So there's this mushroom that makes you hallucinate tiny people marching across your dinner table. And no, I'm not talking about psilocybin mushrooms. This is something completely different and way weirder.
Colin Domnauer, a PhD student at the Natural History Museum of Utah, recently published a fascinating piece about Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom that's been causing what scientists call "lilliputian hallucinations" across multiple cultures for potentially thousands of years.
And it's be one of the most intriguing mushroom stories I've come across.
The Little People Phenomenon
Here's what happens. You eat this mushroom (usually undercooked), and suddenly you're seeing hundreds of tiny people (like, 2cm tall) doing their thing in your actual environment. They're marching, dancing, grinning, interacting with real objects around you.
One professor in Yunnan, China described lifting his tablecloth during dinner to find "hundreds of xiao ren ren, marching like soldiers." When he lifted it higher, their heads stuck to the underside of the cloth while their bodies kept marching in place.
I mean, come on. That's incredibly specific and bizarre.
A Cross-Cultural Mystery
What makes this truly fascinating is that these exact same hallucinations have been independently reported across vastly different cultures:
- In Papua New Guinea, locals call it "nonda" and have known about the "mushroom madness" since at least the 1930s
- In Yunnan, China, it's "Jian shou qing" and seeing "little people" is so common that 96% of hospital patients affected by this mushroom report the same experience
- In the Northern Philippines, indigenous communities call it "Sedesdem" and describe visions of the "ansisit", their word for little people
Different continents, different languages, different cultures. But the same weirdly specific hallucination.
The Science Gets Even Weirder
It gets weirder. Domnauer traveled to the Philippines in 2024 to collect samples of the Sedesdem mushroom. He did DNA sequencing and discovered it was the exact same species as the Chinese mushroom - Lanmaoa asiatica.
But unlike magic mushrooms (which contain psilocybin), chemical analysis has found no known psychoactive compounds in Lanmaoa asiatica. Whatever's causing these lilliputian hallucinations is completely unknown to science. It's a novel compound waiting to be discovered.
The researchers are currently feeding mushroom extracts to mice and watching for behavioural changes, systematically narrowing down which chemical is responsible. Somewhere in this mushroom is a molecule that reliably makes mammals hallucinate tiny people, and we have no idea what it is yet.
Ancient Roots?
Even cooler is this might not be a recent discovery at all. Domnauer points to a 3rd century Daoist text that mentions a "flesh spirit mushroom" that, when eaten raw, allows you to "see a little person" and "attain transcendence immediately."
That's 1,700+ years ago. Have humans been tripping on tiny-people-producing-mushrooms throughout history and we're only just now connecting the dots?
Why This Matters
This isn't just a fun weird-science story (though it absolutely is that). The consistency of these hallucinations across cultures suggests there's something specific happening neurologically. This mushroom doesn't seem to be scrambling your brain randomly. It's triggering a very particular perceptual experience.
What does that tell us about human consciousness? About how our brains construct reality? About what levers exist in our neurology that can be specifically manipulated?
Plus, Lanmaoa asiatica is more closely related to porcini mushrooms than to any other known hallucinogenic species. This is a completely different evolutionary path to psychoactivity.
And get this. Domnauer found that the closest relative to L. asiatica grows commonly in North America. We just don't have reports of it being psychoactive, but maybe that's because no one's really tested it yet.
The Bigger Picture
I love this story because it reminds us how much we still don't know. This mushroom has been sold openly in markets, eaten by thousands of people, reported on in news articles, and documented in hospital records for decades. And we only scientifically identified it in 2014. The active compound is still a mystery in 2025.
How many other mushrooms are out there with completely unknown effects? What other bizarre neurological switches are waiting to be discovered in fungi we walk past every day?
The world is weirder and more magical than we give it credit for. And sometimes, that magic comes in the form of a mushroom that makes you see an army of tiny grinning people marching across your kitchen table.
You can't write this shit.
