as well, they are described as something that can be scattered like dust, like they're that small, and I think that's where we get the idea that they're microscopic or fungal in nature. I think the original Mandarin is like jun rin, which means like, you know, microscopic or fungal men. So this, in this particular example does seem to line up with little a Putian hallucinations, the idea that they're just like a lot of these little people and they're so small you can almost almost can't see them.

00:52:52
Speaker 3: Wow, that is an interesting connection, especially with the mushroom or fungal terminology there. But we do want to be clear that we are not saying that we have evidence that the consumption of these particular mushrooms as they're consumed today in Unn Province inspired the belief in these creatures in the Shannahaiian.

00:53:10
Speaker 2: We would I owe that right correct. But in general, you know, we do have to wonder about ye particular types of accounts of little people, especially this again, the swarming, the marching ones more in line with Delliver's travels in many ways, except generally not trying to tie you up or anything. They're just doing their thing and we're just observing them. Those sorts of stories could conceivably be connected to some sort of lil Futian hallucinations that are either in rare cases experienced or in particular regional examples more broadly experienced as a side effect from consuming some sort of a mushroom like this.

00:53:45
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:53:56
Speaker 2: One of the things that dom Nauer brings up in Passing that I thought was tantle is the possibility that there are actually related species of bolite in the Americas that might also have this property, but we just they just haven't been reported, or they're not and or they're not consumed as regularly. They're not you know, they're not foraged as passionately and widely as we see in this Chinese example. So that that brings up the possibility that even in places where we don't we're not thinking about there being like a regionally available fungal component that brings about lecution hallucinations, there might be something out there, and it might have been part of an indigenous people's diet in other times and therefore could have been tied to again the genesis of a certain type of little people tradition food for thought. Just make sure sure is always that that food is properly cooked.

00:54:57
Speaker 3: Well, Rob, I'm glad you picked this topic. I'd never looked into Lilliputian hallucinations before. I thought this was really interesting. And apart from the connection to this particular mushroom, which is very interesting, one thing I just want to keep an eye on in future research is developments in the understanding of the underlying mechanism with Liliputian hallucinations, apart from whatever compound may or may not be in this mushroom, Like what is it that causes this particular content to manifest over and over again? That's like the core fascination to me, Like why the little people?

00:55:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm very interested in the years to come to hear more about lam maua asiatica, like how like what is it doing? How is it interacting with our human perception? And then there's also the possibility like there's who knows. Once we have that answer, it's entirely possible there could be some sort of even therapeutic application for what we learn from it. It's just don't know enough about it to even strongly speculate about what that might be.

00:56:00
Speaker 3: Some of the sources mentioned that because so there are conditions that tend to cause the Leputian hallucinations, there are conditions that we would like you better ways of treating. And yeah, if you find compounds in nature that reliably cause the same types of hallucinations, you might wonder if understanding that could help provide treatments to these medical conditions.

00:56:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, all right, we're going to go ahead and close this episode out. But hey, these hallucinations are an experience and an experience that I have not had. Likewise, this particular mushroom, len moa ajadica, is not a mushroom that I have consumed before. So, if there's anyone out there listening to this show who has either experienced Lilyputian hallucinations for any reason, or if you have consumed these mushrooms, these specific mushrooms in traditional Chinese cuisine, we absolutely want to hear from you, just to tell like, you didn't see any little people, but you can just tell us what the dish was like. Please write in. We would love to hear from you on that count.

00:57:05
Speaker 3: Feel free to send us recipes absolutely. Yeah, contact at stuff to blow your Mind dot com.

00:57:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, just as a reminder everybody, Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema, and on Wednesdays we do short form episodes. Again, we've been around for quite a while at this point, so if you want to dig into the audio archives of our show, look us up wherever you get your audio podcasts, rate review, subscribe all that really helps us out. Oh.

00:57:38
Speaker 3: One thing, we've been told to remind viewers on Netflix. If you are watching us on Netflix right now and you want to keep getting when we publish new episodes, if you want them to be elevated to your continue watching feed, please hit the remind Me button. I think that's sort of the Netflix version of subscribing to this podcast, So yeah, please, you know, mean a lot to us if you cribe wherever you listen to audio, and if you hit remind me on Netflix. Huge, Thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. No, I just gave the email address a minute ago, but let's do it again. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason at all, if you want to suggest a topic for the future, if you want to give feedback to this episode or any other, if you want to tell us about your experiences with the len Mawa Asiatica mushroom, if you just want to say hi, any reason at all, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

00:58:39
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00:59:00
Speaker 2: Gett