Experts Explore New Mushroom Which Causes Fairytale-Like Hallucinations
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Delving into the mystical realm of a newly discovered mushroom, experts and enthusiasts alike are abuzz about its ability to induce vivid hallucinations of tiny people or "elves" across cultures and geographies. As the discussion unfolds, commenters can't help but inject a dash of humor and speculation, with some tongue-in-cheek theories suggesting that these "elves" are hard at work maintaining the universe, making toys, or even pilfering underwear. The conversation takes a fascinating turn with references to "machine elves" and antimemetics, hinting at a deeper, more complex reality. Amidst the jests, a thread of intrigue weaves together, pondering the mysterious forces at play.
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It could be a subspecies of the "machine elves"...
The real question is WHY they keep stealing my underwear and left-foot socks?
So not everyone is seeing elves is my point here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2IRKuS3sSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XfIpJdlEY
I can only speak for medically-administered intravenous Ketamine, but I would describe it as like relatively effortlessly floating inside of the non-physical space inside of you and meeting yourself in metaphor, all the while completely aware.
- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.
- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
I like that coffee is clearly a drug, a mind-alterer. But it's mostly harmless so it's been boosted as a sort of society-wide mascot. Humans really love drugs.
It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days of the internet that had big warning banners declaring the law enforcement was not allowed to connect.
Funny, I saw “SWIM” and reasoned “Someone Who Is Me”, thinking “is not” would be represented as “Is Not” instead of the contraction. :)
but yeah, a warning is warranted.
(I know folks who read PiHKAL and thought "Hmm, this would be a nice ML training/prediction exercise")
Could this mean we're on the brink of discovering an entirely new class of hallucinogens?
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China.
They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there.
It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
> The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong wrote in Baopuzi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity) around 300 CE that eating a certain wild mushroom raw would result in attainment of transcendence immediately, suggesting that the mushrooms may have been known for thousands of years.
Of course, he also claimed another mushroom would let you live for a millennia without aging, there were 1,000 year old white bats flying around and 10,000 year old horned toads and that eating 200 pounds of jade would make you fly.
Today's occidental universities would have to pay faux homage to "the poor helpless natives" who were the original custodians of the discovery but were too uncomplicated to do much with it, so with their wonderful generosity these kindly westerners did them the great service of elevating their voices, etc.
We can see the same pattern across your other comments -- sweeping "regime and cronies" rhetoric, insinuations without evidence ("what did Obama get in return?"), mocking humanitarian concern as manipulation, and then retreating to grievance when challenged.
That’s not satire; it’s MAGA-adjacent culture-war edgelording.
If you didn’t want your comment read as endorsing racist tropes, you shouldn’t have put those tropes on the page without explicit rejection. Accountability isn’t censorship, and criticism isn’t violence.
The through-line here isn’t people being uncharitable -- it’s a consistent reliance on insinuation, irony, and persecution narratives when your rhetoric doesn’t land.
> "No!," she said, most emphatically, "They are real. I have seen them myself!"
> Miss Oh clearly remembered the hallucinations that began that evening and continued into the next day. The walls moved and shifted in geometrical patterns and strange shapes appeared.
> "I'm sleepy all day," she said in English. "I see them. And I see flies bigger than the actual one, perhaps two times big. I see little insects. Not all the time, but when the water splashed out." She apparently became fascinated by the dripping kitchen faucet, for each drop would, upon hitting the sink, sprout wings and legs and crawl away. And she remembered, very clearly, staring intently at the bows of her shoelaces until they turned into butterflies and fluttered off.
The paper devotes quite a bit of text to explaining that the mushrooms bearing this quality have no specific name, and in fact are not distinguished from non-hallucinogenic mushrooms at all. They are referred to by their property of turning blue when handled, which is a property not exclusive to the hallucinogenic ones.
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492
did they found the schtroumpf village ?
There is so much diversity, and the feminization and paternization are interesting reflections of the language (eg Šmoulinka and Taťka Šmoula for Czech).
My brother and I were backpacking a bit and were in a hostel with some Czech girls. He admonished me: “these chicks are so DTF and you are blabbing about Smurfette?!”
I am curious of the connection between these fairy people and the DMT machine elves.
The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.
Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.
It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms.
While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so.
All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)
https://serendipity.li/trypt.html
Yeah, I know, pseudoscience and the like, but biology it's weird and with the current scientific discoveries (and even reusing quantum mechanics for profit, such as chlorofilla with leafs and photons), Nature itself it's 'magical'. Not actually something from fairy tales, but from weird mechanics we are actually grasping a little today.
Instead of my comment from I-Ching being taken as numerology, I would think of the universe as something being 'computed over', kinda like numeric towers under Lisp. Because in the end nothing exists per se; it's just fields generating matter, waves, energy and probably, information.
The war on drugs was specifically designed to allow the government to go after the left and black people. Nixon's domestic policy chief said this in 1994:
* https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminal...
Foods that contain nonliving toxins when unprocessed are also commonly eaten; a major example would be cassava. See also acorns, nardoo, and the Greenland shark.
Most things prefer not to be eaten; you can't let that stop you.
From what I read Suillellus luridus (见手青) is completely fine when cooked
Doesn't say how, for some reason. I presume they are shocked to see tiny mice, but I would like to know what behaviors they exhibited.
So perhaps not very recreational as might be assumed given the topic.
I knew personally someone whose trips usually took 48 hours. Unusually long, yes, and really exhausting.
Admittedly i wanted to try both but back then I didn't have opportunity, and now the mindspace is just not too.... Right for the risks.
Maybe when I'm too old to worry and it's too late to care :)
Also, 12 hours is definitely not short of LSD. I'd say it's the standard duration, with the peak lasting 7 hours. Longer trips can happen, at least to some people, but the default assumption should be about half a day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
For anyone vaguely interested in psychoactive/psychedelic drugs, his books and videos are amazing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia
For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.
So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
It's also not yet known if the active compound can survive dehydration like psilocybin. If not, it would mean even experiencing l. asiatica will be very difficult to impossible for enthusiasts not residing in its native region.
While occasionally FOAFs would get hallucinogenic effects from dining, I don't recall explicitly hearing of anyone seeing little people, or hearing the term he details in this writing. As such, I wonder where this guy gets his info from. Certainly, most Yunnanese would describe these mushrooms as 牛肝菌 ("bolete") and more specific Chinese common names for similar reddish species would include 桃红牛肝菌 ("peach-colored bolete"). As a general type, they are very common in markets across much of Yunnan.
Given the claims, the clearly infrequent effects, and the personal experience I can trust, I would conclude with three theories: perhaps either the compounds are rapidly degraded when non-fresh, safely broken down when cooking (traditionally these mushrooms are cut thinly before sauteeing or boiling in hotpot), or there are one or two "look alike" species which are more rarely found and contain additional compounds which are responsible for the occasional effects.
Good guess!
Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...
Its the same with mushrooms, the difference being that not only do the spores exist in high numbers, a mushroom getting eaten does nothing to the mycelium that spawns the mushroom
Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to spread.
Other mushrooms developed toxins to protect their fruiting bodies - often the biggest threat isn't larger animals, but insects. Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains. Other toxin mechanisms happen to be deadly to both insects and humans.
The inside of a fairy ring dies off as it uses up nutrients.
The leading edge of the circle remains alive so that is why the fruiting bodies (mushrooms) are there. The fungus produces nitrogen which leads to the growth of a greener ring of grass.
The ring’s steady expansion is driven by growth of the underground mycelium (not spores).
True for coffee as well (if you substitute psychedelic with a more appropriate word).
0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin.
1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.
I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_not_racist,_but...
If you really mean $2, then just say $2, you don't have to preface it with "I'm not $1, but" That's a waste of words, beating around the bush, that reveals that you really are $1 and you feel the need to be defensive about it.
The word "but" means the thing before it is false, and you can ignore everything after it.
All I'm saying is that blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space. It is already known that mutation bias exists, so what I'm saying shouldn't be that controversial.
All I'm saying is that the whole point of the theory of evolution is that blind enumeration of mutations is combinatorially feasible in spite of the vastness of the search space. It is already knows that mutation bias exists, and so what I'm saying isn't controversial at all.
You are hedging, I am not trying to weasel word or distance myself from evolution, or use rhetorical "I'm not racist, but..." devices, and I have read, agree with, and acknowledge the other people's replies to your message, because I understand that evolutionary theory already fully explains exactly the concern you're raising.
Your claim that “blind enumeration of mutations seems combinatorially infeasible due to the vastness of the search space" flatly contradicts the theory of evolution.
The entire point of evolutionary theory is that blind enumeration is not required, and that combinatorial feasibility emerges from selection, heredity, population dynamics, and cumulative retention of partial solutions.
Evolution is blind with respect to foresight, but not blind with respect to feedback, structure, or retention.
Mutation bias, developmental constraints, and non-uniform genotype–phenotype mappings are foundational components of modern evolutionary biology, not ad-hoc patches.
People who doubt evolution tend to rephrase it into a strawman -- "random bit flips over an astronomical space" -- and then declare that strawman implausible.
The "I'm not pushing intelligent design, but evolution seems combinatorially infeasible" move is basically the Discovery Institute / "teach the controversy" pattern: disclaim ID, then drop a doubt-claim that relies on a strawman of evolution as uniform random search, then retreat to "just asking questions." That’s the whole point of the Wedge / "teach the controversy" strategy: manufacture doubt about evolution while insisting it’s not religion. I’m not hedging here: evolutionary theory does not claim "blind enumeration over an astronomical space," and treating it that way flatly misstates it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute
Because
> what survives, survives"
Is not a tautology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)
“Empty” is a meaningless judgment in this scenario.
Saying "what survives, survives" is like saying physics explains motion as "things that move, move." That’s not what the theory actually claims; it’s a caricature.
Evolutionary theory explains mechanisms, not slogans. "Fitness" is not the explanation, it’s a measurable consequence of those mechanisms.
If you want teleology or ultimate purpose, science won’t give you that, so take some shrooms and ask the machine elves. But evolution absolutely explains how structured complexity accumulates without foresight, and it does so with predictive, testable models.
I’m not questioning your beliefs. The issue is that some of your arguments didn’t originate organically or scientifically, they were deliberately promoted through education policy and textbook standards, especially in large markets like Texas, precisely because that influence scaled nationally. People often absorb them without realizing their origin.
After Intelligent Design failed in court, its proponents shifted strategy toward influencing education standards rather than arguing science directly. States like Texas were key targets because of their centralized textbook approval process and market size, which historically shaped textbooks used nationwide. The "teach the controversy" framing was designed to insert doubt about evolution without explicitly promoting religion, and its language appeared repeatedly in state curriculum debates. As a result, many people encountered these arguments in school without ever being told where they came from.
Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things.
> Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years
It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence.
> It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".
Mutations introduce randomness but beneficial traits can be selected for artificially, compounding the benefits.
My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe. This is why mutation bias exists: not all mutations are equally likely, evolution favours some kinds over others.
Can you expand on this? I'm not seeing why it is implausible for one genome to mutate into another, that seems like it could be accomplished in reasonable time with a small, finite number of mutations performed sequentially or in parallel. After all the largest genome is only about 160 billion base pairs, and the average is much smaller (humans are 6 billion base pairs). So what's the difficulty in imagining one mutating into another?
Just look at antelope in north america - they evolved incredible speed and agility in order to outrun and evade megafauna predators, but there's nothing left nearly fast enough to be a threat to them. Environments can change, and leave an organism with features that are no longer necessary or even beneficial in terms of overall quality of life and energy efficiency. The slightest noise can disturb a herd of antelope into bolting as if there were prairie lions or sabertooth tigers on the prowl. They don't need to be hypervigilant in the same way, and it burns a lot of calories to move the way they do, so whitetail deer and other slower species that aren't quite as reactive or fast are better at exploiting the ecosystem as it is.
With mushrooms that have mysterious chemistry, there will be a lot of those sorts of vestigial features. Extinct species of insects and animals and plants will have been the target of specific features, or they might end up in novel environments where other features are particularly suitable, but some become completely counterproductive in practice.
As far as psilocybe mushrooms go, in lower quantities, they actually provide a cognitive advantage sufficient to make a symbiotic relationship plausible between mammals and the mushrooms, albeit indirect. Animals under low levels of psilocybin influence have better spatial perception, can better spot movement in low light conditions, and there's a slight reduction in the neural influence of trauma inspired networks. Large quantities can be beneficial in a number of abstract ways. Any animal that sought those mushrooms out could thereby gain adaptive advantage over competitors that didn't partake.
Having an extremely toxic substance might be useful for killing large organisms and their decomposition either feeding the fungi directly, or feeding the organisms beneficial to the fungi. This can be plants, other fungi, or the feces of scavengers. Horizontal transfer might occur if there's an initial beneficial relationship, animals like the smell and taste of a thing, and then the fungi picks up the killing poison, and the consequences are sufficiently beneficial to outbreed the safe ones.
If too many become deadly, animals get killed off, and the non-deadly ones tend to gain the upper ground, since they aren't spending any resources on producing any poisons. Where there's a balance of intermittent similar but poisonous mushrooms, they take down enough animals to optimize their niche.
There are dozens of such indirect webs of influences and consequences that spread from seemingly simple adaptations, and it's amazing that things seem so balanced and stable as they do. It's a constant arms race of attacks and temptations and strategies.
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