Little people hallucinations: 5 Questions with mushroom researcher Colin Domnauer
Domnauer discusses a mushroom that reliably produces fairy-tale-like visions.
In Yunnan, China, people know that if they eat a local wild mushroom known as “jian shou qing,” they might start to see a particular hallucination: “xiao ren ren,” or little people. The mushroom’s scientific name is Lanmaoa asiatica, and it provokes “lilliputian hallucinations,” named after the mischievous Lilliputians in the novel Gulliver’s Travels, who are tiny people around 6-inches tall.
According to hospital records from Yunnan Hospital, 96 percent of people who sought medical help after eating this mushroom said they have seen “little people” who might be dancing or climbing up furniture. One professor in the region told Colin Domnauer, a PhD candidate at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, that after eating stir-fried mushrooms, he lifted the tablecloth and saw “hundreds of xiao ren ren, marching like soldiers.”
Domnauer has been tracking this ethnomycological mystery in different cultures around the world. He’s found that the same species induce these little people hallucinations in China, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and elsewhere. The Microdose talked to him about his attempts to identify the psychoactive chemicals within Lanmaoa asiatica.
Tell me about the mushroom itself, Lanmaoa asiatica. How did you come across it, and is it related to other magic mushrooms, like those that contain psilocybin?
I first heard about it during a class taught by mycologist Tom Bruns. It was a course on fungi and society, and he mentioned this report from China of a weird type of bolete mushroom—which is completely different from magic mushrooms. Locals were saying it caused hallucinations, but no one had really studied it. He mentioned it as a mystery waiting to be solved.
When I first heard about it, it was not known exactly what species was responsible. Many different, unrelated species of bolete mushrooms were attributed to this effect. Boletes are a term mycologists used to describe a family of mushrooms that is pretty well distinguished from most other mushrooms. They have pores on the underside of their cap rather than gills, and they’re a very distinctive group.
They’re very distantly related from the magic mushrooms, which contain psilocybin, as well as the psychoactive Amanita mushrooms, which is the other currently known group of psychoactive mushrooms. They belong to completely different orders of fungi. The two groups actually diverged about 150 million years ago. Evolutionarily speaking, psilocybin mushrooms and boletes are about as related to each other as we are to a platypus.
When were the hallucinations of little people first reported?
Reports of the bolete mushrooms causing hallucinations were first reported in the 1930s from the first missionaries to embark into the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They reported that the native people were consuming a type of wild mushroom which made them temporarily “insane,” as they called it.
Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim went to Papua New Guinea in the 1960s just a few years after they had discovered psilocybin mushrooms from Mexico. They made collections, spoke with local people, and determined through that process that it was six or 12 different species of mushrooms they attributed these effects to—they were all bolete mushrooms. They sent samples of these to Albert Hoffman and he, in the same way he attempted to isolate the chemical psilocybin, worked on these bolete mushrooms, but was unable to produce anything. They concluded it was merely a cultural drama, or that there wasn’t a physical explanation for what’s happening.
Starting in the 1990s, the first publication came out of China reporting on a very similar phenomenon: in Yunnan province in southwest China, folks were consuming a type of wild bolete mushroom and reporting the same exact types of hallucinations. This was interesting that two completely independent cultures reported a remarkably consistent effect. To my mind, that gave credence to the fact that there might be some chemistry involved that could explain this. It’s not merely a cultural fabrication.
Can you describe the hallucinations?
The hallmark symptom of these mushrooms are Lilliputian hallucinations. This is a clinically defined psychiatric condition characterized by the perception of numerous tiny human, animal, or fantasy-like figures in one’s environment. They’re often very realistic, three dimensional figures said to be colorfully dressed, very mobile, and interacting with the physical world—like climbing up chairs or tables, or clinging to surfaces.
This is a very unique and distinctive type of hallucination, and it’s been reported across history and cultures. The common causes are delirium, alcohol withdrawal, or macular degeneration in old age, and the prevalence has always been very low—under 1 percent of clinical cases. The mechanism of what’s responsible for this effect remains unknown by neurologists.
Up until recently, mushrooms had nothing to do with this syndrome. Now it seems this mushroom has some compound that reliably elicits this exact effect. If we are able to isolate or understand the compound responsible that could give us great insight into the underlying neurological mechanism, and perhaps novel pharmacology.
Have you heard about hallucinations that are often associated with DMT, where people see “elves” or encounter entities? Do you think these hallucinations are similar?
I’ve read up on some of the literature describing Lilliputian hallucinations from psychiatrists writing about them, and they seem categorically different from classical psychedelic hallucinations. The primary difference is that Lilliputian hallucinations inhabit and interact with the world according to physical laws. They’re very three-dimensionally grounded perceptions.
Of course, there is something to what you’re saying. The perception of tiny, diminutive figures is a similarity and has been reported from things like DMT around different cultures. Perhaps that is highlighting some similar mechanism, neurologically speaking. There must be something in our minds that’s producing these sorts of visions of tiny figures. I don’t think they’re exactly the same, but perhaps sharing something or highlighting something shared.
What work are you doing now to isolate the chemical in the mushroom that could be triggering these hallucinations?
We genuinely don’t know what the active compound is. That’s one of the main things I’ve focused on researching right now. My approach has been to use both comparative genomics combined with doing pharmacological assays testing the mushroom extract.
I have samples of specimens of this mushroom that I collected through field work, and I’m generating chemical extracts and testing those. I’m both doing chemical tests as well as pharmacological assays, in vivo and in vitro testing, to narrow down on the bioactive components involved. We’ve made great progress with this, so hopefully soon we can get to an isolated compound.
Also, I’ve completed whole genome sequencing for all the species in this group, and then we can search for the presence of genes that we know are involved in making traditional psychoactive compounds, like psilocybin or ibotenic acid. After doing that search, I found that there’s no trace or evidence that those are present. We’re confident that it’s something different or new in this bolete mushroom, which isn’t surprising, given their distant evolutionary tracks and ecology.
Once we have a compound involved, then we can start doing more interesting work, understanding the evolution and distribution of the species. Given our genomic data set, we now have an understanding of the genes involved and can look at how those genes evolved, how they’re shared across species. Is it only this species that has it? That would be unique because, you know, in the case of psilocybin, it’s found in hundreds of species of mushrooms.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
