On this trip, there are none of the heightened colors, breathing or pulsing objects, nor geometrical patterns typically reported by users of psychedelic substances. In fact, the hundreds of people who enter clinics in China's Yunnan province during each year's summer mushroom season tend to report their vision as being clear and largely unaltered.
These visions are reported by 90% of those who consume a single species of bolete mushroom, called Lanmaoa asiatica, in its raw or undercooked form. Yet despite decades of anecdotal reports, the fantastical claims were dismissed by western scientists as a form of "mushroom madness" — until Colin Domnauer, an undergraduate student taking an optional university module on funguses, caught wind of the reports.
Live Science sat down with Domnauer to discuss L. asiatica, the bizarre revelations it could hold for how we perceive reality, and the barely-discovered fungal universe that surrounds us. Here's what he had to say.
Colin Domnauer is a doctoral student studying ethnobiology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah whose search for an underdocumented psychedelic mushroom is revealing a completely new hallucinogenic compound. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)
Colin Domnauer: Lanmaoa asiatica is a species of mushroom from Yunnan, China. It was described to science only 10 years ago in 2015, so it's a relatively newly discovered species, but it was actually being sold in the markets in Yunnan for decades before scientists realized it was its own species.
It's a species that grows with pine trees. It has a symbiotic relationship called a mycorrhizal relationship and so, for that reason, it's something that can't be cultivated artificially. And it's still only found in its wild habitats, so it's difficult to distribute in that sense. But it's still relatively common and popular in the places that it is found.
CD: Alright, so we don't know exactly the amount of mushroom that's required to get this effect, because in all these cultures they're eating it accidentally, or they're eating it just as food, but they're not intentionally pursuing the psychoactive effects. These effects are seen as an accidental side effect of eating too much, or if they're not cooked enough.
And these aren't like some vague hallucinations, these are like three-dimensionally-rendered, highly-detailed figures inhabiting your exterior world. And they're also interacting with objects in the real world — like crawling up chairs and tables or crawling under doorways, people say. So there's a very strange and specific type of reality-grounded, projected hallucination.
In southwestern China's Yunnan province, Lanmaoa asiatica is prized for its umami-rich flavor. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)
BT: Okay, so immediately there's a lot I want to ask you. Firstly, these tiny people are pretty reliably reported, right?
BT: From the case reports we have hundreds to thousands of clearly-rendered, often brightly-colored, gnome or fairy-like little people clambering about and crawling under things. What else are they doing? Are they talking to the people having the hallucinations, is there much interaction going on?
The little people are said to typically like teasing, playing with or harassing the person seeing them, so there is some level of interaction there.
BT: Are there any other clinically-reported effects on the mind and body?
And then another key thing that a lot of people note is that they seem to be typically weakened, more tired and delirious, so this could give us a hint as to the mechanisms that this unknown compound is working through. So it sounds quite different from the known psychedelic compounds.
BT: If people are hallucinating thousands of miniature people taunting them for several days, are there any injuries or fatalities linked to cases? Or is it just unpleasant and irritating, but harmless?
But interestingly, all those hundreds of hospital reports reported zero deaths or fatalities. They also reported no abnormalities in vital organ function, so it seems to be physiologically safe. But then, at the same time, we don't know if that's because those people were admitted to the hospital and they were getting proper treatment, or if we only have the records of people that were committed to the hospital, so it might be a skewed sample.
CD: In all these places, the mushroom is viewed as a very prized edible. It tastes very good and has a great flavor, but it's never been integrated into any spiritual or religious practices for the psychoactive effects. The psychoactive effects are like an accidental side effect of a food, and they're viewed as sort of an amusing side effect of that. They're not something that they intentionally pursue, but it's also not something that they feel fearful of and avoid.
Yunnan province is known as the wild mushroom capital of China, with the Mushuihua wild mushroom trading center selling over 200 species of edible funguses. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)
BT: And that's so strange. I mean you're a scientist, I'm a science journalist, to me this thing is so fundamentally bizarre that I struggle to understand how it has flown under the radar for so long. It was only scientifically described 10 years ago, and even then without much mention of the psychoactive properties. Why are we only just talking about this now?
But this mushroom went the opposite way and faded into obscurity. And I think the reason for that is twofold. One, the scientists who were initially studying this mushroom in Papua New Guinea were unable to isolate any psychoactive compounds and couldn't determine the species responsible for the effects. And secondly, because these symptoms sounded so bizarre and fantasy-like — seeing little people — I think this biased them toward believing that it wasn't possible.
But since that time, over the last two years, we've had more reports coming from other cultures — from China, and now from the Philippines. That's multiple independent cultures reporting the same specific type of hallucination.
BT: How did you first hear about L. asiatica?
It was written sort of as an anecdotal story. The mycologist was traveling in Yunnan, and the local people told him: "Oh, these mushrooms will make you see little people if you don't cook them." But in that paper he was unable to identify the mushrooms, and he shared his story and said this is something that needs more attention. I tried to look more into it after hearing about that, and I found that, amazingly, no-one was studying it. It had gone just unnoticed or dismissed for decades.
BT: So what did you do next?
I just asked them: "Which ones will make you see little people?" they pointed to them, and I collected them. After getting back to my lab here in Utah, I was able to sequence the mushrooms to determine their identity, and it turns out they were all this one species, so that was a first big hint.
Colin Domnauer
CD: Going into my whole PhD was sort've a wild goose chase — a long shot. We didn't even know if this was real, and even when I made this trip to China, as I was traveling there I asked myself: "Am I even going to find anything? Is this going to be a whole waste of time?"
The real smoking gun then came a few years later when I heard some remarkably similar reports of mushrooms causing Lilliputian hallucinations in a completely different part of the world in the northern Philippines.
When I got the DNA sequencing back it was like one of the most exciting moments of my whole research. It was actually the same species as the one in China, which was completely unexpected, because that species, L. asiatica, was thought to only be found in China. Now we have a whole new record in a country that has independently discovered the same specific psychoactive properties belonging to it.
Domnauer's discovery of L. asiatica in the northern Philippines came on the final day of strenuous fieldwork in the region. (Image credit: Colin Domnauer)CD: Just this month I was finally able to publish research that sequenced the whole genomes of not just L. asiatica, but actually all of the species in this group. I did that because I wanted to understand what psychoactive chemicals might be causing this effect and if it’s something that's found more widely in the mushroom kingdom, or only in this one species; so I needed to understand the whole evolutionary relationships and history of the group.
There weren't even any known psychoactive compounds, so it seemed like this must be some new hallucinogenic compound waiting to be discovered, because there's nothing that matches anything in our database.
CD: It can be a long and painstaking process to go from a complicated organism that has hundreds of molecules in it to one causing a single effect. We've been screening the chemical extracts, in mice, for example. We give them an extract of this mushroom, and we also give them an extract of a placebo or a blank control and we watch how their behavior changes. With L. asiatica, they behave strikingly differently than in the control, so that shows that there is a bioactive effect going on.
There's also other more complicated methods that we're pursuing. But still to this day we haven't definitively found the actual chemical responsible.
CD: I'll say this: We’ve narrowed down whatever is causing the activity in mice to a few candidates, but we don't know if the thing that's causing activity in mice is the same thing causing hallucinations in humans.
BT: I know you’re approaching this from the mycology side, but the same visions being consistently reported between cases implies one or more regions of the brain responsible for seeing little people. What work has been done on the neuroscience behind Lilliputian hallucinations? Has anyone identified the regions of the brain it's hitting?
But in all those cases, psychiatrists and neurologists don't really have a treatment for those people because they don't know how it works in the brain. If you don't understand the mechanisms involved, you can't treat it, so it remains a mystery to this day. Hopefully more neuroscientists can use this mushroom to study it, because that's one of the reasons it's remained mysterious. We didn't have a tool that could produce these effects reliably. It was all random, inconsistent occurrences.
BT: DMT, LSD, magic mushrooms — most psychedelics usually hit serotonin receptors, yet weirdly there's no sign of that here. Is there any possibility it's doing something upstream with the same effect?
BT: Have you spoken to anyone who has suspicions of what parts of the brain might be involved?
I mean, this is... I don't know of anything else like this that can produce these very realistic hallucinations integrated with the real world. So, hopefully, it can give us insight into how we perceive reality normally.
CD: It's really different, yeah. Like you said, either the objects that are normally there are changed in some way, or people go to a different world in their minds, behind closed eyelids.
BT: So there have been scant reports of similar hallucinations occurring elsewhere. Papua New Guinea is a strong case, right? Does that mean that L. asiatica is also there, or could there be another mushroom that's kind of having effects?
Or it could be a completely different mushroom, which would be exciting for its own reason — it would show that whatever compound is causing this is perhaps more widespread, and it's not just found in one species. More research needs to be done, for sure.
Some of the earliest 20th century reports of Liliputian hallucinations came from the Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea. (Image credit: Maria Cristina di Palma/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
BT: DMT, LSD, magic mushrooms — most psychedelics usually hit serotonin receptors, yet weirdly there's no sign of that here. Is there any possibility it's doing something upstream with the same effect?
BT: Have you spoken to anyone who has suspicions of what parts of the brain might be involved?
I mean, this is... I don't know of anything else like this that can produce these very realistic hallucinations integrated with the real world. So, hopefully, it can give us insight into how we perceive reality normally.
CD: It's really different, yeah. Like you said, either the objects that are normally there are changed in some way, or people go to a different world in their minds, behind closed eyelids.
BT: So there have been scant reports of similar hallucinations occurring elsewhere. Papua New Guinea is a strong case, right? Does that mean that L. asiatica is also there, or could there be another mushroom that's kind of having effects?
Or it could be a completely different mushroom, which would be exciting for its own reason — it would show that whatever compound is causing this is perhaps more widespread, and it's not just found in one species. More research needs to be done, for sure.
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CD: Of course I’ve been tempted to. But I haven't actually eaten it raw intentionally for two reasons. One, the effects last several days, and also apparently cause a delirium that might not be so pleasant. So, it's a pretty serious undertaking, I'd say.
I'm certainly super curious, and that’s why I'm studying this in the first place. But there's already hundreds of reports out there, I don't feel like I need to prove anything. Personally, at this point, I just don't feel like it's not worth the commitment to be having these hallucinations for several days.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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