The mystery of the little people, mushrooms.
Unlocking the secrets of hallucinogenic beliefs.
Dive into the ultimate mycological hoodoonit.
In this deep dive, we explore hallucinogenic
bolete mushrooms, specifically Lanmaioa asiatica,
infamous for causing bizarre Lilliputian hallucinations,
vivid visions of tiny marching people known as
the Xiaorenren. From the controversial historical
reports of mushroom madness in the highlands
of Papua New Guinea to a buzzy 2023 dinner involving
U .S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in Yunnan,
China, we unpack the history, the culinary practices,
and the cutting -edge 2026 science. attempting
to identify completely unknown psychoactive compounds.
Perfect for the curious learner who loves a scientific
mystery. Hallucinogenic Belete Mushrooms, Lanmawa
Asiatica, Shaoran Ren, Lilliputian Hallucinations,
Mushroom Madness, Psychedelic Fungi, Colin Domnauer,
Bryn Dentinger, Janet Yellen Mushroom, Psychoactive
Beletes. Welcome to the Deep Dive. I want you
to imagine just for a second that you're sitting
at your kitchen table. You've just finished a
really delicious, savory meal of wild foraged
mushrooms. Sounds pretty ideal, honestly. Right.
And you feel perfectly fine. But a few hours
later, um... Uh -oh. Yeah. And suddenly the shoelaces
transform into vividly colored butterflies and
they actually physically detach from the canvas
and flutter away toward the ceiling. That is
that is highly specific. It gets weirder. You
blink, you know, trying to clear your vision.
And when you look back at the wooden table, there
is an entire regiment of tiny two inch tall soldiers
marching in perfect formation past your salt
shaker. Just right across the table. Right across
the table. I mean, it sounds like something straight
out of a. whimsical fairy tale or maybe a heavily
produced fantasy film. But there's a real naturally
occurring mushroom that induces. Exactly this
hyper -specific experience. And it is one of
the most baffling things in modern botany. Totally.
So today our mission is to explore one of the
most incredible ethno -mycological mysteries
on the planet. We are looking into helicinogenic
bolete mushrooms. We're pulling from a comprehensive,
deeply sourced Wikipedia article today. It breaks
down the history, the global geography, and the
ongoing scientific scramble to figure out exactly
what these mysterious fungi are doing to the
human brain. Because the absolute craziest part
of this entire story is that modern science,
right up to the present day in 2026, still hasn't
figured out exactly what chemical is causing
this. Or how it even works. Okay, let's unpack
this. When we talk about these specific bleats,
we are largely looking at varieties that have
a very alarming biological trait, right? Yeah,
the blue staining. Right. When you cut or bruise
their flesh, they almost instantly oxidize. They
stain this deep, violent, vibrant blue. Which
is fascinating from a biological standpoint.
I mean, in the fungal kingdom, that kind of rapid
oxidation is often a neon warning sign to predators
like do not eat me. Right. But the core of this
mystery isn't the physical appearance. No, it's
the deeply unusual psychological effect it produces
when humans consume it. In clinical terms, what
you just described with the tiny soldiers, that
is known as a Lilliputian hallucination. Named
after the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput in Jonathan
Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Exactly. It refers
to the visual hallucination of miniature people,
or sometimes miniature animals or objects, and
they interact with the real world environment.
And they have a very specific name for this in
China, don't they? They do. In the Yunnan province
of China, where these mushrooms were actually
widely consumed, the locals have a very affectionate
name for them. They call them the Xiao Ren Ren
mushrooms. Which translates to little people.
Right, little people. And what's fascinating
here is that this is an incredibly rare, hyper
-specific type of hallucination that is completely
inconsistent with the effects of classic psychedelic
mushrooms. Yeah, because when most people hear
magic mushrooms, their minds immediately go to
psilocybin. Which targets serotonin receptors.
Right. Or maybe Amanita muscaria, that classic
red mushroom with the white spots. Which hits
the GABA receptors. Exactly. But those traditional
compounds produce a really wide, unpredictable
range of sensory distortions, like you might
get breathing walls or a sense of ego dissolution.
Or intense emotional shifts. Right. They don't
typically conjure up consistent, identical armies
of tiny people marching across a table. And our
source material details a massive 1991 hospital
report out of Yunnan that perfectly illustrates
how vivid this is. That study is wild. It is.
The researchers analyzed 300 separate cases of
poisoning from a local mushroom known as Xiaomei
Nuganjun. What exactly were these patients reporting
on a clinical level? The reports from that 1991
hospital study are just staggering in their consistency.
While patients did experience some broader sensory
distortions, like the shoelaces turning into
butterflies, the unifying symptom across these
300 isolated cases was always the Xiao Ren Ren.
The little people. Yes. Patients described feeling
as though they had suddenly entered a fully realized
miniature kingdom. One patient even reported
seeing little people less than 33 centimeters
tall popping up everywhere. And they had very
specific outfits. They were wearing red and green
clothing that highly diverse facial features.
And they were incredibly lively and mischievous.
The patient could even hear their little voices
talking to each other. Yeah. Another person in
the study saw rabbits and squirrels appearing
out of thin air and genuinely felt that these
phantom animals were trying to bite her. of these
visions, it isn't just a quick fleeting trip.
Not at all. And that duration is one of the most
alarming aspects for clinicians. Most of these
cases took several days to fully resolve. Days.
Days. But some patients remained in this altered
state for 10 to 30 days. That is terrifying.
And in the rarest, most extreme instances documented
in that hospital report, the hallucinations persisted
for over a month to half a year in one case.
Wow. That extreme timeline highlights a very
grounded medical reality. While seeing mischievous
little people might sound fun or whimsical in
a vacuum, the actual lived experience of this
intoxication can be incredibly distressing. Well,
yeah, I mean, the 1991 Union Report noted severe,
dangerous symptoms. We're talking psychosis -like
or schizophrenia -like states, threatening auditory
hallucinations, complete personality disintegration.
And periods of profound stupor. So the brain
is essentially short -circuiting under the weight
of these compounds. Yes. When researchers hooked
these patients up to an EEG to monitor their
brain activity during those periods of stupor,
they found electrical changes that closely resembled
the brain patterns of someone under the heavy
influence of LSD. But they found a pharmacological
clue in that hospital data too, right? They did.
The medical staff found that administering chlorpromazine
which is a very standard old -school antipsychotic
medication, was highly effective in managing
the symptoms and bringing them out of the psychosis.
And chlorpromazine primarily works by blocking
dopamine receptors, though it does affect serotonin.
Right. So that gives researchers a tiny initial
breadcrumb regarding the neurochemical pathways
these mushrooms might be hijacking. It grounds
the bizarre sci -fi nature of the hallucinations
in very real human biology. And the emotional
toll of that biology can be profound. Definitely.
The sources recount a deeply tragic news article
from 2014 about a woman in Yunnan. She was purposefully
and repeatedly eating these toxic beliefs, but
she wasn't doing it recreationally. She was intentionally
poisoning herself specifically so she could enter
that hallucinatory state and see a vision of
her deceased daughter again. It's a heartbreaking
detail. But it tells us something vital about
the phenomenological nature of the intoxication.
How so? Well, the visions aren't perceived as
transparent overlays or just fleeting tricks
of the light. They are integrated into the user's
reality with absolute solidity. They feel completely
real. Entirely real. With an effect this powerful,
you would naturally assume that modern pharmacology
would have mapped out exactly where these grow,
what species they are, and isolated the chemical
years ago. You would think so. But the geographic
timeline of this mystery is a total roller coaster.
Let's trace the historical breadcrumb trail.
We're going to travel far away from the mountains
of China down to the western highlands of Papua
New Guinea. specifically looking at the Kuma
people. This is where Western science first attempted
and completely failed to catalog this phenomenon.
The historical record here starts in 1936. Right,
when a missionary reported that native populations
in the Papua New Guinea highlands were consuming
a type of bolete mushroom that caused extreme
behavioral shifts. He described it simply as
mushroom madness. Mushroom madness. But it wasn't
rigorously studied then. No, it wasn't until
the late 1950s that an anthropologist named Marie
Ray actually embedded with the Kuma people and
documented this mushroom madness in much greater
detail. And crucially, she reported that the
mushrooms were causing Lilliputian hallucinations.
The tiny people again. The exact same symptom.
And this detail caught the attention of two legendary
figures in ethnomycology, Gordon Wasson and Roger
Heim. They were absolute titans of their field
at the time. Yes, they were. In the mid -1960s,
Wasson and Heim traveled to Papua New Guinea.
They surveyed around 400 different local mushrooms
and eventually narrowed the culprit down to six
species reportedly causing this madness. With
the primary suspect being a blue staining bolete
called Boletus manicus. And Wasson and Heim didn't
mess around. Heim took physical samples of Boletus
manicus, preserved them, and sent them to Switzerland
to be analyzed by a chemist named Albert Hoffman.
And for anyone who doesn't recognize that name,
Albert Hoffman is the scientist who synthesized
and discovered LSD. He is arguing. the greatest
analytical chemist in the history of hallucinogens.
If there was a psychoactive compound hiding in
that mushroom, Hoffman was the man to find it.
But Hoffman hit an absolute wall. Really? Yeah.
He put the samples through rigorous analysis
and did manage to isolate trace amounts of three
unidentified indolic compounds. Indoles being
the chemical class that includes powerful neurotransmitters
and psychedelics like serotonin, LSD, and psilocybin.
Exactly. The problem was the yield. The quantities
he found were so microscopic that they couldn't
even be properly identified with the technology
of the era. For those specific trace amounts
to be the root cause of the intense mushroom
madness described by Marie Ray, the undiscovered
chemical would have to be unbelievably potent.
We're talking about something active at the microgram
level. Literally on par with the potency of LSD
itself. Exactly. And because Hoffman couldn't
hand them a neat, chemically identified smoking
gun, Wasson and Heim made a pivot that, in retrospect,
feels incredibly arrogant. It really does. Heim
decided to try eating tiny, cautious amounts
of the mushroom himself. When he only experienced
some strange dreams and no obvious waking hallucinations,
they essentially threw out the biological explanation
entirely. We just gave up on it. They officially
concluded that the Kuma people's mushroom madness
wasn't pharmacological at all. They labeled it
a form of social catharsis. Basically saying
the indigenous population was just ritualistically
acting out, using the mushroom as a cultural
excuse to behave wildly. It is a textbook example
of how a rigid scientific paradigm can blind
researchers to reality. Because a mid -century
European chemist couldn't isolate the compound,
and because a Western researcher didn't hallucinate
after taking a subperceptual dose. They completely
dismissed the lived, documented experiences of
an entire culture. It's infuriating. And the
real tragedy is that because Wasson and Heim
dismissed it as mere theater, the phenomenon
wasn't rigorously studied for decades. The scientific
community just moved on. Right. Fast forward
to 2006, researchers finally go back to that
specific village in Papua New Guinea, only to
find that the local ancestral knowledge of these
mushrooms is almost entirely gone. The last known
incidence of them being consumed for this purpose
was in the mid -1980s. So when modern mycologists
Bryn Dentinger and Colin Domnauer traveled back
to Papua New Guinea in December of 2025, specifically
hunting for Wasson and Haim's lost mushrooms,
they couldn't even find them. It seemed like
a total scientific dead end. The habitat had
changed. The cultural knowledge had faded. But
the global map of this phenomenon was about to
expand. Domnauer didn't let the Papua New Guinea
dead end stop the research, which brings us to
a much more recent breakthrough geographical
connection. Yes. In 2024, Domnauer traveled to
the Cordillera Mountains in the northern Philippines,
specifically focusing on an area called Sagada.
And what he found there. Completely shatters
the social catharsis theory Wasson and Heim proposed.
Totally. In the Philippines, Don Naur documented
local populations who regularly forage and eat
a type of blue staining bolete they call seedsdom.
And the locals explain that, irregularly, eating
these specific mushrooms causes people to see
visions of what they call the ancestors. Which
translates, once again, to little people. We
now have completely independent, geographically
isolated cultures. The Kuma people and the...
the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the foragers
in the mountains of Philippines, and the massive
populations in the Yunnan province of China.
Three distinct cultures separated by thousands
of miles and oceans. All reporting the exact
same hyper -specific Lilliputian hallucinations
resulting from the consumption of local blue
-staining Bolete mushrooms. That level of cross
-cultural independent consistency makes the idea
of localized mass hysteria or theatrical acting
statistically impossible. It strongly undeniably
points to a shared, highly specific pharmacological
agent working on the human brain. Okay, here's
where it gets really interesting. In Papua New
Guinea and the Philippines, encountering these
visions seems like a relatively rare, irregular
occurrence. But in Yunnan, China, these mushrooms
are not some hidden fringe oddity. No, not at
all. They are a massive, highly sought -after
culinary staple. The locals refer to them as
giant shauking, which directly translates to
turns blue when bruised. You can walk into everyday
markets and see them piled high. They are incredibly
popular, often more prized than standard porcini
mushrooms because they have this incredibly rich,
deep umami flavor. But eating them requires following
a very strict zero margin for error cooking rule.
The culinary practice in Yunnan is essentially
a game of chemical Russian roulette. It really
is. The local knowledge dictates that these mushrooms
must be sliced thin and cooked at a high heat
for a very specific window of time, typically
at least 15 to 25 minutes. And if prepared correctly,
the intense heat completely denatures or destroys
the hallucinogenic compounds, rendering the mushroom
perfectly safe, non -toxic and delicious. But
if the cook is impatient or if the slices are
too thick and the core doesn't reach the required
temperature, you're going to meet the Shao Ren
Ren. Undercook your dinner by three minutes and
you're staring at an army of tiny men on your
plate. And this dangerous culinary tightrope
isn't some modern foodie fad. The historical
documentation of this exact practice in China
is ancient. We can look at a Chinese Taoist text
authored by a scholar named Gay Hong around the
year 300 CE. We are talking over 1 ,700 years
ago. Yes. Gay Hong describes something he calls
a flesh spirit mushroom. His text includes this
remarkable quote. He wrote, if you see a little
person seven to eight kun tall riding in a carriage
when you travel on a mountain, you have encountered
a flesh spirit mushroom. Consume it raw and you
will attain transcendence immediately. And seven
to eight kun translates to roughly three to 33
centimeters. It perfectly matches the descriptions
from the 1991 hospital report. Over a millennia
later, Gay Hong basically wrote a recipe that
says, step one, look for the tiny man in the
tiny carriage. It proves that the link between
these specific mushrooms and Lilliputian hallucinations
has been a recognized part of human knowledge
for nearly 2 ,000 years. And that deep cultural
integration leads to some fascinating modern
clashes. Because the mushroom is viewed primarily
as a food source rather than a drug, its presence
in high -end cuisine is totally normalized in
Yunnan. Which brings us to the international
incident. The dinner. The dinner. In 2023, the
United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen
was on a diplomatic trip to China. She and her
team went out to dinner at a very popular, reputable
restaurant in Yunnan. And they ordered a local
specialty mushroom dish. It turned out to be
a dish made entirely of Lanmala Asiatica, the
hallucinogenic blitz. When the news broke back
in the U .S., it caused a massive media frenzy.
The reaction highlighted a profound difference
in cultural framing. How so? Well, the Western
media immediately latched on to the hallucinogenic
aspect. They were trying to figure out if a high
-ranking government official had unwittingly
consumed a psychedelic drug during a sensitive
diplomatic mission. Right. But within the cultural
context of Jenin, the restaurant had simply served
a premium local delicacy. Because the chefs were
professionals who cooked the mushrooms properly
for the required time, the psychoactive compounds
were entirely inactivated. Secretary Yellen didn't
hallucinate. She later gave interviews noting
she had no idea the mushrooms had that potential
until she read the news and simply stated that
the dish was delicious. In the West, a hallucinogenic
property immediately throws an organism into
the category of a controlled substance, a taboo
drug, or strictly clinical medicine. But in Yunnan,
the culinary experience takes absolute precedence.
The hallucinogen is merely viewed as a naturally
occurring toxin. An inconvenience that needs
to be boiled out. Yeah, no different than boiling
a raw kidney bean to neutralize its natural poisons
before making chili. Exactly. It's a pragmatic
gastronomic approach to a potent neurotoxin.
So let's look at the board. We have a family
of mushrooms that causes armies of tiny people
to march across your vision. It's been meticulously
documented for 1700 years. It's sold in open
air markets by the ton to the point where U .S.
government officials are casually eating it for
dinner. Right. Which begs the absolute most obvious
question I can think of. It is 2026. We can sequence
entire genomes in an afternoon. We have AI modeling
protein structures. Why don't we know what chemical
causes this yet? What is the holdup? The holdup
is that we are dealing with a true taxonomic
and chemical nightmare. Okay. First, we have
to address the identification problem. You mentioned
earlier that we are looking for blue staining
boletes. The issue is a biological phenomenon
known as convergent evolution. Meaning different
species evolving identical traits independently
over time. Precisely. Because of convergent evolution,
many completely distinct species of boletes have
evolved to look almost exactly identical to one
another, including that rapid blue staining defense
mechanism. So they all look the same. They do.
The most frequently implicated species in the
Union Hospital reports is currently identified
as Lanmera asiatica. But that specific species
wasn't even officially described and named by
science until 2015. Just a little over a decade
ago. Right. Before that, it was just lazily lumped
in with a generic group of European Boletus species.
And on top of the taxonomy issues, you have the
practical reality of foraging. The locals in
Yunnan don't just pick one type of mushroom.
They forage and consume hundreds of different
species. The mixed basket problem. Exactly. When
a patient arrives at the hospital in a state
of stupor, hallucinating tiny people, they usually
can't point to the exact mushroom that did it.
Because they ate a mixed stir fry. Yes. So researchers
are constantly struggling to verify if they're
studying the single true source species or if
the Xiao Ren Ren effect is actually the result
of an entourage effect. A complex chemical reaction
caused by combining multiple different fungal
species in the same meal. Right. If we connect
this to the bigger picture, it demonstrates how
difficult it is to isolate a novel compound when
you can't even lock down the foundational biology
of the SIRS material with absolute certainty.
It sounds incredibly frustrating for the chemists,
but we do have a few solid pieces of the puzzle.
Specifically, we have definitively ruled out
the usual suspects. We know it is absolutely
not psilocybin. Modern testing has confirmed
that. And the genetic research has closed some
other major doors. In 2023, Colin Domnauer and
Bryn Denger, the researchers who tracked the
phenomenon to the Philippines, they ran a major
genetic study. They sequenced the DNA of 12 different
species within the Lanmaoa genus. They were specifically
looking for something called horizontal gene
transfer. Right. Testing the hypothesis that
these boletes somehow stole the genetic instructions
for producing known hallucinogens from other
mushroom families, like psilocybe or emanita.
Over millions of years of shared environmental
proximity, yeah. But the DNA sequencing yielded
zero evidence of that. None at all. None. These
beliefs completely lack the biosynthetic gene
clusters required to produce any of the known
fungal hallucinogens. So they aren't just a new
delivery system for an old chemical. No. The
genetic data points toward a thrilling conclusion.
We are looking at the existence of an entirely
novel, completely undiscovered class of psychoactive
compounds. This is incredible. And the renowned
ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna has weighed in on
the pharmacology based purely on the symptomology.
Looking at the profound stupor, the deeply immersive
and bizarre nature of the visions, and the extreme
duration, McKenna suggests the mechanism of action
might be akin to a detourist -style anticholinergic
delirium. How does that differ from a classic
psychedelic trip? Well, classic psychedelics
generally leave the user with an intact ego.
They know they are hallucinating. They can ground
themselves? Usually, yes. But anticholinergists
work by blocking the neurotransmitter acetylcholine
in the central nervous system. This induces a
state of true delirium, where the user absolutely
cannot distinguish the hallucination from baseline
reality. They interact with the phantoms as if
they are entirely real. Which perfectly aligns
with the reports of patients trying to talk to
little people or running away from phantom animals.
So where does the hunt stand right now, today?
The source material notes that as of late 2025
and early 2026, Domnauer and Dentinger are deep
in laboratory trials. They've successfully moved
past the genetic sequencing and into animal testing.
They are taking raw chemical extracts directly
from Lanmaoa Asiatica and administering them
to mice in controlled settings. And they are
finally seeing measurable physical results. The
mice are exhibiting intense periods of hyperactivity,
immediately followed by a very long, profound
stupor. a behavioral pattern that perfectly mirrors
the human clinical reports from that 1991 hospital
study. They are aggressively working on isolating
the exact active constituents from those extracts
and are preparing to publish their definitive
findings very soon. Late 2025 or early 2026.
After nearly a century of dead ends, from the
highlands of Papua New Guinea to the laboratories
of today, we might be just months away from one
of the biggest breakthroughs in modern ethnopharmacology.
What does this all mean? For you listening, I
think the most profound takeaway is a necessary
humbling of our modern perspective. I agree.
We live in an incredibly advanced digitized age
where it is so easy to arrogantly assume that
science has successfully mapped the natural world.
we assume we know all the chemicals all the biological
mechanisms and that there are no major surprises
left in our own backyards that there are yet
here is an entirely novel incredibly potent deeply
complex undiscovered class of psychoactive compounds
hiding in plain sight It's not locked away in
some inaccessible, unexplored deep sea trench.
It is sitting quietly inside a popular, delicious,
edible mushroom sold by the ton in everyday markets,
eaten by thousands of normal people. It serves
as a stark reminder of the vast, untapped chemical
potential of the natural world that is still
waiting to be understood, provided we have the
patience to look closely. It really does. And
I want to leave you with a final, somewhat provocative
thought to mull over as we wrap up this deep
dive. We know that the intense, mind -altering
properties of these Belit mushrooms compounds,
powerful enough to conjure literal armies of
tiny people in your kitchen, are completely destroyed
by a simple 15 -minute boil. That's all it takes
to erase the magic entirely. It makes you wonder.
What other completely undiscovered, radically
mind -altering compounds might be hiding in the
everyday foods we eat? Are there other profound
neurochemical secrets locked away in the produce
aisle of our grocery stores, forever hidden from
human experience simply because our culinary
culture, over thousands of years of trial and
error, has taught us to always cook them first?
It's a wild thought. Next time you boil a vegetable
for dinner, just think about what unseen molecular
structures you might be destroying in the process.
Thank you so much. joining us on this deep dive.
Stay curious and we'll catch you next time.