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
DMT also commonly induces visions of elves (the so-called "machine elves"). Having tried DMT several times I can't say it's something that ever happened to me personally but lots of people report seeing elves on DMT.
For me, I was hit with a wall of metallic gems that warped into a wormhole that sucked me into the void. My body melted into a pool of crystalline jelly, and then a pair of indescribably massive entities with vortex heads that reached infinitely far into space stuck their hands into my liquified body and started rearranging my internals.
It was interesting. But I can't exactly recommend it because it felt like I stopped breathing and died.
I was before I tried. But I also remember that I didn’t remember that fact when I took it both times. The second time I was more primed for like organic shape.
The first time I saw something what one could call a giant machine elf I guess. Though the thought occurred to me much later. It looked a bit like Galactus from the Marvel comics, but friendly. I stood in the palm of its hand. The second time I saw a jester. I definitely didn’t think about seeing a jester beforehand as I wasn’t really aware that they could be a thing.
My first trip was very meaningful. My second trip was mostly interesting. In part because I kept one eye closed and the other open to see what would happen.
There's a matching eye/brain condition where older people very rapidly develop cataracts or other eye problems and they spontaneously start seeing little people everywhere.
Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.
J.R.R. Tolkien was on it a long time ago, now that you mention it. If you recall the opening chapters of the book, Merry and Pippin (referred to as 'little people' by various characters in the trilogy) are running away from an angry farmer... because they stole his mushrooms.
As an aside, they didn't make it home from their mushroom-stealing afternoon until the end of the the series.
LOTR is a sequel to the Hobbit however, so 'the first few chapters' are already after the lore previously written.
And in the hobbit there was already pipe smoking folks (although it's less emphasised probably because it was written as more as a book for children - or at least a child).
> LOTR is a sequel to the Hobbit however, so 'the first few chapters' are already after the lore previously written.
I mean sure, he wrote the lore sitting in trenches during a war, most of the universe was sorted out before he wrote _The Hobbit_ at all. I was, I thought clearly but I guess not, specifically referring to the Trilogy.
It's fun to imagine there might be ways to tailor the chemistry to create highly specific imaging and sensations. Probably limited to imagery we have evolved with, because that's what must be embedded in our fundamental brain structure, but intriguing nevertheless.
I wish there was a simple concept to explain this phenomenon: the appearance of widespread unified action (a "conspiracy" in the literal sense of the word), but only because the effects of doing X manifest themselves the same way in different places/people, often for biological reasons but more broadly for structural ones.
I guess you could call it something like, "system-limited emergence," in the sense that different systems can have similar outputs if they are structured the same way.
In other words, the idea is that differing groups of people don't see elves because they are all accessing some hidden reality full of elves, but rather because the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location.
This maybe seems obvious for mushrooms or other substances, but I think the same concept applies to other phenomena too: the spread of ideas, political actions, etc. Or maybe I've just been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.
When you realize that everything "we" see is common hallucination, then it will all make sense. The human mind creates the image of a tree, the eye just takes in the light. Change the eye or the mind and our hallucination changes.
So these mushrooms change the mind in a very specific way, but no more strange than putting on red tinted glasses.
Speaking as someone who has involuntary hallucinations, this is a reality taken for granted by most people. I have very different hallucinations when I am dep[ressed vs when I am manic. And you are on the right track in my opinion that "the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location."
Where in the brain do visual hallucinations happen? I remember hearing that we can crudely reconstruct images from live scans of the brain. Does that work with hallucinations?
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.
That is quite characteristically distinct to the “endogenous” appearance of other figures when using serotonergics, that almost certainly arise from intra CNS activity
It was interesting. But I can't exactly recommend it because it felt like I stopped breathing and died.
The first time I saw something what one could call a giant machine elf I guess. Though the thought occurred to me much later. It looked a bit like Galactus from the Marvel comics, but friendly. I stood in the palm of its hand. The second time I saw a jester. I definitely didn’t think about seeing a jester beforehand as I wasn’t really aware that they could be a thing.
My first trip was very meaningful. My second trip was mostly interesting. In part because I kept one eye closed and the other open to see what would happen.
>What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.
Usually their vision becomes blurry, but the tiny characters remain in perfect focus.
As an aside, they didn't make it home from their mushroom-stealing afternoon until the end of the the series.
And in the hobbit there was already pipe smoking folks (although it's less emphasised probably because it was written as more as a book for children - or at least a child).
I mean sure, he wrote the lore sitting in trenches during a war, most of the universe was sorted out before he wrote _The Hobbit_ at all. I was, I thought clearly but I guess not, specifically referring to the Trilogy.
I guess you could call it something like, "system-limited emergence," in the sense that different systems can have similar outputs if they are structured the same way.
In other words, the idea is that differing groups of people don't see elves because they are all accessing some hidden reality full of elves, but rather because the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location.
This maybe seems obvious for mushrooms or other substances, but I think the same concept applies to other phenomena too: the spread of ideas, political actions, etc. Or maybe I've just been watching too much Ghost in the Shell.
So these mushrooms change the mind in a very specific way, but no more strange than putting on red tinted glasses.
Speaking as someone who has involuntary hallucinations, this is a reality taken for granted by most people. I have very different hallucinations when I am dep[ressed vs when I am manic. And you are on the right track in my opinion that "the drug induces the same reaction in a human body, no matter its location."
More info about what metabolites may be involved.
I sent the Vice article to my girlfriend and she had a good question and wondered if the mice treated with it see even smaller little mice.