Scientists identify mushroom behind visions of tiny humans

Certain wild mushrooms can make people see dozens or even hundreds of tiny, colorful humans moving through the real world, walking around objects, climbing over surfaces and reacting to what is around them. The experience has been reported in places thousands of miles apart, and scientists have now identified a mushroom species behind it in two countries.

The visions have a name: Lilliputian hallucinations

The miniature figures are so consistent that the experience has its own label. Researchers call them Lilliputian hallucinations, after the tiny inhabitants of "Gulliver's Travels," who stand just 6 inches tall.

Three separate communities have described the same thing after eating local mushrooms:

• In Papua New Guinea, the mushrooms are known as "Nonda."
• In Yunnan, in southwest China, they are called "Jian shou qing."
• In the remote Northern Cordillera region of the Philippines, they are called "Sedesdem."

These mushrooms have an important place in local food traditions, and people eat them. The visions tend to appear when the mushrooms are not cooked thoroughly.

A chemical hunt that stalled for decades

The scientific trail starts in 1934, when Western researchers learned that people in Papua New Guinea sometimes had vivid visions of miniature humans after eating wild mushrooms. The effect became known as "mushroom madness."

During the 1950s and 1960s, anthropologists and mushroom specialists traveled to Papua New Guinea to investigate. Their work pointed to several possible species in the bolete family. Chemical testing, however, turned up nothing that could explain the visions. Samples were even examined by Albert Hofmann, the scientist who first isolated the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms and also discovered a famous laboratory-made hallucinogen. He could not identify an active ingredient either.

With no chemical explanation, some researchers began to doubt that the mushrooms were responsible at all. They suggested the visions came from cultural expectations instead. By the end of the 1960s, the investigation had largely stopped. It revived in the 1990s, when people in Yunnan reported similar hallucinations after eating bolete mushrooms, and researchers suspected a mushroom called Lanmaoa asiatica.

DNA points to one species

In 2024, Colin Domnauer, a doctoral student at the University of Utah, learned of similar experiences among an Indigenous community in the northern Philippines. That was the third independent report of wild mushrooms causing visions of tiny people.

Domnauer traveled to Yunnan and the Philippines, interviewed local residents and collected mushroom specimens. The fieldwork included the first scientific survey of fungi in the northern Philippines. He and Bryn Dentinger, a mycologist affiliated with the university and the Natural History Museum of Utah, then read the DNA of the collected mushrooms to work out what they were.

The results showed that the mushrooms called Jian shou qing in China and Sedesdem in the Philippines are both Lanmaoa asiatica. That was a surprise, because the species had been thought to grow only in China.

Dentinger also visited Papua New Guinea, where the mystery began, but unusually dry weather made it impossible to collect samples, so that mushroom remains unverified.

The team found no trace of psilocybin, the best-known hallucinogenic compound in mushrooms, or of any other known mind-altering substance. That suggests Lanmaoa asiatica may make a chemical that science has not described before. Identifying it could help researchers understand unusual visual experiences and how the brain builds our sense of reality. The findings were published in the journal Mycologia.