One thing from the article that isn't clear. Do people who see little people actually believe they are real, even when they know about the potential effect of these mushrooms?

This is a fundamental difference between psychedelics such as psilocybin and deliriants like datura. Usually, with psychedelics, you know that what you are seeing is not real, or at least, that it is not normal. With deliriants, even if you know exactly what you took and the effect it has, the crazy things you are seeing feel real and perfectly normal until the effect wears off.

What make me feel goes to the psychedelic side is that description talk about something wonderful, or at least worthy of attention. If it was a hallucination in its purest sense, the presence of little people would be no weirder than that of a cat or a dog.

But the fact that it is generally considered unpleasant and not used for recreational or spiritual purposes is more of a deliriant thing.

• victorbjorklund

  today at 12:14 PM

  There are plenty of things that are less strong effects that can still trick your mind to believe something that you know is not really true. Such as when you do the fake arm test. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1395356/ It feels real for the brain, even if you know that it's not your arm. I did a test and my brain believed that it's my arm, even if I of course, logically know my arm is not a rubber arm.

• dudefeliciano

  today at 10:24 AM

  There is a similar effect related to Delirium Tremens, caused by extreme alcohol withdrawal. Apparently people across cultures report seeing the same "Hat Man" in their peripheral vision, who disappears when looked at directly, but everyone seems to report the same ominous feeling about him. Also there are reports of people seeing a bunch of spiders everywhere, when going through alcohol withdrawal.

  • finghin

    today at 11:31 AM

    The mind and body are always in sync somewhat, even when under great stress like that. Anticholinergics at high doses act almost mechanistically on the PNS to create the parasthesia/formication on/under one’s skin. I think the visual perception of the insects is in that case secondary to the tactile sensation.

    That is quite characteristically distinct to the “endogenous” appearance of other figures when using serotonergics, that almost certainly arise from intra CNS activity

  • ravenstine

    today at 10:52 AM

    Those are also common hallucinations reported for recreational Benadryl dosages.

The elves are always there. The mushroom just lets us see them.

• rbanffy

  today at 10:02 AM

  Humans are not supposed to know that yet. You'll get in trouble with management if you continue doing this.

• wewewedxfgdf

  today at 9:56 AM

  Finally a rational explanation.

• nelox

  today at 10:57 AM

  They Live!

• FpUser

  today at 10:39 AM

  William of Ockham confirms

DMT also commonly induces visions of elves (the so-called "machine elves"). Having tried DMT several times I can't say it's something that ever happened to me personally but lots of people report seeing elves on DMT.

• dghf

  today at 12:22 PM

  I was under the impression that the "machine elves" were very different from the tiny people described in this article.

• kdheiwns

  today at 10:51 AM

  For me, I was hit with a wall of metallic gems that warped into a wormhole that sucked me into the void. My body melted into a pool of crystalline jelly, and then a pair of indescribably massive entities with vortex heads that reached infinitely far into space stuck their hands into my liquified body and started rearranging my internals.

  It was interesting. But I can't exactly recommend it because it felt like I stopped breathing and died.

• saagarjha

  today at 7:50 AM

  Curious what happens if you’ve never been introduced to the concept of elves.

  • happythrowaw

    today at 8:17 AM

    I was before I tried. But I also remember that I didn’t remember that fact when I took it both times. The second time I was more primed for like organic shape.

    The first time I saw something what one could call a giant machine elf I guess. Though the thought occurred to me much later. It looked a bit like Galactus from the Marvel comics, but friendly. I stood in the palm of its hand. The second time I saw a jester. I definitely didn’t think about seeing a jester beforehand as I wasn’t really aware that they could be a thing.

    My first trip was very meaningful. My second trip was mostly interesting. In part because I kept one eye closed and the other open to see what would happen.

  • irusensei

    today at 8:15 AM

    From the fine article:

    >What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.

    • ivanbakel

      today at 11:18 AM

      The GP is talking about DMT, not the mushroom mentioned in the article.

      • finghin

        today at 11:33 AM

        For my two cents, I asked what my friend was seeing and he said “tin foil”. No elves - quite disappointing - but he enjoyed it

  • today at 8:08 AM

• gadders

  today at 9:48 AM

  Are they the ones that are claimed to be racist?

Quite a light article. There are entire lives dedicated to finding out what is really real and what is just a perception of reality.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-imagining-it/

So they discovered Can-D from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?

Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...

It'd be amusing to try to trace legends of "little people" to incidence of these particular mushrooms. Not sure how you'd do that though.

• irishcoffee

  today at 11:09 AM

  J.R.R. Tolkien was on it a long time ago, now that you mention it. If you recall the opening chapters of the book, Merry and Pippin (referred to as 'little people' by various characters in the trilogy) are running away from an angry farmer... because they stole his mushrooms.

  As an aside, they didn't make it home from their mushroom-stealing afternoon until the end of the the series.

  • staticman2

    today at 11:55 AM

    Hobbits are between two and four feet tall.

    I think the "little people" in the article are more fairy sized or smaller. The BBC article linked to at that article says they were seen on dishes.

  • philipwhiuk

    today at 11:11 AM

    LOTR is a sequel to the Hobbit however, so 'the first few chapters' are already after the lore previously written.

    And in the hobbit there was already pipe smoking folks (although it's less emphasised probably because it was written as more as a book for children - or at least a child).

    • irishcoffee

      today at 11:30 AM

      > LOTR is a sequel to the Hobbit however, so 'the first few chapters' are already after the lore previously written.

      I mean sure, he wrote the lore sitting in trenches during a war, most of the universe was sorted out before he wrote _The Hobbit_ at all. I was, I thought clearly but I guess not, specifically referring to the Trilogy.

I hallucinated gnomes after I took medicine they prescribed me at the hospital, following a bike accident.

• lioeters

  today at 11:25 AM

  Yeah it used to be common advice to not take any drink, food, or medicine prescribed by gnomes.

• alienbaby

  today at 12:04 PM

  Sounds like you may have been hallucinating to begin with.

• CoastalCoder

  today at 11:33 AM

  That may have been a bad reaction. Ask your doctor is KDE is right for you!

  • flr03

    today at 12:00 PM

    I switched to xfce since, much better

There's a matching eye/brain condition where older people very rapidly develop cataracts or other eye problems and they spontaneously start seeing little people everywhere.

Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.

• finghin

  today at 11:40 AM

  The overall field of visual paraperception is very interesting. You have Charles Bonnet Syndrome as described, and other really interesting phenomena like blindsight and complex visual agnosias, and then Anton-Babinski anosognosia where a patient IS blind but confabulates their visual field and maintains they can see!

  I started reading into this from my interest in neuropsychiatry, but what is most interesting is that visual hallucinations are really quite rare in the schizophrenic population. Most visual hallucinations, it seems, have nothing to do with mental illness.

  • ekaryotic

    today at 12:09 PM

    also, if you are blind from birth or go blind within a year of birth you won't develop schizophrenia. those folk are completely absent in the population.

• flippyhead

  today at 11:34 AM

  Makes me wonder if there's some consortium of effects that just causes our very active face recognition system to start perceiving faces.

It's fun to imagine there might be ways to tailor the chemistry to create highly specific imaging and sensations. Probably limited to imagery we have evolved with, because that's what must be embedded in our fundamental brain structure, but intriguing nevertheless.

Is this where Smurfs (Smurves?) came from?

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717442

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsn3.70583

More info about what metabolites may be involved.

I sent the Vice article to my girlfriend and she had a good question and wondered if the mice treated with it see even smaller little mice.

• thrownthatway

  today at 8:37 AM

  Probably turtles.

  • madwolf

    today at 9:27 AM

    yeah, it's probably turtles all the way.

There was a game called: "Little Computer People" [1].

I call those the... "Little Shrooms People".

[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People#/media/...

Where in the brain do visual hallucinations happen? I remember hearing that we can crudely reconstruct images from live scans of the brain. Does that work with hallucinations?

Turn on the TV and I tune to snow, the ask a room full of people who have just smoked marijuana what the collectively see.

• mcphage

  today at 12:15 PM

  Drinkin outta cups

I wish there was a simple concept to explain this phenomenon: the appearance of widespread unified action (a "conspiracy" in the literal sense of the word), but only because the effects of doing X manifest themselves the same way in different places/people, often for biological reasons but more broadly for structural ones.

I guess you could call it something like, "system-limited emergence," in the sense that different systems can have similar outputs if they are structured the same way.

In other words, the idea is that differing groups of people don't see elves because they are all accessing some hidden reality full of elves, but rather because the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location.

This maybe seems obvious for mushrooms or other substances, but I think the same concept applies to other phenomena too: the spread of ideas, political actions, etc. Or maybe I've just been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.

• Noaidi

  today at 11:30 AM

  When you realize that everything "we" see is common hallucination, then it will all make sense. The human mind creates the image of a tree, the eye just takes in the light. Change the eye or the mind and our hallucination changes.

  So these mushrooms change the mind in a very specific way, but no more strange than putting on red tinted glasses.

  Speaking as someone who has involuntary hallucinations, this is a reality taken for granted by most people. I have very different hallucinations when I am dep[ressed vs when I am manic. And you are on the right track in my opinion that "the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location."

• krapp

  today at 10:07 AM

  Yes, you've discovered archetypes. Go read Jung's Red Book, none of this is new.

  • keiferski

    today at 10:38 AM

    Sort of but not really. I’m talking about actions, not why patterns appear in culture. I don’t really think “archetypes” quite captures the meaning.

    • pillefitz

      today at 10:56 AM

      More like Eigenvectors/-modes of the mind, which certain stimuli amplify into resonance

  • today at 10:31 AM

This article ended before it really got interesting. I was hoping it would actually go into the brain chemistry and controlled trials underway.