Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint, all related to the mushroom. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.
The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor (Broth-like or meaty flavor). In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season, which occurs between June and August each year. One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in.
“At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'” says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. “That effect is very common knowledge in the culture there, but outside of Yunnan and a couple of other places, the strange mushroom is largely an enigma.”
“There are many accounts about the existence of this psychedelic [mushroom], and many people who have looked for it, but the actual species was never found,” says Giuliana Furci, a mycologist and the founder and executive director of the Fungi Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to discovering, documenting and conserving fungi.
Domnauer is on a quest to solve the decades-old mysteries about this fungi species and to identify the unknown compound responsible for its unusually similar hallucinations – he also wants to find out what it can potentially teach us about the human brain. He first heard of L. asiatica from his mycology professor at university. “It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time,” Domnauer says. “I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more.”
The academic literature provided a few breadcrumbs. In a 1991 paper, two researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described cases of people in Yunnan Province who had eaten a certain mushroom and experienced “lilliputian hallucinations” – the psychiatric term for the perception of tiny human, animal or fantasy figures. It is so named after the small people who inhabit the fictional Lilliput Island in the novel Gulliver’s Travels. The patients saw these figures “moving about everywhere”, the researchers wrote. Usually, there were more than ten tiny beings on the scene. “People saw them on their clothes when they were dressing and saw them on their dishes when eating,” the researchers added. The visions “were even more vivid when their eyes were closed”.
In the 1960s, Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim – the American author and French botanist who brought the existence of psilocybin mushrooms to the attention of Western audiences – came across something similar in Papua New Guinea. They were searching for a mushroom that a team of missionaries, who had visited 30 years earlier, had said caused the locals to go “insane”. A condition that an anthropologist later dubbed “mushroom madness“. Unbeknownst to them, what they encountered actually sounds strikingly similar to the current reports from China. They collected specimens of the suspected species and sent them to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, for testing. But Hofmann failed to identify any molecules of interest. The team concluded that the stories they heard from the field must have been cultural tales rather than having any pharmacological basis, and no further research was done.
It was not until 2015 that researchers finally formally described and named L. asiatica, still without much detail about its psychoactive properties. So Domnauer’s first goal has been to pin down the species’ true identity. In 2023, he travelled to Yunnan during the peak summertime mushroom season. He surveyed the province’s sprawling fungi markets and asked sellers which of their mushrooms “makes you see little people”. He purchased the ones that the giggling vendors pointed to, then brought the specimens back to the laboratory to sequence their genomes.
Domnauer also visited the Philippines, where he had heard rumors of a mushroom causing similar symptoms as those from China and Papua New Guinea. The specimens he collected there looked slightly different from the Chinese ones – they were smaller and light pink as compared to the larger, redder Chinese mushrooms, he says. But his genetic testing revealed that they were indeed the same species.
Domnauer and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations in L. asiatica. Current tests suggest it is not likely related to any other known psychedelic compound. For one, the “trips” it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an initial onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the this extraordinarily long duration of these trips, and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself.
The really curious factor of this mushroom species is that “the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported”, Domnauer says. “I don’t know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations.”
Researchers estimate that less than 5% of the world’s fungal species have been described, so there is still a world of discoveries to be made!
