In 1934, Western scientists first heard reviews from Papua New Guinea of individuals hallucinating tiny people after consuming wild mushrooms, a the phenomenon they dubbed “mushroom insanity.”
Anthropologists and mycologists went to Papua New Guinea within the ’50s and ’60s, narrowing the wrongdoer to a couple species within the Boletaceae (bolete) household. They did some chemical analyses however couldn’t discover any psychoactive elements. They even despatched samples to Albert Hoffman, who first remoted psilocybin and found LSD, however even he couldn’t discover an lively compound.
Ultimately, they concluded that possibly these mushrooms weren’t bioactive in any respect—possibly this was all only a sociocultural phenomenon. So, analysis actually ended within the Sixties.
Many years later within the Nineties, there have been reviews from Yunnan in Southwest China of a really comparable phenomenon after folks ate bolete mushrooms. The species wasn’t clear, however mycologists steered that it may be L. asiatica, then a newly described mushroom.
In 2024, I heard comparable accounts from an Indigenous group within the Philippines’ distant Northern Cordillera area who had been consuming a wild mushroom known as “Sedesdem” that, in keeping with native data, sometimes precipitated visions of little folks. Often known as the “Nonda” in Papua New Guinea and “Jian shou qing” in Yunnan, it’s a culturally necessary edible mushroom that, if undercooked, produced the hallucinations.
That was the third impartial case linking wild mushroom to visions of little folks.
I went to Yunnan and the Philippines, spoke with locals and picked up L. asiatica and as many specimens within the Lanmaoa genus as I might discover for DNA sequencing. That was the primary scientific survey of Northern Philippine fungi that had each been achieved.
It seems that China’s Jian shou qing and the Philippine’s Sedesdem had been each L. asiatica—which was very stunning as a result of on the time, we thought L. asiatica solely occurred in China. Sadly, when Bryn Dentinger traveled to Papua New Guinea, unusually dry circumstances prevented us from amassing specimens for comparability.
Now, three utterly impartial cultures have reported the identical particular sort of hallucination, and two instances are attributed to the identical DNA-verified mushroom species. That signifies that these weird psychological results aren’t cultural manifestations or coincidences—they should have a shared underlying chemical and neurological foundation.
