Lilliputian Hallucinations and the Kingdom of the Small

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the psychedelic mushroom tied to hallucinations of little people and how it might have impacted Chinese myths and folktales of tiny men.

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Episode Transcript

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

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
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

(00:41):
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

(01:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
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

(01:47):
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,

(02:08):
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?

Speaker 2 (02:21):
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

(02:43):
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

(03:03):
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

(03:26):
what you're taking, when you're taking who you are.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
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.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
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.

(04:05):
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

(04:26):
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

(04:48):
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,

(05:09):
changes in size and so forth. Really getting into that
sort of Alice in Wonderland realm where suddenly size changes.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
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

(05:54):
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

(06:19):
or thousands of individuals. Sometimes they're described as marching or
kind of like boiling in and out of things.

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

Speaker 2 (06:28):
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

(06:53):
seem to be anything nefarious about them. It's just kind
of happening.

Speaker 3 (06:58):
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,

(07:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:36):
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

(07:58):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
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

(08:36):
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,

(08:56):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (09:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
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

(09:54):
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

(10:16):
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

(10:37):
or the way the light works, and that reads in
your brain. Your brain kind of cranks that up into
tall man.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
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

(11:06):
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

(11:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
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

(12:06):
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,

(12:30):
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

(12:51):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (13:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:17):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:32):
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,

(13:52):
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

(14:16):
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

(14:37):
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

(14:59):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:17):
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

(15:39):
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.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
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

(16:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:26):
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.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
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

(17:03):
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,

(17:27):
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

(17:49):
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

(18:14):
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

(18:34):
and I feel like you almost never get a result
of ninety seven percent of anything.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (18:57):
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

(19:19):
two percent, and then in one percent they are reported
as a fixed two dimensional projection upon a wall like
a movie.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
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

(19:49):
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

(20:12):
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

(20:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
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

(21:05):
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

(21:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
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

(22:33):
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

(22:56):
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,

(23:17):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
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

(23:59):
in the blanks.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
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

(24:23):
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

(24:46):
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

(25:09):
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.

(25:30):
But here, somehow the valve gets kind of partially opened,
and that content starts spilling out and mixing with your
incoming perceptual content.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
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.

Speaker 3 (26:00):
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,

(26:23):
this is the len maua asiatica.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
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

(26:47):
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,

(27:07):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
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

(27:48):
by people in other places around Asia as well.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
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,

(28:12):
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

(28:34):
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.

(28:55):
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

(29:16):
in visions were that, at least at one point were
described as tiny people with mushrooms around their faces.

Speaker 3 (29:24):
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

(29:45):
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,

(30:05):
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.

(30:28):
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

(30:50):
of frenzy. Death is even known to have resulted from
its use.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
It is used.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
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

(31:15):
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

(31:37):
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.

(31:58):
Could be in the work the comments on it in
the later in the sixties, I think by R. Gordon
Wasson and Roger Heim.

Speaker 2 (32:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
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

(32:48):
a different pharmacologically active mushroom.

Speaker 2 (32:51):
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,

(33:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:51):
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

(34:14):
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

(34:37):
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

(35:01):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (35:11):
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

(35:34):
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

(35:57):
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.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
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

(36:39):
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

(37:00):
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?

Speaker 4 (37:13):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 3 (37:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:43):
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,

(38:06):
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

(38:31):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (38:45):
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

(39:08):
so forth.

Speaker 3 (39:09):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
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,

(39:41):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 2 (40:04):
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.

Speaker 3 (40:19):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
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

(40:50):
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,

(41:12):
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

(41:32):
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

(41:56):
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

(42:18):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (42:30):
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

(42:53):
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,

(43:14):
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.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
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.

(44:16):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:28):
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

(44:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
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

(45:20):
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

(45:41):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:55):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
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

(46:36):
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.

(46:58):
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,

(47:20):
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,

(47:41):
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

(48:04):
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

(48:27):
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.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (48:57):
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

(49:18):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (49:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (49:57):
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

(50:19):
creatures and beings and it has a kind of poetic
literary quality as well with illustrations.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
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

(50:46):
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

(51:06):
moved on to the next mythic province.

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

Speaker 2 (51:11):
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

(51:32):
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

(51:56):
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

(52:18):
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

(52:42):
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.

Speaker 3 (52:52):
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.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
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

(53:32):
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.

Speaker 4 (53:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
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

(54:17):
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

(54:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (54:57):
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

(55:19):
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?

Speaker 2 (55:33):
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

(55:55):
learn from it. It's just don't know enough about it
to even strongly speculate about what that might be.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
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

(56:47):
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.

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

Speaker 2 (57:11):
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

(57:32):
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that really helps us out. Oh.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
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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
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So yeah, please, you know, mean a lot to us

(57:59):
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

(58:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
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Speaker 2 (59:00):
Gett