Jakarta –
Every year, doctors at a hospital in China’s Yunnan Province brace for a surge in patients with unusual complaints. Patients came in with very strange symptoms: they saw small dwarf-like creatures walking under doors, crawling on walls, and clinging to furniture.
The hospital handles hundreds of such cases every year. All cases have the same causes: Asiatic Lanmaoa.
It is a type of fungus that forms a symbiotic relationship with pine trees in the surrounding forests, and is a popular local delicacy, known for its savory, umami-rich taste.
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Di Yunnan, L. Asiatica sold in markets, appearing on restaurant menus, and served at home during mushroom season. The peak is between June and August.
However, it is important to cook it thoroughly, otherwise hallucinations will appear.
“At a restaurant hot pot mushrooms there, the waiter set the time for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat before timer sound or you might see a small creature,'” said Colin Domnauer, a biology doctoral candidate at the University of Utah and the Utah Museum of Natural History, who is researching L. Asiatica.
“This seems to be common knowledge in the local culture.”
Domnauer is trying to solve a years-long mystery about this mushroom species and identify the unknown compound responsible for very similar hallucinations as well as what this mushroom can teach us about the human brain.
Domnauer first heard about L. Asiatica while still an undergraduate student of his mycology professor.
“It sounds so strange, that there is a fungus out there that causes the fairy tale-like hallucinations reported in various cultures and eras,” Domnauer said.
“I was confused and driven by curiosity to find out more.”
Colin Domnauer
The academic literature provides some clues.
A 1991 article, two researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences described cases of people in Yunnan who had eaten certain mushrooms and experienced “Lilliputian hallucinations.”
Lilliputian hallucination is a psychiatric term for the perception of humans, animals, or fantasies of very small subjects. This term is taken from the small people who inhabit Lilliput Island in the fictional novel Gulliver’s Travels.
The patients saw these creatures “wandering all over the place,” the researchers wrote. There were usually more than ten of the tiny creatures at the site.
“They see it on their clothes when they get dressed, and on their plates when they eat,” the researchers added. The vision was “clearer when their eyes were closed.”
In the 1960s, American writers Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim and French botanists who introduced the existence of psilocybin mushrooms to Western audiences discovered something similar in Papua New Guinea.
Colin Domnauer Mushrooms Asiatic Lanmaoa sold freely in traditional markets during the harvest season between June and August.
They were looking for a fungus that was causing the local population to go “crazy”, according to a group of missionaries who visited the area 30 years earlier. This condition is called “fungal madness” by one anthropologist.
Unbeknownst to them, what they encountered actually sounded very similar to recent reports from China.
They collected specimens of suspected species, and sent them to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, for testing.
However, Hofmann failed to identify the molecules of interest.
The team concluded that the stories they heard from the field were only cultural stories, and had no pharmacological basis, so no further research was carried out.
It wasn’t until 2015 that researchers finally officially described and named it L. Asiaticastill without many details about its psychoactive properties.
Domnauer’s first goal was to determine the true identity of the species.
In 2023, he traveled to Yunnan during the peak mushroom harvest season. He researched the province’s vast mushroom market and asked sellers about mushrooms that “make you see little people.”
He bought the mushroom pointed out by the laughing seller, then took the specimen back to the laboratory to sequence its genome. This confirmed the identity of L. asiatica, he said.
In research he is preparing for publication, chemical extracts from laboratory specimens, caused behavioral changes in mice similar to those reported in humans.
After being given the mushroom extract, the mice experienced a period of hyperactivity followed by a long period of lethargy, during which the mice did not move much.
Domnauer also visited the Philippines, a region he had heard rumors of a fungus that caused similar symptoms. This fungus also has historical records such as in China and Papua New Guinea.
The specimens he collected there looked slightly different from those in China in that they were smaller and light pink compared to the larger, red Chinese mushrooms, he said.
However, genetic tests showed they were indeed the same species.
In December 2025, Domnauer bosses also visited Papua New Guinea to search for the mushrooms reported in Wasson and Heim’s notes. But his identity, Domnauer said, “is still a big question mark.”
However, they failed to find it, so the mystery remains unsolved.
“It’s probably the same species, which would be surprising, because Papua New Guinea doesn’t usually have the same species as those found in China and the Philippines,” Domnauer said.
Or perhaps it’s a different species, which would be more “interesting from an evolutionary perspective”, he added.
This means the same Lilliputian effect has evolved independently in different fungal species in other, completely different parts of the world.
There is precedent for this occurring in nature.
Scientists recently discovered that psilocybin – a psychedelic molecule found in magic mushrooms – evolved independently in two distantly related types of mushrooms.
However, it’s not psilocybin that exerts its Lilliputian effect on mushrooms L. AsiaticaDomnauer said.
Colin Domnauer Colin Domnauer discovered mushrooms in the Philippines that looked different but were the same species as L. asiatic of China
Domnauer and his team are still working to identify the chemical compounds responsible for the hallucinations in L. Asiatica. Current trials suggest the compound is unlikely to be related to any other known psychedelic compounds.
First, the hallucinatory effects it produces are very long-lasting. It usually lasts 12 to 24 hours. In some cases, it even causes hospitalization for consumers for up to a week.
Due to the unusually long duration of the hallucinations, and the possibility of prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has not tried the raw mushroom himself.
This long-lasting hallucinatory effect may help explain why people in China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea do not appear to have a tradition of deliberately seeking L. Asiatica for its psychoactive effects, Domnauer found.
“The mushroom was always eaten as food,” Domnauer said, with hallucinations an unexpected side effect.
There is another interesting factor: other known psychedelic compounds typically produce unique and varied hallucinatory experiences. This is not just from person to person, but also from one experience to the next within the same individual.
However, with L. Asiatica“little people’s perception of vision is reported very reliably and repeatedly,” Domnauer said.
“I don’t know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations.”
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Understanding this fungus is not easy, Domnauer said. But as with the study of other psychedelic compounds, the resulting scientific research may touch on the biggest questions about consciousness and the relationship between mind and reality.
It may also provide important clues about what causes spontaneous Lilliputian hallucinations in people. Even when they don’t consume it L. Asiatica.
The condition is rare, and as of 2021, only 226 cases unrelated to mold have been reported since Lilliputian hallucinations were first described in 1909.
But for a small number of cases, the results can be serious: a third of them do not fully recover, even though the cases are not related to fungus.
Colin Domnauer Domnauer and colleagues attempted to identify psychedelic substances in L. Asiatica.
Research on L. Asiatica may help scientists understand the brain mechanisms behind naturally occurring Lilliputian visions. It might even lead to new treatments for people suffering from the neurological condition, Domnauer said.
“Now we may understand where in the brain [halusinasi lilliputian] comes from,” said Dennis McKenna, an ethnopharmacologist and director of the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, a non-profit educational center in California, USA.
He agrees that understanding the fungal compounds could lead to the discovery of new drugs. “Are there any therapeutic applications? That remains to be seen,” he said.
Researchers estimate that less than 5% of the world’s fungal species have been described, so the findings also highlight the “enormous potential” for discoveries in the world’s dwindling ecosystems, said Giuliana Furci, a mycologist who focuses on research of the fungal kingdom.
“Fungi harbor enormous biochemical and pharmacological libraries that we are only just beginning to explore,” Furci said. “There are still many discoveries waiting to be discovered.”
See also the video ‘Germany researches fungus that can eat plastic waste’:
(eng/ita)
