In research he is preparing for publication, chemical extracts from lab specimens produced behavioural changes in mice similar to those reported in human.
So did these mice see little mice as well?
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
179 points (96.9% liked)
World News
52430 readers
1651 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF OCTOBER 19 2025
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
What if those little people are real and the mushroom just allows us to see them?
Occam's razor: are they real beings such that we can't usually see them and they don't interact with our universe in ways we can otherwise measure, or is it more likely that they're hallucinations caused by a chemical that make our brains think funny thoughts?
i think there's an easy way to check. ask two people having this hallucination if what they are seeing is consistent with each other.
These mushrooms produce pretty consistent results. From what I've heard, most people that eat them report seeing tiny men. Wayyy more consistent and specific of a hallucination then eating a standard cubensis mushroom.
I'm not claiming there's anything more than a hallucination going on here, but it is fascinating how specific and consistent the results are. Makes you wonder about the future of hallucinogens, perhaps one day we can synthesise specific trips, kind of like a total recall situation where you could choose what you want to experience
Sounds way more consistent than any halucinogen with a common theme that people see. Like DMT makes people see the 'machine elves' but afaik it's well less than 50% of people / experiences who see them, and they take wildly different forms for different people. I also think a lot of that is psychosomatic- people going into an experience expecting to see something specific will sometimes synthesize that experience for themselves.
The effects of deleriants tend to be more reliable, from my understanding, like dramamine making people see people who aren't there / are dead. Which was a really uncanny experience when i tried it; youre not hallucinating the experience, but rather the memory of it having just happened, almost like waking up from a dream over and over. Like id looks up at the empty chair in my room and think 'wasnt my brother just there talking about walking in the woods? Oh wait, he couldnt have been, he passed away 3 years ago' i also kept hallucinating a cigarette, like id think I had just had ine between my fingers, had just taken a drag, and go to take another, then think I must have dropped it, only to realize there was no smoke in the room, I was just falsely remembering.
I suspect these mushrooms have a mild deleriant compound in them, although even then were talking very consistent results.
Lots of trip reports on delerients involve talking to devils and demons and the like.
Okay, but again, the question remains: how much of that is power of suggestion and priming/expectation?
Exactly. To my understanding, when people see demons, theyre being what they imagine a demon to look like, with no coherence between experiencers unless they already had a shared framework for those entities. Its similar to my seeing people I knew, memory/ imagination combined with a dream like state, innthe case of demons, probably with a component of chemically induced fear contributing.
Id be curious to see more in depth testing on these mushrooms. Do the small people all have the same size between experiencers? Similar clothing, attributes, actions and movements, etc?
In other words, how much of the e tities is defined by the user and how much the drug?
People on drugs don't usually make the most reliable observers. But I suppose if you can insulate the trippers from one another their answers wouldn't influence each other. Then you could interview them about the same scene and see if you get different answers. Again, these wouldn't be reliable observers and idk how eloquent their answers would be under the influence.
All of this to say I'd put my money on drugs causing hallucinations, as we have decades of research which confirm this.
There's always the possibility that our brains filter out aspects of reality for the sake of our sanity, or for some other unknown reason, and that these drugs lift the filter, so to speak, which is also proven to be true to a degree, like how shrooms sort of break down established beliefs and understanding, and I suspect that phenomenon is probably being misconstrued or inaccurately extrapolated on to assume the filter is about seeing something extrinsic about reality and not just revealing the internal processes of our minds.
Very specific psychiatric symptoms can occur even when there's nothing actually there. There are quite a lot of special-purpose structures in the brain, and if they're triggered by something like a tumor, you can hear things that aren't there, see things, smell things, become impulsive, experience intense emotions: all from direct physiological causes. So while it's comforting to believe that those little people represent some form of reality that is only revealed to these mushroom-eaters, there is plenty of precedent that says that it's not necessarily so.
Hahaha first thing I thought of
"At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'" says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica.
I'm not sure if I would take them seriously.
I would have taken them seriously;)
As seen in the show Common Side Effects
The characters look like they are regular at Little Bits from R&M. Is C.S.E. good?
(whispers) "Little Biiiiiits!"
It's fantastic
As is Scavengers reign, the creator's previous show.
As an aficionado for good animation and storytelling, it is very good, I highly recommend it.
phenomenal
This is just really effective advertising from Big Mushroom.
I thought those looked like boletes. Which I've heard can be hallucinogenic, but those also had analysis showing it's just a small amount of regular psilocybin. This is neither psilocybin nor muscimol, pretty interesting. I'd eat them raw.
Wikipedia:
Chemical and genomic analyses have shown that the Lanmaoa asiatica does not contain any known psychoactive compounds such as psilocybin or muscimol. It is likely that there remains an unknown hallucinogenic compound yet to be discovered in this species.[3][6] Chemical analysis of Lanmaoa asiatica has identified numerous compounds and their pharmacological activity has been studied, but as yet none of them have been linked to the reported psychoactive effects.[7][8][9][10]
Interesting. I thought it was a bolete too. There is one other hallucinogenic bolete, the blue meanie, in central europe and I don't know where else. It is a giant one too I believe. Psilocybin I believe.
I had the exact same thought when I read this haha! But when I went looking for which bolete variety had psilocybin I couldn't find it
There has to be something similar in nordics. Old pagan beliefs are jam packed with little people.
I mean, there are a number of cases in mythologies where you can find common elements. I'd buy that in some cases, there might be common elements causing it, but I don't think that it'd need to be a common hallucinogen.
Off-the-cuff, some examples:
-
"Hybrid" animals that are a conglomeration of different animals.
Some native American tribes too. Apache for example.
Also, the Smurfs
Gargamel, The Movie. An old man living alone with his cat is slowly driven to madness by the soup of mushrooms he always boils in his cauldron.
Very common, can certainly get you fucked up and destroy your internal organs, but no cases that would have reported seeing little people.
Oh lol yeah, I've had a couple chinese friends from over there tell me we should hang out and try as much, I guess mushrooms don't count as drugs in Yunnan.
I should be able to try some over the summer.
Idk, but 12 to 24 hours trippin' doesn't sound like my cup of tea. To most people four hours are funny but slightly exhausting, eight defiitely too much and I don't even want to think of 24...
14 hours of LSD was OK, with enough time and starting early with enough sleep, that'd be a lot of fun
Eh, I'm sure they wouldn't offer if it was unpleasant.
As far as I understood the article the shrooms were not offered for their psychedelic effect but as ordinary food - with the advice to cook them long enough to eliminate the psychoactive bits.
Correct, by the restaurants. But that doesn't stop individuals from suggesting we eat the mushrooms that make you trip. I've heard people from Yunnan have a reputation for this sort of thing.