So imagine you sit down to like a really delicious,
perfectly spiced, umami -rich mushroom hot pot
for dinner on a Friday night. That's like a pretty
ideal Friday, honestly. Right. You finish your
meal, you pay the bill, and you just go to bed.
And Saturday morning rolls around, and you feel
completely fine. Totally normal. Yeah. You run
some errands. Maybe you grab lunch. But then
Saturday night, which is a full 24 hours after
that dinner, you look down at your sneakers.
OK. And the shoelaces suddenly detach themselves.
turn into these beautifully detailed butterflies,
and literally just flitter away into the sky.
Wow. Yeah. You have just experienced the effects
of the Lamaua Asiatica mushroom. That is a wild
timeline for a hallucination. It really is. Welcome
to today's deep dive, everyone. We are taking
a massive stack of source material, specifically
a highly comprehensive, newly updated 2026 Wikipedia
article, and we're just pulling out the most
fascinating insights for you. And there is a
lot to pull from this one. Definitely. Our mission
today is to explore a genuine, totally unsolved
scientific mystery. We are talking about this
elusive fungus that causes highly specific, almost
fairy tale -like hallucinations of tiny people.
Right, the little people. Yeah, plus a chemical
compound that completely defies our modern understanding
of mycology and an accidental culinary adventure
by the United States Treasury Secretary. Which
is still just such a bizarre crossover of...
politics and biology. Truly. OK, let's unpack
this. Where do we even begin with this mushroom?
Well, the best place to ground this whole phenomenon
is actually in the Yunnan province of southwest
China. This region is essentially ground zero
for the modern documentation of this mushroom.
Locally, it's highly prized. They call it Jiangshu
King, which it roughly translates to turning
blue when bruised. Because the mushroom literally
stings blue if you touch it or cut it. Exactly.
But the clinical reality of what happens when
this mushroom is ingested improperly, that is
what makes it so incredibly unique. The medical
literature actually refers to the symptoms as
Lilliputian hallucinations. Right, like from
Gulliver's Travels. And the local terminology
for this, which I found fascinating in the sources,
is xiao ren ren, meaning little people or little
men. Yeah, it's a very specific cultural shorthand
for a very specific symptom. And based on the
medical reports, this isn't just, you know, a
vague distortion of light or color like you might
get with other classic psychedelics. No not at
all. People are seeing fully formed miniature
entities actually interacting with the real world.
The specificity of the visual distortion is just
staggering. I mean, patients consistently report
seeing small, highly detailed animals, like rabbits
or squirrels just materializing out of thin air.
Just running around the living room. Exactly.
Or they see the physical architecture of the
room shifting, like the walls are breathing or
moving around them. One of the details from the
clinical reports that absolutely blew my mind
was this one patient who was just staring at
a sink. Oh, the water droplet one. Yes. they
watched a water droplet fall. And the moment
it hit the porcelain, the droplet transformed
into a multi -legged insect and just scurried
down the drain. It sounds incredibly whimsical,
almost like something out of Alice in Wonderland.
Right, but experiencing that non -stop for days
would be absolutely terrifying. Which honestly
brings me to a massive point of confusion here.
What's that? Eating this mushroom feels remarkably
similar to eating Japanese fugu, the pufferfish.
Oh, that's a really good comparison. It's like
a culinary Russian roulette, where one wrong
move by the chef can just be disastrous. Yet
in Yunnan, these mushrooms aren't treated as
illicit drugs. No, they're not. They aren't banned
at all. Families are just casually serving them
for dinner. If they are so profoundly hallucinogenic,
why on earth are they a staple at the dinner
table? Well, to understand that culinary paradox,
we really have to look at the chemistry of the
preparation. Okay, lay it on me. The locals in
Yunnan have understood for generations that the
danger is entirely neutralized by heat. The active
hallucinogenic compounds in Lenmao Asiatica are
what chemists call thermolubule. Meaning the
physical structure of the molecule just shatters
if it gets too hot. Exactly, it breaks down.
So it is exactly like fugu, but with a thermal
twist. Like with the puffer fish, it's all about
physical knife skills, right? Cutting the toxin
out. Right, very precise cuts. But here... the
heat is actually doing the surgery. That is a
perfect analogy. If you boil these mushrooms
continuously for at least 15 to 25 minutes, those
thermolubile compounds just denature. they break
apart into completely harmless byproducts. And
then it's just a normal meal. Yeah. Once that
happens, the mushroom becomes perfectly safe,
highly nutritious, and apparently incredibly
delicious. The poisonings and the hospitalations
we see, they almost exclusively occur when someone
just gets impatient and undercooks them. Or they
just eat a massive amount. Yeah. If someone consumes
a truly gluttonous quantity, the trace amounts
of the surviving compound can build up in the
system and still trigger the effects. Because
it's really about respecting the ingredient,
not fearing it. But the timeline of the symptoms
is the part that I still find most baffling.
The delay. Yeah. I mean, if I eat something toxic,
my body usually lets me know pretty quickly.
I get sick right away. What's fascinating here
is the incredibly bizarre onset time. If we look
at standard, well -understood hallucinogenic
mushrooms like those containing psilocybin. Right.
Classic magic mushrooms. The psychoactive effects
usually hit the bloodstream and cross the blood
-brain barrier within 30 minutes to an hour.
It is a very fast, direct metabolic process.
It kicks in quick. But with Lonmawa Asiatica,
the hospital data, specifically this really robust
2024 study that tracked 81 poisoned patients,
shows the onset time is typically 12 to 24 hours
after consumption. It's literally a psychedelic
time bomb. It really is. And if we think about
the biology of that, a 24 - hour delay strongly
suggests this isn't a direct poison, right? Like
the body must be doing something to the molecule.
Is it a prodrug? The physiological data strongly
points exactly in that direction. For those listening,
what does that mean practically? A prodrug is
essentially a biologically inactive compound.
Your body's metabolism, usually the liver, has
to break it down and convert it into the active
drug. So the mushroom itself isn't making you
trip. Your liver is processing it into the thing
that makes you trip. Precisely. Because that
metabolic cleavage takes time, or maybe because
the compound just relies on a really slow gastrointestinal
absorption rate, the neurological fireworks are
delayed by a full day. Just put yourself in the
shoes of someone experiencing this. You wake
up on a Saturday night and you are hallucinating
tiny people. Yeah, it would be baffling. To connect
that back to a hot pot dinner you had on Friday
night requires a massive leap of logic. You might
have eaten, what, three other meals since then?
Easily. It just makes me wonder how ancient humans
ever managed to isolate this specific mushroom
as the culprit. Well, that delayed onset makes
the historical record even more impressive, honestly,
because long before modern clinical studies,
ancient scholars had actually already connected
the dots. Wait, really? How far back are we talking?
If we look back through the historical texts,
there is a Chinese Taoist manuscript written
around 300 CE. 300 CE? Yeah. by a scholar named
Get Hong. The text is called The Master Who Embraces
Simplicity. I have to say, The Master Who Embraces
Simplicity is a wonderfully poetic title for
a book that describes hallucinating tiny people.
It truly is. In this manuscript, Gae Hong meticulously
describes a wild fungus he calls the flesh -spirit
mushroom. Flesh -spirit mushroom, wow. And he
explicitly warns that if you eat this mushroom
raw, meaning without the heat to destroy those
thermolubile compounds, you will encounter a
little person, roughly 3 to 33 centimeters tall,
Writing in a carriage. Writing in a carriage.
That is so specific. Very specific. And he interpreted
this as a pathway to immediate spiritual transcendence.
So we are looking at a 1 ,700 -year -old documentation
of the exact same Jiao Ren hallucination. The
exact same one. But it seems like Western science
didn't get the memo until much, much later. When
did modern researchers finally start taking this
seriously? The modern scientific pursuit actually
started halfway across the world, completely
independent of those Chinese texts. Oh, interesting.
It began in the western highlands of Papua New
Guinea. In the 1930s, and then much more thoroughly
in the 1950s, anthropologists who were embedded
with the Kuma people reported a phenomenon the
locals called mushroom madness. Mushroom madness.
Yes. The Kuma were consuming specific bolete
mushrooms, notably one called Boletus manicus,
and they were reporting the exact same Lilliputian
hallucinations. So the Western scientific establishment
hears about this, and I imagine they send in
the heavy hitters to figure out what's going
on, right? Absolutely. they sent the pioneers
of mycology. In the 1960s, Gordon Wasson and
Roger Heim traveled to Papua New Guinea. They
surveyed hundreds of local mushrooms, identified
the ones the kuma claimed were hallucinogenic,
and they sent samples directly to Albert Hoffman.
Okay, just for context for you listening, Albert
Hoffman is the Swiss chemist who literally synthesized
and discovered LSD. The godfather of psychedelics.
Exactly. He is the undisputed heavyweight of
psychedelic chemistry. If there's a hallucination
hiding in a fungus, Hoffman is the guy who will
find it. Which is exactly why his findings were
so disappointing to the researchers at the time.
What did he find? Hoffman ran the chemical analyses
and he found only trace amounts of unidentified
Indolic compounds. Let me pause you there. Indolic
compounds, that's the chemical family that includes
our brain's serotonin, right? As well as classic
psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. Correct.
They share a specific molecular ring structure,
but the key word in Hoffman's report was trace.
Ah, not enough of it. Right. The quantities he
found were so incredibly minute that unless this
undiscovered chemical was exponentially more
potent than LSD, it just couldn't possibly explain
the profound multi -day hallucinations the Kuma
people were experiencing. So the math just didn't
add up. Exactly. Roger Heim even went a step
further and conducted self -experiments. He ate
small amounts of the raw mushroom himself. He
reported having some unusually vivid dreams,
but absolutely no profound psychoactive effects.
Okay, this is where I get incredibly frustrated
with the historical narrative. Because Heim didn't
trip, and because Hoffman's 1960s lab equipment
couldn't isolate the molecule, they just threw
their hands up. Pretty much. They concluded that
mushroom madness wasn't a chemical reality at
all. They officially declared it was just social
catharsis. Right, but it was psychological. Yeah,
that the indigenous people were essentially just
putting on a theatrical play to let off steam.
Isn't it incredibly arrogant to assume an entire
population is just faking a specific hallucination
simply because Our primitive mass spectrometers
couldn't find the molecule. This raises an important
question about how cultural biases blind scientific
discovery. The dismissal of the Kuma people's
experience is a textbook example of empirical
arrogance. It really is. They viewed the indigenous
knowledge entirely through a rigid Western laboratory
lens. The logic was, if the machine doesn't beep,
the local experience must be psychological theater.
Right. If we can't measure it, it's not real.
Exactly. And contemporary researchers look back
at that 1960s conclusion as not just premature,
but fundamentally flawed. And the real tragedy
here is that by dismissing them, we squandered
the opportunity to study it in its natural cultural
context. the window of opportunity completely
closed. Wow. By the time modern researchers realized
the mistake and returned to that specific region
in Papua New Guinea in 2006, almost all the local
mycological knowledge had been lost to modernization
and cultural shifts. That is heartbreaking. It
is. The last confirmed incidence of someone eating
those mushrooms for hallucinogenic purposes was
all the way back in the mid 1980s. And to put
the final nail in the coffin, a recent expedition
in December 2025 went back searching the highlands
for the exact mushrooms Wasson and Haim recorded.
And I'm guessing they didn't find them. They
completely failed to find them. The trail in
Papua New Guinea has effectively gone cold. Which
means if we want to solve this mystery, we can't
rely on the Papua New Guinea data. We have to
look at the hard, undeniable medical proof coming
out of modern -day China. Because in Yunnan,
this isn't just an anthropological curiosity.
It is a heavily documented, massive public health
issue. The clinical reality in UNIN is impossible
to ignore. The foundational data set for the
modern era comes from a major hospital report
published in 1991. What did they find? Over a
specific period, a single hospital documented
300 severe cases of poisoning from these exact
belief mushrooms. 300 cases. That goes way beyond
a few forging accidents. That is literally a
localized epidemic of hallucinations. And the
physiological details in that report are staggering.
The effects weren't just a brief trip. They lasted
anywhere from a few days to, in some extreme
cases, several months. Months. Yes. Patients
exhibited profound, stupor, persistent auditory
hallucinations and severe disorientation. But
most tellingly, when doctors hooked these patients
up to an electroencephalogram, an EEG. Right,
the machine that measures electrical activity
in the brain. Exactly. They observed massive
brain wave alterations. electrical storm in their
brains closely mirrored the exact pattern seen
during severe LSD intoxication. That is wild
and you know buried in all this clinical data
are some incredibly poignant human stories. Yeah,
the human element is very intense. The source
material highlights this news article from 2014
about a woman in Yunnan who was purposely and
repeatedly undercooking these toxic mushrooms.
Right. And she wasn't looking for a high. She
was doing it because the specific nature of these
hallucinations allowed her to see and interact
with her recently deceased daughter. It's a very
heavy story. It is this heartbreaking intersection
of profound human grease and raw toxicology.
It just shows how immersive and real these visions
feel to the person experiencing them. It underscores
the sheer power of whatever chemical compound
is hidden inside the mushroom cellular walls.
But, you know, the phenomenon isn't just limited
to the locals of UNIT. No, it absolutely isn't.
In fact, this brings us to a highly publicized
event from 2023 involving the United States Treasury
Secretary Janet Yellen. A very strange global
news moment. Very strange. During a diplomatic
visit to China, she and her team dined at a reputable
restaurant in Yunnan. And she actually ordered
a dish made of these exact Lanmao Asiatica mushrooms.
The Shaoran ren mushrooms? Yeah. And just to
be strictly impartial here and look at the facts
of what happened, she ordered the dish completely
unaware of its hallucinogenic properties. Right.
But because she was at a high -end restaurant
that followed the strict culinary rules, Boiling
them for that crucial 15 to 25 minutes, the thermolavial
compounds were completely destroyed. The heat
did its job. Exactly. She experienced zero ill
effects, no hallucinations, and just had a fantastic
umami -rich meal. But when the global media realized
she had eaten the little people mushroom, it
sparked an absolute frenzy and triggered this
massive culinary craze for the dish worldwide.
The media attention was just immense. But from
a mechanical and scientific perspective, the
fact that a foreign dignitary could so easily
order a potentially mind -altering fungus really
highlights a massive issue. The extreme difficulty
of mushroom taxonomy. Identifying these mushrooms
in the wild is basically a mycology just worst
nightmare. Why is it so difficult though? I mean,
if a mushroom causes you to see tiny people,
shouldn't it look distinctly different from a
normal everyday mushroom? You would think so,
but nature relies on a biological principle called
Convergent evolution. Okay, convergent evolution.
Right. Over millions of years, entirely different
genetic lineages of mushrooms adapted to the
exact same environmental pressures. Similar soil
acidity, similar humidity, similar symbiotic
relationships with tree roots. So because the
environments were identical, they just evolved
to look practically identical. Exactly. They
all have porous undersides instead of gills,
and many of them exhibit the exact same blue
staining oxidation reaction when they're bruised.
Wow. So for decades, the psychoactive landmower
Asiatica was completely confused with non -psychoactive
European beliefs. In fact, the genus landmower
wasn't even officially created and described
by scientists until 2015. Okay, here's where
it gets really interesting. We have the ancient
300 CE Taoist texts. We have the tragic missteps
in Papua New Guinea. We have 300 hospital cases
with LSD -like brainwaves. And we have a U .S.
Treasury Secretary's dinner menu. A lot of history.
The physical symptoms are undeniably real. The
taxonomy is finally getting sorted out. But if
you take this blue staining mushroom and put
it under a mass spectrometer today, right now
in 2026, What molecule is actually causing the
hallucinations? That is the ultimate scientific
hook of this entire narrative. Despite all the
medical data and all the historical precedent,
researchers still do not know the exact chemical
identity of the active constituent. With all
of our modern technology, how is that even possible?
It is a process of elimination at this point,
and we know exactly what it is not. OK, so what
isn't it? Rigorous genetic and chemical testing
has conclusively proven that the compound is
not psilocybin. The bleep mushrooms do not even
possess the necessary gene clusters to synthesize
psilocybin. So no classic magic mushroom stuff.
Right. And it is also definitively not musimol,
which is the delirium -inducing compound found
in the classic, you know, the red and white spotted
Amanita muscaria mushrooms. Mario mushroom. Yes,
the Mario mushrooms. It's not that either. So
if it's not the two most famous hallucinogens
on the planet, what are the leading theories?
Well, Dr. Dennis McKenna, who is a highly prominent
ethnopharmacologist, proposed a really compelling
theory based on the clinical symptoms. What did
he look at? He looked at the prolonged stupor,
the 24 -hour delay, and the true hallucinations,
you know, where people interact with phantoms
that aren't actually there. He theorized that
the effects closely resemble an anticholinergic
delirium. Anticholinergic, okay, for those listening
who might not be familiar, an anticholinergic
essentially blocks acetylcholine. Right? Which
is a key neurotransmitter responsible for memory,
learning, and muscle movement. Exactly. When
you block that, you don't just see pretty colors.
You enter a waking dream state where the line
between reality and imagination completely dissolves.
It's similar to the terrifying effects of the
detour plan. Precisely. The symptoms align beautifully
with that mechanism. But there's another major
avenue of research that looked at genetics. Scientists
wondered if these belief mushrooms had engaged
in horizontal gene transfer. Horizontal gene
transfer. Yeah. They're asking, did they somehow
steal the genetic code for making hallucinogens
from other nearby magic mushrooms over millions
of years of evolutionary history? Oh, that's
wild. It's like finding a Ferrari engine naturally
growing inside a Ford. That is a great way to
visualize it. Yeah. But a highly comprehensive
2023 genomic analysis sequenced the DNA and found
absolutely zero evidence of horizontal gene transfer.
Zero. None. The mushrooms didn't steal the recipe
from anyone else. They evolved it entirely on
their own. So they invented an entirely new biological
pathway. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
the magnitude of this genetic independence is
staggering. It means we are likely looking at
an entirely novel, completely undiscovered class
of hallucinogenic compounds occurring naturally
in the wild. And the race to isolate that novel
compound is happening right now. at the absolute
cutting edge of 2025 and 2026. Yes, it is. The
source material highlights the ongoing work of
two lead researchers. There is an American esnobiologist
named Colin Domnauer and a leading mycologist
Bryn Dentinger. In 2024, they realized they couldn't
just look at China, so they expanded their search.
Their fieldwork actually took them to the Sagada
region in the Philippine Cordilleras, and what
they found there perfectly bridges the geographical
gap. They found the exact same phenomena. They
really did. The local indigenous populations
in the Philippines regularly forage and eat a
blue -staining bolete they call sedizdem. And
the locals report that if it is undercooked,
it causes irregular visions of the Ancissi. And
the Ancissi is the local cultural term for, well,
you guessed it. little people. It's amazing.
The Philippine data beautifully corroborates
both the Los Papua New Guinea reports and the
modern Chinese hospital records. It ties it all
together. It does. But what is truly exciting
is that the hard laboratory science is finally
catching up to the ethnobotany. In late 2025,
Donauer and Dentinger achieved a massive milestone.
They successfully tested chemical extracts of
the Lanmua asiatica mushroom on animal models.
Wait, OK. If McKenna's theory is right, and this
acts like an anticholinergic, I'd imagine giving
this extract to a mouse wouldn't make it trip
and look at the stars. It would probably just
make it incredibly delirious and panicked. What
actually happened? The behavioral response validated
the clinical data perfectly. When injected with
the extract, the mice exhibited severe erratic
hyperactivity, which was subsequently followed
by a prolonged period of deep stupor. So the
exact same trajectory. Right. It mirrors the
exact trajectory of human hospital poisonings,
the agitation followed by the waking dream state.
By isolating the specific extract causing this
behavior, they have narrowed down the chemical
suspects immensely. As of early 2026, they are
on the absolute brink of publishing the molecular
identity of the active constituents. So what
does this all mean? Let's say they publish the
paper next month. We find a brand new molecule
that makes the human brain perceive tiny people.
Why does it matter to you and me beyond just
being a really wild story to tell at a dinner
party? It matters because discovering a fundamentally
new neural pathway or an entirely novel chemical
compound could lead to tectonic shifts in psychiatric
medicine. How so? Well, consider the trajectory
of psilocybin. For centuries, it was just a mysterious
compound used in indigenous ceremonies in Mexico.
Today, it is leading a clinical revolution in
how we treat severe depression, anxiety, and
PTSD. Right. It's a legitimate medical tool now.
Exactly. If we isolate a novel compound from
these belief mushrooms, one that interacts with
the brain in a completely unprecedented way,
it could unlock treatments for neurological conditions,
memory disorders, or psychiatric illnesses that
we haven't even conceived of yet. It is incredibly
exciting. Just to recap this year's scale of
the journey we just went on here. We started
with a scholar writing on bamboo scrolls in 300
CE. A very long time ago. We traveled to the
misty highlands of Papua New Guinea, where mid
-century Western science completely dismissed
a real phenomenon because of its own empirical
blind spots. A huge missed opportunity. We walked
through modern Chinese hospitals dealing with
a 24 -hour delayed pro -drug time bomb. And now
we are sitting on the precipice of a brand new
chemical discovery that could change modern medicine.
It just emphasizes how much profound complexity
is still hiding in the natural world, waiting
for us to figure it out. And to leave you with
one final, truly mind -expanding thought derived
directly from the source material, we've spent
this entire time talking about China, Papua New
Guinea, and the Philippines. Yeah. But species
of landmioa that are genetically closely related
to these hallucinogenic Asian mushrooms actually
grow wild right now in North America. Wait, really?
They're in our own hemisphere? They are. But
there are absolutely no clinical reports of little
people hallucinations in North America. Why not?
because North Americans and Europeans have a
deeply ingrained cultural stigma against eating
any wild mushroom that instantly turns dark blue
when you bruise it. And just to clarify the chemistry
of that, the blue staining is usually just a
rapid oxidation reaction, right? Like an apple
turning brown when exposed to the air. Psilocybin
mushrooms do the exact same thing. That is precisely
what it is. It's a completely harmless enzymatic
reaction to oxygen. But culturally, to a Western
forager, a mushroom that bleeds dark blue looks
inherently poisonous, toxic, and evil. So we
just ignore them. Exactly. So no one ever eats
them. No one ever tests the culinary boundaries
like they do in Yunnan. So the chemical potential
is literally growing in the dirt right next to
us. But our cultural fear completely prevents
the discovery. It forces you to wonder what other
medical marvels, entirely novel compounds or
reality bending phenomena are literally growing
in our own backyards, entirely hidden from us
simply because of the stories we tell ourselves
about what is safe and what is dangerous. We
always think we need a multi -billion dollar
sterile laboratory to find the future of medicine.
But maybe we just need to look a little closer
at the weird blue staining mushroom growing under
the oak tree down the street. Thank you so much
for joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning
the world around you and we'll see you next time.