Comment by GuB-42
3 days ago
One thing from the article that isn't clear. Do people who see little people actually believe they are real, even when they know about the potential effect of these mushrooms?
This is a fundamental difference between psychedelics such as psilocybin and deliriants like datura. Usually, with psychedelics, you know that what you are seeing is not real, or at least, that it is not normal. With deliriants, even if you know exactly what you took and the effect it has, the crazy things you are seeing feel real and perfectly normal until the effect wears off.
What make me feel goes to the psychedelic side is that description talk about something wonderful, or at least worthy of attention. If it was a hallucination in its purest sense, the presence of little people would be no weirder than that of a cat or a dog.
But the fact that it is generally considered unpleasant and not used for recreational or spiritual purposes is more of a deliriant thing.
There is a similar effect related to Delirium Tremens, caused by extreme alcohol withdrawal. Apparently people across cultures report seeing the same "Hat Man" in their peripheral vision, who disappears when looked at directly, but everyone seems to report the same ominous feeling about him. Also there are reports of people seeing a bunch of spiders everywhere, when going through alcohol withdrawal.
The mind and body are always in sync somewhat, even when under great stress like that. Anticholinergics at high doses act almost mechanistically on the PNS to create the parasthesia/formication on/under one’s skin. I think the visual perception of the insects is in that case secondary to the tactile sensation.
That is quite characteristically distinct to the “endogenous” appearance of other figures when using serotonergics, that almost certainly arise from intra CNS activity
I wonder if people who have never seen or heard of hats will talk about a Hat Man.
I'd bet my money on no. To my understanding, those hallucinations are basically brain-level disturbances in perception, where the brain does its best to fill in ambiguous activity with known objects. So I guess if you've never seen hats (or men), your brain would just interpret the signal as something different.
Extreme tangent but interesting (to me): people in different cultures experience voice hallucinations differently. In the west, "hearing voices" is often frightening because the voices are hostile. In other cultures, the voices are friendly!
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
That's an interesting question, but the answer probably isn't worth the trauma you'd inflict on a child by intentionally raising them to be completely unaware of the existence of hats.
Those are also common hallucinations reported for recreational Benadryl dosages.
And extreme sleep deprivation.
I did a search for "Delirium Tremens hat man" and there were a couple of things about Benadryl and this post.
Hmm ok, I went down a youtube rabbit hole a while ago where people who experienced delirium tremens talked about it. But the sources online do seem to associate it more to benadryl and sleep deprivation, not sure if it's because extreme alcohol deprivation is less studied nowadays (I don't think any modern clinical study would allow someone to go cold turkey and possibly die just to confirm the existence of a hat man, but apparently these types of studies were done at the beginning of the last century)
There are plenty of things that are less strong effects that can still trick your mind to believe something that you know is not really true. Such as when you do the fake arm test. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1395356/ It feels real for the brain, even if you know that it's not your arm. I did a test and my brain believed that it's my arm, even if I of course, logically know my arm is not a rubber arm.
> There are plenty of things that are less strong effects that can still trick your mind to believe something that you know is not really true.
You mean like, religion?
Probably in some cases. Even if religions have been try to muddy the water to make it hard to say that something is absolutely false.