So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest species seemed to need their toxin (amanitin) so much that they picked it up through horizontal gene transfer. Why did just those ones need to be deadly? In addition to which we have these species that don't even make you sick, just make you trip out, a function which looks to have evolved three times over in different ways. What kind of half-assed evolutionary strategies are these? What do mushrooms want?
It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin.
But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the fruit of a (usually) much larger organism. Then you can start applying normal fruit rules. Some want to be eaten, or picked up and moved around. Some want to keep insects from infesting the fruit. Others don't give a damn and release spores into the wind or water.
Also remember that nicotine is an insecticide. Insects that nibble on tobacco die, which prevents infestation at scale. (Un?)fortunately it's also neuroactive in apes, so we farm incredible quantities of tobacco to extract its poisons.
There is no logic in evolution at large scales. Things happen, sometimes there's fourth order effects like some oddball internal hormone causing wild hallucinations in apes. It's all random optimization for small scale problems that ripple out to unintended large scale consequences.
It's not that suspicious- many molecules in nature are made from the same few precursors like cholesterol, amino acids, etc. and on top of that there's pressure for plants/fungi to evolve molecules similar to ones animals use in order to affect them.
The brain is a fiber network like the mycelium, likely the same genes (animals are related to mushrooms) and neurotransmitters are involved in its function.
0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin.
1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.
So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"
While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense.
Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.
He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward.
Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to have any effect on your survival, because for instance none of your predators can see blue any better than they can see what every color your mate is, then there will continue to be blue babies at some rate. And if you or your mate have other genes that do boost your survivability, then there will be a lot of blue babies. But not on the merits of being blue. However the animals involved may just decide to involve blueness in their mate selection criteria. Because correlation.
Then many generations later, if your habitat changes, or your range expands, maybe blue fur protects more or less well against UV light, or moss growing in your fur, or some new predator. Now the selection works more like people think it works. But it’s been sitting there as genetic noise for perhaps centuries or eons, waiting for a complementary gene or environmental change to create a forcing function.
I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))
The fly agaric, is very poisonous and has a very distinctive red with white dots pattern to warn about its poison. Unfortunately, that pattern looks so pretty that disney and ninetendo decided to use it as their generic mushroom coloring. So, if you are hiking with your kids, and they see a pretty mushroom just like in cartoons, don't let them touch it.
If there are enough poisonous mushrooms, it is possible that most animals decide to leave mushrooms alone regardless of distinctive coloring. That seems to be the case because mushrooms tend not to be bitten by large animals, at least when i go mushrooming. If that happens, it is possible that other mushrooms do not develop poison but rather freeload on the poison of other mushrooms.
Thus, one may guess, that first distinctive poisonous mushrooms like the fly agaric developed, then most animals large enough to eat them developed an instinct to avoid all mushrooms, and then the non-poisonous freeloading mushrooms developed.
There are some psychedelic mushrooms in the amazon that use their psychedelic effect to zombify ants and force them to spread the mushrooms spores. That is really disturbing, find a youtube video of it if you feel like having some nightmares.
Furthermore it should be noted that the poison or the psychedelic effect may not even be relevant for evolution. The poisonous or psychedelic compound may be produced for completely different purpose or as a byproduct of the production of another useful compound.
>Thus, one may guess, that first distinctive poisonous mushrooms like the fly agaric developed, then most animals large enough to eat them developed an instinct to avoid all mushrooms, and then the non-poisonous freeloading mushrooms developed.
Just wanted to note that these phenomena are important enough in the study of mimicry in biology to have earned their own names:
Müllerian mimicry is when two species who are similarly well defended (foul tasting, toxic or otherwise noxious to eat) converge in appearance to mimic each other's honest warning signals.
Batesian mimicry is when a harmless or palatable species evolves to mimic a harmful, toxic, or otherwise defended species.
There are plenty of poisonous plants that large animals e.g. farm animals will happily eat and die. Yew, water hemlock etc. are notorious livestock killers.
According to a farmer friend of mine, sheep are also absolutely crazy about hedgehog mushrooms (hydnum repandum), which is not poisonous, but it suggests that they don't shun mushrooms.
Many good answers, but I'll add another angle I don't see any replies covering, which is that being poisonous/toxic is expensive. We humans lead charmed lives by the standards of the biosphere, where we get obese, and even before we got obese, many of us had unbelievable access to nutrients and energy. The steady state of the ecosystem is a war where every calorie must be spent carefully. This is particularly clear in the bacterial world but it progresses up to macroscopic plant life as well. Producing poisons is energy you could be using to grow or reproduce. Some poisons require additional care because they're still poisonous to the producer, it's just that the producer spends additional resources on containing the poison so it doesn't affect them.
There is a constant, low-level evolutionary impetus to stop spending any calorie that doesn't need to be spent, which would generally include the production of poisons of any kind. This low-level impetus is clearly something that can be overcome in many situations, but it is nevertheless always there, always the "temptation" to stop spending so much on poisons and redirect it to growth or reproduction. Over time it's a winning play quite often.
I've watched a documentary on mushrooms. Their posion is not a defense mechanism in most (all? don't remember) cases. It is just a consequence of the fact that mushrooms need to dump the excess Nitrogen somewhere, and that is related to the fact that most posionous mushrooms are those who thrive in Nitrogen-rich environments, like a leaf forest floor. And unfortunately for us, Nitrogen is a component for many creative biologically active substances.
FWIW, human is the best mushroom's friend, when you cut it and carry around you seed tons of spores, so as a sibling comment said, mushrooms would not need to develop anti-human defenses. It's just that some of them got (un)lucky when played the chemical roulette while trying to figure out how to get rid of Nitrogen waste.
Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through.
Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to spread.
Other mushrooms developed toxins to protect their fruiting bodies - often the biggest threat isn't larger animals, but insects. Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains. Other toxin mechanisms happen to be deadly to both insects and humans.
As proof of this evolutionary arms race, there are fruit flies that have developed resistance to amatoxins.
It may be worth mentioning, for anyone who didn't know this already; that the fruiting body, which is what your normally see, isn't most of the mushroom. The rest of it is in the ground, or in something else like a dead log or live tree. So the organism can afford the fruiting body to be eaten, if it serves the purpose of spreading spores.
Insects have the some of the same neurotransmitters as mammals, but they can be relaying different things. For example, dopamine is not used for reward learning, but for aversion learning and pain.
Plants want to be eaten only by big animals that take them on long and random walks and then die far away from where they are picked up to fertilize the seed.
Which also explains the talking Ameglian Major Cow on the menu at Milliways, in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: when you confuse evolutionary outcomes with intent, you end up with livestock enthusiastically volunteering for dinner.
Sure, many things evolved to be less edible. But humans themselves are hunter-gatherer omnivores - who evolved to be very good at eating a lot of very different things. There are adaptations in play on both ends.
There are, in fact, many countermeasures that would deter other animals, but fail to deter humans. In part due to some liver adaptations, in part due to sheer body mass, and in part due to human-specific tricks like using heat to cook food.
If your countermeasures just so happen to get denaturated by being heated to 75C, good luck getting humans with them. It's why a lot of grains or legumes are edible once cooked but inedible raw. The same is true for many "mildly poisonous" mushrooms - they lose their toxicity if cooked properly.
Those countermeasures don't have to be lethal to deter consumption! If something causes pain, diarrhea or indigestion, or some weirder effects, or just can't be spotted or reached easily, that can work well enough. So the evolutionary pressure to always go for highly lethal defenses isn't there. It's just one pathway to take, out of many, and evolution will roll with whatever happens to work best at the moment.
Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to a lot of things. So you get all of those weird situations - where sometimes, humans just blast through natural defenses without even realizing they're there, and sometimes, the defenses work but don't work very well because they evolved to counter something that's not a human, and sometimes, the defenses don't exist at all because the plant's environment never pressured it to deter consumption by large mammals at all.
And with the level of control humans attained over nature now? The ongoing selection pressure is often shaped less like "how to deter humans" and more like "how to attract humans", because humans will go out of their way to preserve and spread things they happen to like.
> And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse".
Some of the poisonous ones even taste really good, and don't start making you sick for a day or two (and then you die horribly). You hear about it from time to time, where people have the best dinner of their life and then are dead.
You're likely referring to the death cap (Amanita phalloides), which is reportedly quite tasty. But there's also a mushroom that's both deadly poisonous and a sought-after, commercially sold delicacy, the only difference being the method of preparation:
Although recent research suggests that some poison remains even after careful preparation, and that consumption may even be linked to ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).
"one mushroom species in five is poisonous"? 20% ??? That seems like a crazy high estimate to me, at least if you mean deadly poisonous to humans. In the USA there are only a few species of amanita, galerina, a few of the hundreds of species of cortinarius, maybe some gyromitra and a handful of others I can think of that will kill you. Among the many thousands of mushroom species in the USA, there are only a few dozen known deadly poisonous ones. It's a really tiny percentage. Of course that doesn't mean that the others are edible, just not gonna kill you...
Seems clear to me that poisonous != deadly poisonous by GPs - as they stated, many of the poisonous mushrooms have mild side effects, like “makes a hangover worse.” So 20% is definitely high for deadly poisonous, but not for inedible/mildly poisonous.
That’s also my thought. The seem to be inside some type of evolutionary gray area or dead-end, where mutations in the edibility axis do not seem to matter much for the survival of the specifies. So we end up getting species of all extremes: extremely poisonous, highly valuable for coursing, trippy, non-trippy, mildly poisonous, etc.
Metastatic cancer where our organs and cells grow every direction forever until resources expire is extremely counterproductive and doesn’t matter for the survival of our species because it usually occurs after reproductive age and the reproduction happened. Perpetuating the flawed genes in the next generation.
Its the same with mushrooms, the difference being that not only do the spores exist in high numbers, a mushroom getting eaten does nothing to the mycelium that spawns the mushroom
There are other bright red mushrooms (especially russulas) which are quite tasty. Russulas also can have many other bright colors. Conversely, many of the deadliest mushrooms where I live are plain and unassuming, at least in the color spectrum I can see.
Not exactly. You can eat that mushroom but you'll have indigestion problems. Squirrels around me love it though. You can also parboil it and you'll be fine, which it is actually quite tasty.
That mushroom (Amanita muscaria) is also related to the death cap (Amanita phalloides). Though the toxins are different in the death cap and will not be converted/removed by parboiling. Worse than that, you won't show symptoms for over a day.
The death cap is white or yellow, looking quite mundane. Especially compared to Muscaria.
They want the same thing as every other organism wants - maximal exploitation of a niche by a lineage. Each adaptation that survives overwhelmingly tends toward advantage in the exploitation of a niche - fending off predation, establishing control over resources, symbiotic support, parasitic drain, and a myriad other capabilities that are highly environment dependent.
Just look at antelope in north america - they evolved incredible speed and agility in order to outrun and evade megafauna predators, but there's nothing left nearly fast enough to be a threat to them. Environments can change, and leave an organism with features that are no longer necessary or even beneficial in terms of overall quality of life and energy efficiency. The slightest noise can disturb a herd of antelope into bolting as if there were prairie lions or sabertooth tigers on the prowl. They don't need to be hypervigilant in the same way, and it burns a lot of calories to move the way they do, so whitetail deer and other slower species that aren't quite as reactive or fast are better at exploiting the ecosystem as it is.
With mushrooms that have mysterious chemistry, there will be a lot of those sorts of vestigial features. Extinct species of insects and animals and plants will have been the target of specific features, or they might end up in novel environments where other features are particularly suitable, but some become completely counterproductive in practice.
As far as psilocybe mushrooms go, in lower quantities, they actually provide a cognitive advantage sufficient to make a symbiotic relationship plausible between mammals and the mushrooms, albeit indirect. Animals under low levels of psilocybin influence have better spatial perception, can better spot movement in low light conditions, and there's a slight reduction in the neural influence of trauma inspired networks. Large quantities can be beneficial in a number of abstract ways. Any animal that sought those mushrooms out could thereby gain adaptive advantage over competitors that didn't partake.
Having an extremely toxic substance might be useful for killing large organisms and their decomposition either feeding the fungi directly, or feeding the organisms beneficial to the fungi. This can be plants, other fungi, or the feces of scavengers. Horizontal transfer might occur if there's an initial beneficial relationship, animals like the smell and taste of a thing, and then the fungi picks up the killing poison, and the consequences are sufficiently beneficial to outbreed the safe ones.
If too many become deadly, animals get killed off, and the non-deadly ones tend to gain the upper ground, since they aren't spending any resources on producing any poisons. Where there's a balance of intermittent similar but poisonous mushrooms, they take down enough animals to optimize their niche.
There are dozens of such indirect webs of influences and consequences that spread from seemingly simple adaptations, and it's amazing that things seem so balanced and stable as they do. It's a constant arms race of attacks and temptations and strategies.
Some are saying: "Don't come anywhere near me". Others are are saying: "Take a little, I'll show you a good time. Take too much... I will make you end your own life."
The Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom ) talks about effects lasting for days, even in animal studies. Some of the historical records claimed effects lasting even longer, from months to years, though this sounds like triggered psychosis.
So perhaps not very recreational as might be assumed given the topic.
Incredible! A mushroom that bruises blue, but the visions are seemingly unlike traditional tryptamines, and there's no psilocybin found in the mushroom. Also no muscimol present (the thing in Fly Agaric, the 'other' type of hallucinogenic mushroom compound) yet there's definitely a consistent syndrome of hallucinations if you eat it undercooked.
Could this mean we're on the brink of discovering an entirely new class of hallucinogens?
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China.
They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there.
It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info
xiǎo rén rén? Like “small people”? Okay, if the mushrooms are literally called little guy mushroom and you see little guys running around then surely this is an old discovery.
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals.
The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.
Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what
tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.
It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.
I’m sure there’s some boring neuro-chemical explanation for this, and I won’t doubt or deny the neuro-chemical explanation, but the fact that there’s a mushroom that consistently brings about hallucinations of tiny people is so bizarre that I kind of want to indulge in equally bizarre explanations. Maybe it’s not a hallucination and this mushroom simply allows us to see the tiny people all around us. Maybe mushrooms are intelligent and are intentionally making us hallucinate tiny people.
It’s a little bit crazy, I know, but it’s odd to me that evolutionary forces would produce a mushroom that makes you have some specific hallucinations, rather than simply make things swirl together or simply produce intense feelings of euphoria or dread. I mean, marijuana just gets you high and that’s that.
Perhaps human-like creatures are so common in drug hallucinations because we're human, social animals, creatures who are maximally interested in other humans. If you gave drugs to dogs then perhaps they'd see human-like things mixed with dog-like things. I assume crocodiles, solitary animals, would see nothing besides wounded fish or maybe sexy female crocodiles.
If I remember correctly, the properties mentioned in this document are well-known and commonly found in mushroom field guides or scientific literature written in the Chinese language.
I've been to Yunnan and have eaten that mushroom too (properly cooked!).
We can find closely related species to this one in the wild in Japan too, but documentation for those Lanmaoa species found outside China is currently lacking, I believe.
EDIT: Found the field guide I was thinking about on my shelf. It's "中国真菌志 牛肝菌科(III)" [1], which is only about boletes!
Reminds me of Lem's The Futurological Congress. Where drugs were speculated to be used in wars to make people imagine war machines. Much cheaper solution to make opponent imagine a bomber plane than actually to build enough of them...
- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.
- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
I like that coffee is clearly a drug, a mind-alterer. But it's mostly harmless so it's been boosted as a sort of society-wide mascot. Humans really love drugs.
It gets the visuals accurate, but the experience includes a lot of physical sensation that is very difficult to convey, e.g. the 'wind' that pushes you back and the discomfort of going into a chaotic dissociated state. You see those things but it feels very 'real'.
I can only speak for medically-administered intravenous Ketamine, but I would describe it as like relatively effortlessly floating inside of the non-physical space inside of you and meeting yourself in metaphor, all the while completely aware. The biggest risk seemed to be temporarily becoming a relatively inanimate part of the infrastructure there, and even that was a sort of pleasant and satisfying state.
Lilliputian hallucinations are also common in mental illnesses with hallucinations. Definitely some kind of physical foundation for it in the human brain.
The next step should be to send enthusiasts there, get samples of this mushroom from that market, and introduce it to the underground for personal research. That’s normally what happens when something interesting is discovered.
For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.
So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was growing what they thought was natalensis for many years, until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science. At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano). I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of thing.
The issue is lanmaoa asiatica is ectomycorrhizal, meaning it grows exclusively on the roots of certain plant species in a symbiotic relationship. This is not like TTBVI or p. ochraceocentrata (misclassified as p. natalensis until recently) where amateurs can produce grain spawn with relative ease. Cultivation would involve planting or having access to the correct host species (Yunnan pine) which is a prohibitive barrier for most.
It's also not yet known if the active compound can survive dehydration like psilocybin. If not, it would mean even experiencing l. asiatica will be very difficult to impossible for enthusiasts not residing in its native region.
I feel like the natural test to do is: do experiments, and see if different people see the same little people doing the same things. That would move the observations from subjective to objective perspective.
Testing the theory of whether psychedelics are just inside our heads or whether our consciousness travels somewhere objectively really is why this Tales From The Trip video is my favorite videos. Both men see the same blue woman which is very interesting!
https://youtu.be/P_34oNWmNsc?si=_k2CG5b-TVuDaFvM
Yes, this was a common phrase in early psychedelic and other drug experience sharing forums. Like a verbal talisman people believe kept them from incriminating themselves. I haven't thought about it in years. Delightful.
In some online drug forums it was believed that if you used SWIM instead of I for all of your posts, the government was powerless to use any of the posts against you. You can still find threads on forums where everyone is saying SWIM did this and SWIM experienced that as if they have discovered a loophole to protect themselves from the law.
It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days of the internet that had big warning banners declaring the law enforcement was not allowed to connect.
Lived in Yunnan for over a decade, primarily as a vegetarian. Mushrooms there are indeed many and varied and quite tasty. Many poisonings annually but the government are pretty good at helping people to ID with warning posters. Personally ate many mushrooms that looked like this and never had hallucinations. Did have some others which made me feel a little ill, however. I suspect locals are unduly relaxed about types science would avoid due to hepatoxicity.
While occasionally FOAFs would get hallucinogenic effects from dining, I don't recall explicitly hearing of anyone seeing little people, or hearing the term he details in this writing. As such, I wonder where this guy gets his info from. Certainly, most Yunnanese would describe these mushrooms as 牛肝菌 ("bolete") and more specific Chinese common names for similar reddish species would include 桃红牛肝菌 ("peach-colored bolete"). As a general type, they are very common in markets across much of Yunnan.
Given the claims, the clearly infrequent effects, and the personal experience I can trust, I would conclude with three theories: perhaps either the compounds are rapidly degraded when non-fresh, safely broken down when cooking (traditionally these mushrooms are cut thinly before sauteeing or boiling in hotpot), or there are one or two "look alike" species which are more rarely found and contain additional compounds which are responsible for the occasional effects.
Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...
My guess would be there is probably some contamination with something ergot-like going on. Long-lasting but maybe hard to detect because such a small amount is needed for effect that it's easy to miss.
According to a voluminous illustrated tome I acquired during my extended stay, Yunnan has at least seven species of native psilocybe. Like nearby areas along the Himalayas, cannabis and opium are endemic and widely utilized in traditional cultures of the area. Heroin processed in Myanmar became a problem in rural Yunnan the early 2000s and present-era government shut it down with a heavy-handed campaign around 15 years ago. These days it's probably trans-shipped more than locally consumed.
Spinach too is mildly toxic because of its oxalate content yet we eat it all the time. Some of those toxic saponins even have certain health benefits. There are plenty other examples of toxic foods we regularly consume: legumes contain deadly saponins, beets contain oxalates, and potatoes contain glycoalkaloids
From what I read Suillellus luridus (见手青) is completely fine when cooked
>Terence had symbolically left a single mushroom standing in the middle of the hut. As they sat there, for a fleeting moment Terence saw “not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth, lustrous and alive, blue and tan and dazzling white.” Dennis saw the exact same image and concluded the experiment had been a success. Terence was not convinced.
I saw this in a dream too; but I remember descending uber fast from space to home, as if I were in a amusement ride, that one where you are dropped at high speeds from a fair height, but with far more vertigo. Also, I was in space in some kind of a capsule before the jump.
So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest species seemed to need their toxin (amanitin) so much that they picked it up through horizontal gene transfer. Why did just those ones need to be deadly? In addition to which we have these species that don't even make you sick, just make you trip out, a function which looks to have evolved three times over in different ways. What kind of half-assed evolutionary strategies are these? What do mushrooms want?
It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin.
But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the fruit of a (usually) much larger organism. Then you can start applying normal fruit rules. Some want to be eaten, or picked up and moved around. Some want to keep insects from infesting the fruit. Others don't give a damn and release spores into the wind or water.
Also remember that nicotine is an insecticide. Insects that nibble on tobacco die, which prevents infestation at scale. (Un?)fortunately it's also neuroactive in apes, so we farm incredible quantities of tobacco to extract its poisons.
There is no logic in evolution at large scales. Things happen, sometimes there's fourth order effects like some oddball internal hormone causing wild hallucinations in apes. It's all random optimization for small scale problems that ripple out to unintended large scale consequences.
BTW, Caffeine is also a naturally occurring insecticide, yet humans tend to repurpose and hack things.
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It's not that suspicious- many molecules in nature are made from the same few precursors like cholesterol, amino acids, etc. and on top of that there's pressure for plants/fungi to evolve molecules similar to ones animals use in order to affect them.
The brain is a fiber network like the mycelium, likely the same genes (animals are related to mushrooms) and neurotransmitters are involved in its function.
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Two things:
0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or even be sought after for other reasons, like capsaicin.
1) You're succumbing to the usual evolution fallacy. Evolution doesn't want anything more than 1 and 1 want to be 2. It's just a process, and sometimes (hell maybe even often) it doesn't work in a linear fashion. Lots of "X steps back, Y steps forward", and oftentimes each of those steps can take anything from decades to centuries or more to make, and by the time it happens what was pressuring that change is gone.
So many people, even when they obviously know better, like to think of evolution as intelligent. It's obviously not. But every time someone says stuff like this, it reinforces the fallacy and then we get people saying things like "if evolution is real, why come $insane_argument_against_evolution?"
While your objection is technically correct it can still be useful (ie simple, straightforward, etc) to phrase things in terms of a goal. Since a goal (pursued by an intelligent being) and optimization pressure (a property of a blind process) are approximately the same thing in the end. In other words, Anthropomorphization can be useful despite not being true in a literal sense.
Certainly this can be misleading to the layman. The term "observer" in quantum mechanics suffers similarly.
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If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.
He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
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Survival of the fittest is also a wrong way to think about evolution that leads many people to make assumptions that are backward.
Selection doesn’t pick winners, it picks losers. But bad luck also picks losers, and good luck pick winners, so things with small negative or positive effects can be swamped, and anything neutral has no pressure to be phased out at all. So if being born with blue hair turns out not to have any effect on your survival, because for instance none of your predators can see blue any better than they can see what every color your mate is, then there will continue to be blue babies at some rate. And if you or your mate have other genes that do boost your survivability, then there will be a lot of blue babies. But not on the merits of being blue. However the animals involved may just decide to involve blueness in their mate selection criteria. Because correlation.
Then many generations later, if your habitat changes, or your range expands, maybe blue fur protects more or less well against UV light, or moss growing in your fur, or some new predator. Now the selection works more like people think it works. But it’s been sitting there as genetic noise for perhaps centuries or eons, waiting for a complementary gene or environmental change to create a forcing function.
0) What do humans have to do with it? We're not the only animals that eat mushrooms.
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I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
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> $insane_argument_against_evolution
That looks like Perl variable syntax. Arguably the most mushroom like programming language.
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> like to think of evolution as intelligent
Evolution is more intelligent than people assume.
The selection is driven by each species choices, and the more intelligent the species, the more intelligence played a role in it.
Also way too biased to humans, the fact that they poison us could just be a biochemistry coincidence, the author is operating from a very human-centric POV (like you say in (0))
The fly agaric, is very poisonous and has a very distinctive red with white dots pattern to warn about its poison. Unfortunately, that pattern looks so pretty that disney and ninetendo decided to use it as their generic mushroom coloring. So, if you are hiking with your kids, and they see a pretty mushroom just like in cartoons, don't let them touch it.
If there are enough poisonous mushrooms, it is possible that most animals decide to leave mushrooms alone regardless of distinctive coloring. That seems to be the case because mushrooms tend not to be bitten by large animals, at least when i go mushrooming. If that happens, it is possible that other mushrooms do not develop poison but rather freeload on the poison of other mushrooms.
Thus, one may guess, that first distinctive poisonous mushrooms like the fly agaric developed, then most animals large enough to eat them developed an instinct to avoid all mushrooms, and then the non-poisonous freeloading mushrooms developed.
There are some psychedelic mushrooms in the amazon that use their psychedelic effect to zombify ants and force them to spread the mushrooms spores. That is really disturbing, find a youtube video of it if you feel like having some nightmares.
Furthermore it should be noted that the poison or the psychedelic effect may not even be relevant for evolution. The poisonous or psychedelic compound may be produced for completely different purpose or as a byproduct of the production of another useful compound.
>Thus, one may guess, that first distinctive poisonous mushrooms like the fly agaric developed, then most animals large enough to eat them developed an instinct to avoid all mushrooms, and then the non-poisonous freeloading mushrooms developed.
Just wanted to note that these phenomena are important enough in the study of mimicry in biology to have earned their own names:
Müllerian mimicry is when two species who are similarly well defended (foul tasting, toxic or otherwise noxious to eat) converge in appearance to mimic each other's honest warning signals.
Batesian mimicry is when a harmless or palatable species evolves to mimic a harmful, toxic, or otherwise defended species.
There are plenty of poisonous plants that large animals e.g. farm animals will happily eat and die. Yew, water hemlock etc. are notorious livestock killers.
According to a farmer friend of mine, sheep are also absolutely crazy about hedgehog mushrooms (hydnum repandum), which is not poisonous, but it suggests that they don't shun mushrooms.
Many good answers, but I'll add another angle I don't see any replies covering, which is that being poisonous/toxic is expensive. We humans lead charmed lives by the standards of the biosphere, where we get obese, and even before we got obese, many of us had unbelievable access to nutrients and energy. The steady state of the ecosystem is a war where every calorie must be spent carefully. This is particularly clear in the bacterial world but it progresses up to macroscopic plant life as well. Producing poisons is energy you could be using to grow or reproduce. Some poisons require additional care because they're still poisonous to the producer, it's just that the producer spends additional resources on containing the poison so it doesn't affect them.
There is a constant, low-level evolutionary impetus to stop spending any calorie that doesn't need to be spent, which would generally include the production of poisons of any kind. This low-level impetus is clearly something that can be overcome in many situations, but it is nevertheless always there, always the "temptation" to stop spending so much on poisons and redirect it to growth or reproduction. Over time it's a winning play quite often.
I've watched a documentary on mushrooms. Their posion is not a defense mechanism in most (all? don't remember) cases. It is just a consequence of the fact that mushrooms need to dump the excess Nitrogen somewhere, and that is related to the fact that most posionous mushrooms are those who thrive in Nitrogen-rich environments, like a leaf forest floor. And unfortunately for us, Nitrogen is a component for many creative biologically active substances. FWIW, human is the best mushroom's friend, when you cut it and carry around you seed tons of spores, so as a sibling comment said, mushrooms would not need to develop anti-human defenses. It's just that some of them got (un)lucky when played the chemical roulette while trying to figure out how to get rid of Nitrogen waste.
Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through.
Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to spread.
Other mushrooms developed toxins to protect their fruiting bodies - often the biggest threat isn't larger animals, but insects. Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains. Other toxin mechanisms happen to be deadly to both insects and humans.
As proof of this evolutionary arms race, there are fruit flies that have developed resistance to amatoxins.
It may be worth mentioning, for anyone who didn't know this already; that the fruiting body, which is what your normally see, isn't most of the mushroom. The rest of it is in the ground, or in something else like a dead log or live tree. So the organism can afford the fruiting body to be eaten, if it serves the purpose of spreading spores.
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Insects have the some of the same neurotransmitters as mammals, but they can be relaying different things. For example, dopamine is not used for reward learning, but for aversion learning and pain.
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> Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic trips to our brains.
True for coffee as well (if you substitute psychedelic with a more appropriate word).
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Plants want to be eaten only by big animals that take them on long and random walks and then die far away from where they are picked up to fertilize the seed.
Which also explains the talking Ameglian Major Cow on the menu at Milliways, in Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: when you confuse evolutionary outcomes with intent, you end up with livestock enthusiastically volunteering for dinner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAF35dekiAY
Natural selection cuts both ways.
Sure, many things evolved to be less edible. But humans themselves are hunter-gatherer omnivores - who evolved to be very good at eating a lot of very different things. There are adaptations in play on both ends.
There are, in fact, many countermeasures that would deter other animals, but fail to deter humans. In part due to some liver adaptations, in part due to sheer body mass, and in part due to human-specific tricks like using heat to cook food.
If your countermeasures just so happen to get denaturated by being heated to 75C, good luck getting humans with them. It's why a lot of grains or legumes are edible once cooked but inedible raw. The same is true for many "mildly poisonous" mushrooms - they lose their toxicity if cooked properly.
Those countermeasures don't have to be lethal to deter consumption! If something causes pain, diarrhea or indigestion, or some weirder effects, or just can't be spotted or reached easily, that can work well enough. So the evolutionary pressure to always go for highly lethal defenses isn't there. It's just one pathway to take, out of many, and evolution will roll with whatever happens to work best at the moment.
Human takeover of the biosphere is a recent event too, and humans are still an out-of-distribution threat to a lot of things. So you get all of those weird situations - where sometimes, humans just blast through natural defenses without even realizing they're there, and sometimes, the defenses work but don't work very well because they evolved to counter something that's not a human, and sometimes, the defenses don't exist at all because the plant's environment never pressured it to deter consumption by large mammals at all.
And with the level of control humans attained over nature now? The ongoing selection pressure is often shaped less like "how to deter humans" and more like "how to attract humans", because humans will go out of their way to preserve and spread things they happen to like.
> And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse".
Some of the poisonous ones even taste really good, and don't start making you sick for a day or two (and then you die horribly). You hear about it from time to time, where people have the best dinner of their life and then are dead.
You're likely referring to the death cap (Amanita phalloides), which is reportedly quite tasty. But there's also a mushroom that's both deadly poisonous and a sought-after, commercially sold delicacy, the only difference being the method of preparation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyromitra_esculenta
Although recent research suggests that some poison remains even after careful preparation, and that consumption may even be linked to ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).
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> What do mushrooms want?
I think it's a way of mushrooms saying "We don't think of you at all."
"one mushroom species in five is poisonous"? 20% ??? That seems like a crazy high estimate to me, at least if you mean deadly poisonous to humans. In the USA there are only a few species of amanita, galerina, a few of the hundreds of species of cortinarius, maybe some gyromitra and a handful of others I can think of that will kill you. Among the many thousands of mushroom species in the USA, there are only a few dozen known deadly poisonous ones. It's a really tiny percentage. Of course that doesn't mean that the others are edible, just not gonna kill you...
Seems clear to me that poisonous != deadly poisonous by GPs - as they stated, many of the poisonous mushrooms have mild side effects, like “makes a hangover worse.” So 20% is definitely high for deadly poisonous, but not for inedible/mildly poisonous.
That’s also my thought. The seem to be inside some type of evolutionary gray area or dead-end, where mutations in the edibility axis do not seem to matter much for the survival of the specifies. So we end up getting species of all extremes: extremely poisonous, highly valuable for coursing, trippy, non-trippy, mildly poisonous, etc.
Metastatic cancer where our organs and cells grow every direction forever until resources expire is extremely counterproductive and doesn’t matter for the survival of our species because it usually occurs after reproductive age and the reproduction happened. Perpetuating the flawed genes in the next generation.
Its the same with mushrooms, the difference being that not only do the spores exist in high numbers, a mushroom getting eaten does nothing to the mycelium that spawns the mushroom
Fruit bodies are reproductive organs, spores can survive digestion, and there are plenty of species that use animal waste as a substrate.
The same logic of hard seeds applies to spores.
I think of those "genetic algorithm car thing" simulations that run in a browser.
weird stuff survives.
and good stuff crashes and burns sometimes.
I dig your style, you sound like my inner monologue :D
A mushroom doesn't produce seeds, it produces spores.
If you pick a mushroom the spores use you, your clothes, your pets, your horses as vectors for spreading.
Amanita Muscaria seems like it does use colour as a warning signal - it's bright red.
There are other bright red mushrooms (especially russulas) which are quite tasty. Russulas also can have many other bright colors. Conversely, many of the deadliest mushrooms where I live are plain and unassuming, at least in the color spectrum I can see.
Not exactly. You can eat that mushroom but you'll have indigestion problems. Squirrels around me love it though. You can also parboil it and you'll be fine, which it is actually quite tasty.
That mushroom (Amanita muscaria) is also related to the death cap (Amanita phalloides). Though the toxins are different in the death cap and will not be converted/removed by parboiling. Worse than that, you won't show symptoms for over a day.
The death cap is white or yellow, looking quite mundane. Especially compared to Muscaria.
I appreciate your thirst for knowledge
They want the same thing as every other organism wants - maximal exploitation of a niche by a lineage. Each adaptation that survives overwhelmingly tends toward advantage in the exploitation of a niche - fending off predation, establishing control over resources, symbiotic support, parasitic drain, and a myriad other capabilities that are highly environment dependent.
Just look at antelope in north america - they evolved incredible speed and agility in order to outrun and evade megafauna predators, but there's nothing left nearly fast enough to be a threat to them. Environments can change, and leave an organism with features that are no longer necessary or even beneficial in terms of overall quality of life and energy efficiency. The slightest noise can disturb a herd of antelope into bolting as if there were prairie lions or sabertooth tigers on the prowl. They don't need to be hypervigilant in the same way, and it burns a lot of calories to move the way they do, so whitetail deer and other slower species that aren't quite as reactive or fast are better at exploiting the ecosystem as it is.
With mushrooms that have mysterious chemistry, there will be a lot of those sorts of vestigial features. Extinct species of insects and animals and plants will have been the target of specific features, or they might end up in novel environments where other features are particularly suitable, but some become completely counterproductive in practice.
As far as psilocybe mushrooms go, in lower quantities, they actually provide a cognitive advantage sufficient to make a symbiotic relationship plausible between mammals and the mushrooms, albeit indirect. Animals under low levels of psilocybin influence have better spatial perception, can better spot movement in low light conditions, and there's a slight reduction in the neural influence of trauma inspired networks. Large quantities can be beneficial in a number of abstract ways. Any animal that sought those mushrooms out could thereby gain adaptive advantage over competitors that didn't partake.
Having an extremely toxic substance might be useful for killing large organisms and their decomposition either feeding the fungi directly, or feeding the organisms beneficial to the fungi. This can be plants, other fungi, or the feces of scavengers. Horizontal transfer might occur if there's an initial beneficial relationship, animals like the smell and taste of a thing, and then the fungi picks up the killing poison, and the consequences are sufficiently beneficial to outbreed the safe ones.
If too many become deadly, animals get killed off, and the non-deadly ones tend to gain the upper ground, since they aren't spending any resources on producing any poisons. Where there's a balance of intermittent similar but poisonous mushrooms, they take down enough animals to optimize their niche.
There are dozens of such indirect webs of influences and consequences that spread from seemingly simple adaptations, and it's amazing that things seem so balanced and stable as they do. It's a constant arms race of attacks and temptations and strategies.
Some are saying: "Don't come anywhere near me". Others are are saying: "Take a little, I'll show you a good time. Take too much... I will make you end your own life."
what others are saying works for hotdogs too :)
The Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom ) talks about effects lasting for days, even in animal studies. Some of the historical records claimed effects lasting even longer, from months to years, though this sounds like triggered psychosis.
So perhaps not very recreational as might be assumed given the topic.
I wonder if Hamilton Morris has tried it yet. Hamilton, if you're reading let us know when you're going to let us hear about it :)
For anyone vaguely interested in psychoactive/psychedelic drugs, his books and videos are amazing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia
Sorry to use a reddit-ism, but "this should be at the top" - for safety.
"Days"?!? Hard pass. My experiments with shrooms in college was fun, but I couldn't deal with the 8-12 hours of hallucinating.
I guess you didn't touch LSD? I think 12 would be considered short :)
I knew personally someone whose trips usually took 48 hours. Unusually long, yes, and really exhausting.
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Damn. 8-12? For me the peak always lasted 2-3 hours and I was sober again after 7 hours.
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Incredible! A mushroom that bruises blue, but the visions are seemingly unlike traditional tryptamines, and there's no psilocybin found in the mushroom. Also no muscimol present (the thing in Fly Agaric, the 'other' type of hallucinogenic mushroom compound) yet there's definitely a consistent syndrome of hallucinations if you eat it undercooked.
Could this mean we're on the brink of discovering an entirely new class of hallucinogens?
From the Wikipedia
> In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations).
It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China.
They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there.
It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
xiǎo rén rén? Like “small people”? Okay, if the mushrooms are literally called little guy mushroom and you see little guys running around then surely this is an old discovery.
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> mushroom sized > blue when bruised > make see small fairy people
did they found the schtroumpf village ?
Is any of the variants called gargamel or a latin variant of it in the scientific name 'by accident'?
Aka the Smurfs in English.
These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals.
The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.
Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.
It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
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I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.
Or a new reality…
I’m sure there’s some boring neuro-chemical explanation for this, and I won’t doubt or deny the neuro-chemical explanation, but the fact that there’s a mushroom that consistently brings about hallucinations of tiny people is so bizarre that I kind of want to indulge in equally bizarre explanations. Maybe it’s not a hallucination and this mushroom simply allows us to see the tiny people all around us. Maybe mushrooms are intelligent and are intentionally making us hallucinate tiny people.
It’s a little bit crazy, I know, but it’s odd to me that evolutionary forces would produce a mushroom that makes you have some specific hallucinations, rather than simply make things swirl together or simply produce intense feelings of euphoria or dread. I mean, marijuana just gets you high and that’s that.
Perhaps human-like creatures are so common in drug hallucinations because we're human, social animals, creatures who are maximally interested in other humans. If you gave drugs to dogs then perhaps they'd see human-like things mixed with dog-like things. I assume crocodiles, solitary animals, would see nothing besides wounded fish or maybe sexy female crocodiles.
If I remember correctly, the properties mentioned in this document are well-known and commonly found in mushroom field guides or scientific literature written in the Chinese language.
I've been to Yunnan and have eaten that mushroom too (properly cooked!). We can find closely related species to this one in the wild in Japan too, but documentation for those Lanmaoa species found outside China is currently lacking, I believe.
EDIT: Found the field guide I was thinking about on my shelf. It's "中国真菌志 牛肝菌科(III)" [1], which is only about boletes!
[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%9C%9F%E8%...
Reminds me of Lem's The Futurological Congress. Where drugs were speculated to be used in wars to make people imagine war machines. Much cheaper solution to make opponent imagine a bomber plane than actually to build enough of them...
It is interesting how the hallucinations consistently represent tiny people/elves to the mushroom consumer, even across geography/culture.
I wonder what the brain is doing…
Could be that the mushroom just temporarily interferes with the substances the elves put in our water supply to keep us in the dark?
This is some real antimemetics stuff here :) (https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub if you're not familiar)
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exactly, the real question is what the elves are doing while they’re unseen.
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s/elves/government
I think it makes sense given the following:
- Your brain has been trained extensively to recognize faces / people. Even very small babies can do this.
- Your brain processes a large amount of mostly noise, and sometimes mislabels noise as objects, which trends towards face-like things (see: seeing faces in clouds, people in shadows etc.) Various classes of substances make this effect more noticeable (even stimulants, including caffeine)
- The jump from that to 'elves' is largely just cultures have some form of small magical person.
>Caffeine increases pareidolia
I like that coffee is clearly a drug, a mind-alterer. But it's mostly harmless so it's been boosted as a sort of society-wide mascot. Humans really love drugs.
Would be interesting if the chemical mechanism is related or similar to the DMT one that creates the "machine elves" experience.
Yeah, the machine elves rabbit hole is interesting for sure. I hope a lot more rigorous science delves into both mushrooms and DMT
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Since we're in the topic of elves and common hallucinations, I want to share these Salvia trip replicas that some say are extremely accurate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2IRKuS3sSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65XfIpJdlEY
It gets the visuals accurate, but the experience includes a lot of physical sensation that is very difficult to convey, e.g. the 'wind' that pushes you back and the discomfort of going into a chaotic dissociated state. You see those things but it feels very 'real'.
Wow, looks terrifying!
I can only speak for medically-administered intravenous Ketamine, but I would describe it as like relatively effortlessly floating inside of the non-physical space inside of you and meeting yourself in metaphor, all the while completely aware. The biggest risk seemed to be temporarily becoming a relatively inanimate part of the infrastructure there, and even that was a sort of pleasant and satisfying state.
Lilliputian hallucinations are also common in mental illnesses with hallucinations. Definitely some kind of physical foundation for it in the human brain.
I imagine it is something similar to pareidolia.
reminds me of trip reports from people trying Salvia Divinorum - there's even a name for these tiny people, 'Smelves'
Occam’s razor would say they’re real.
I wonder what lab rats would experience - lots of tiny rats ?
These mushrooms are small, these elves are far away.
You will get a kick out of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVUuoXAkuUg a Corridor Crew video on in-camera forced perspective effects.
The next step should be to send enthusiasts there, get samples of this mushroom from that market, and introduce it to the underground for personal research. That’s normally what happens when something interesting is discovered.
For example, members of a famous forum recently found, analyzed for alkaloid content, and re-cultivated a strain of Phalaris Aquatica because of its notable alkaloid content. Some other mushrooms became popular this way as well — for example, Psilocybe Natalensis, first found in Natal, Africa. Or the now famous Tamarind Tree British Virgin Islands (TTBVI) Panaeolus Cyanescens that’s widely cultivated at home.
So IMO it's not only scientists, but often enthusiasts who end up gifting these discoveries to everyone else!
The natalensis story is even stranger: the underground was growing what they thought was natalensis for many years, until someone finally did the sequencing and found out that what everyone had grown and loved was actually new to science. At this point last year, their "natalensis" received its proper scientific name, ochraceocentrata. The underground then had to go out and fetch some actual natalensis, which is only just now being introduced to those circles (eg by Yoshi Amano). I haven't yet tried true natalensis, but ochras are definitely distinguishable from the usual cubensis, experentially, and I'd heartily recommend them to anyone that likes that kind of thing.
The issue is lanmaoa asiatica is ectomycorrhizal, meaning it grows exclusively on the roots of certain plant species in a symbiotic relationship. This is not like TTBVI or p. ochraceocentrata (misclassified as p. natalensis until recently) where amateurs can produce grain spawn with relative ease. Cultivation would involve planting or having access to the correct host species (Yunnan pine) which is a prohibitive barrier for most.
It's also not yet known if the active compound can survive dehydration like psilocybin. If not, it would mean even experiencing l. asiatica will be very difficult to impossible for enthusiasts not residing in its native region.
Author flies around the world to find a shroom that makes reality feel like Super Mario and didn't even bite into one... lost opportunity
I feel like the natural test to do is: do experiments, and see if different people see the same little people doing the same things. That would move the observations from subjective to objective perspective.
Testing the theory of whether psychedelics are just inside our heads or whether our consciousness travels somewhere objectively really is why this Tales From The Trip video is my favorite videos. Both men see the same blue woman which is very interesting! https://youtu.be/P_34oNWmNsc?si=_k2CG5b-TVuDaFvM
Looks like the site is being hugged to death. Here's another instance of the article (I think).
https://attheu.utah.edu/science-technology/mushroom-causes-f...
Common Side Effects anyone?
SWIM would like to know how to get paid as (instead of paying to be) "an expert who explores new mushrooms".
Major in biology, do a grad program in medicinal chemistry, join a lab that already studies this.
(I know folks who read PiHKAL and thought "Hmm, this would be a nice ML training/prediction exercise")
Someone Who Isn't Me?
Yes, this was a common phrase in early psychedelic and other drug experience sharing forums. Like a verbal talisman people believe kept them from incriminating themselves. I haven't thought about it in years. Delightful.
In some online drug forums it was believed that if you used SWIM instead of I for all of your posts, the government was powerless to use any of the posts against you. You can still find threads on forums where everyone is saying SWIM did this and SWIM experienced that as if they have discovered a loophole to protect themselves from the law.
It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days of the internet that had big warning banners declaring the law enforcement was not allowed to connect.
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> Someone Who Isn't Me?
Funny, I saw “SWIM” and reasoned “Someone Who Is Me”, thinking “is not” would be represented as “Is Not” instead of the contraction. :)
Yeah - I was going to ask... for a friend
some breadcrumbs for your SWIM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Morris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia
I always feel like they should bring along an artist for the trip so we can get a visual depiction of what it was like
Ride my Llama
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMC3DjAFQEs
And a poet.
Exploring new mushrooms is more likely to end in agonizing death than piercing the veil of reality.
no, statistucally not.
but yeah, a warning is warranted.
I wish it were another dimension, or breaking through the Matrix. I never had the chance to experience such items but look forward to doing so.
When mice are given chemical extracts of Lanmaoa asiatica, their behavior shifts noticeably compared to controls.
Doesn't say how, for some reason. I presume they are shocked to see tiny mice, but I would like to know what behaviors they exhibited.
Are they seeing tiny mice...or are they seeing the same 2cm tall "people"?
Psilocybin always gives me fairytale like, animated and very vivid hallucinations. Would be curious how these differ.
Lived in Yunnan for over a decade, primarily as a vegetarian. Mushrooms there are indeed many and varied and quite tasty. Many poisonings annually but the government are pretty good at helping people to ID with warning posters. Personally ate many mushrooms that looked like this and never had hallucinations. Did have some others which made me feel a little ill, however. I suspect locals are unduly relaxed about types science would avoid due to hepatoxicity.
While occasionally FOAFs would get hallucinogenic effects from dining, I don't recall explicitly hearing of anyone seeing little people, or hearing the term he details in this writing. As such, I wonder where this guy gets his info from. Certainly, most Yunnanese would describe these mushrooms as 牛肝菌 ("bolete") and more specific Chinese common names for similar reddish species would include 桃红牛肝菌 ("peach-colored bolete"). As a general type, they are very common in markets across much of Yunnan.
Given the claims, the clearly infrequent effects, and the personal experience I can trust, I would conclude with three theories: perhaps either the compounds are rapidly degraded when non-fresh, safely broken down when cooking (traditionally these mushrooms are cut thinly before sauteeing or boiling in hotpot), or there are one or two "look alike" species which are more rarely found and contain additional compounds which are responsible for the occasional effects.
According to Wikipedia, the Yunnan mushrooms indeed have their hallucinogens broken down after cooking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
Good guess!
Although, the local hospital records imply that hallucinations can last for days or even months, so uh, probably not a great idea to go looking for them...
My guess would be there is probably some contamination with something ergot-like going on. Long-lasting but maybe hard to detect because such a small amount is needed for effect that it's easy to miss.
According to a voluminous illustrated tome I acquired during my extended stay, Yunnan has at least seven species of native psilocybe. Like nearby areas along the Himalayas, cannabis and opium are endemic and widely utilized in traditional cultures of the area. Heroin processed in Myanmar became a problem in rural Yunnan the early 2000s and present-era government shut it down with a heavy-handed campaign around 15 years ago. These days it's probably trans-shipped more than locally consumed.
It appears there are several blue staining boletes in the same genus that grow in the US. Seems like a fertile area for study.
I have a friend who gave up taking regular magic mushrooms because he always hallucinated tiny Power Rangers.
Giving up right when its getting good
Interesting. Did he find it boring, annoying, disturbing, or what?
Aparently 见手青 is mildly toxic yet commonly consumed in Yunan.
Spinach too is mildly toxic because of its oxalate content yet we eat it all the time. Some of those toxic saponins even have certain health benefits. There are plenty other examples of toxic foods we regularly consume: legumes contain deadly saponins, beets contain oxalates, and potatoes contain glycoalkaloids
From what I read Suillellus luridus (见手青) is completely fine when cooked
Meat is also toxic when eaten raw; that is not generally held to be a reason to avoid eating it cooked.
What toxins does raw meat contain? Or are you referring to bacteria contaminated raw meat?
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Experts
It's Elves all the way down.
I say it again, fungi and cephalopods are the closest things to aliens we have on this world.
That reminds me of Mckenna/Peter Meyer and the fractal time.
https://www.fractal-timewave.com/articles.php
You can get a free-libre Unix timewave generator there:
https://github.com/kl4yfd/timewave_z3r0
It's a bit pseudo-science but some Chinese wrote an article on the I-Ching and patterns and it can have a bit of truth on it.
https://vixra.org/abs/2409.0093 [ Chinese, use whatever tool you like to translate it]
I said this because both Mckenna and Peter did writtings about DMT and the experiences under it:
https://scribe.rip/illumination/terence-mckenna-explores-the...
>Terence had symbolically left a single mushroom standing in the middle of the hut. As they sat there, for a fleeting moment Terence saw “not a mature mushroom but a planet, the earth, lustrous and alive, blue and tan and dazzling white.” Dennis saw the exact same image and concluded the experiment had been a success. Terence was not convinced.
I saw this in a dream too; but I remember descending uber fast from space to home, as if I were in a amusement ride, that one where you are dropped at high speeds from a fair height, but with far more vertigo. Also, I was in space in some kind of a capsule before the jump.
McKenna also talked quite a bit about talking to little elves on DMT.
These could be leftovers from genetical, hereditary fears (and helpful feelings) against wild beasts since prehistoric times.
I was disappointed that the article doesn't contain pictures of these little people.
It does but the liliputians are invisible on photographs unless you’ve eaten the undercooked mushroom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cottingley_Fairies_1.jpg
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Easy, eat another well known species of uncooked mushrooms so that your camera is now able to eat the mushroom.
Hmm... having trouble getting that URL. Archive.org has a recent snapshot at https://web.archive.org/web/20251226204255/https://nhmu.utah...
No the site is just having its own "fairytale-like hallucinations"
https://archive.ph/CwDtf
Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20251226204255/https://nhmu.utah...
Hugged to death. Archived mirror: https://archive.is/CwDtf
Site seems to be overwhelmed rn. https://archive.vn/CwDtf
If used can we hallucinate and predict the HN news of tomorrow(especially any acquisition related news)?
yes,but you wont care.
Let's ban it before anyone finds out if it's useful
Just need a minority in America to associate it with
Do you lot ever get tired of saying stuff like this? It’s not 2016 anymore, there’s no need for it.
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