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'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!
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.
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.
Mnestics are pharmaceuticals that allow agents to maintain awareness of threats that otherwise erase themselves from human memory. The drugs are used to combat antimemetic entities by enhancing memory and enabling users to perceive or recall information that self-erases.
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.
Machine elves as a specific is probably closer to a mass psychosis. Someone named them that at some point, then everybody talks about them, so everybody saw "machine elves" and future people interpret what they see that way because that's what they heard before they tripped.
Really, DMT trips kinda go like an acid trip but you've taken 100x times the dose and died in the process. Reality itself kind of dissolves away and you forget what you are frequently.
In that state, there's a lot going on, with a fair bit of synesthesia and trying to decipher exactly what's happening. Things breath in and out rapidly, but it feels like lifetimes.
Anyway, the "machine elves" aren't really elves... Or machines. Even on sub-breakthrough doses, you start seeing eyes and mouths in the spaces around you, you may even hear voices/singing - IME often a beckoning. Once you break through, those hallucinations have been ramped up and your brain is filling in so many gaps (at this point your eyes will have closed) they come across almost like deities that exist in between time and space. They don't have consistent forms; they speak in tongues / songs that you can sometimes "understand". They tend to be "neutral / neutral", so to speak.
It's profoundly difficult to explain, since language wasn't really designed to capture that state of mind and lacks the adjectives. But someone tried to make something relatable with "machine elves" at some point and it stuck because "yeah, that's weird enough to capture the essence of it".
Some people do take these experiences as more than what they are, though, and act like machine elves are "real" lore or that they are something that actually exists "beyond the veil" or whatever. And now that so many people learn about it well before tripping, they may be seeing more concretely "machine elves". But that's way more... Pedestrian(?) than what I experienced without that bias.
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?
I read about this before and did a some half-assed "research". My understanding is that this is much less fun than it sounds. It isn't people take this mushroom and see elves and have a good time. It is more that people eat this mushroom in food and when it isn't cooked properly, they get violently ill and also happen to see the same elves. So, it does seem consistent, but not something you could do safely recreationally.
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.
>That’s where researchers investigating “mushroom madness” ultimately dismissed the accounts as cultural myth after chemical tests turned up nothing. Makes sense since the species wasn’t formally described until 2015. [..] Domnauer visited Yunnan’s mushroom markets and asked vendors which of these mushrooms is the one that’s making people see little people? All the vendors said L. asiatica.
This is a surprisingly common research failure mode. Actually talking to people is important.
> Genetic testing confirmed its identity, and lab studies showed that extracts cause dramatic behavioral changes in mice
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.
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.
The overall field of visual paraperception is very interesting. You have Charles Bonnet Syndrome as described, and other really interesting phenomena like blindsight and complex visual agnosias, and then Anton-Babinski anosognosia where a patient IS blind but confabulates their visual field and maintains they can see!
I started reading into this from my interest in neuropsychiatry, but what is most interesting is that visual hallucinations are really quite rare in the schizophrenic population. Most visual hallucinations, it seems, have nothing to do with mental illness.
also, if you are blind from birth or go blind within a year of birth you won't develop schizophrenia. those folk are completely absent in the population.
I would speculate, that the mushroom triggers specifically the pattern-matching for people in the distance. And the center that triggers that motion tracking.
> The trip can last so long that it’s impractical as a recreational drug, which is why no culture seems to use the mushroom intentionally as a psychedelic. Not yet, at least.
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."
Your best bet is probably to attach a VCR, if you can find one; they generally have a tuner, and I think most TVs still usually have a component input and/or, in Europe, SCART.
I'd be a little surprised if anyone still makes a TV with an analog tuner.
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.
The elves are always there. The mushroom just lets us see them.
Humans are not supposed to know that yet. You'll get in trouble with management if you continue doing this.
Mnestics are pharmaceuticals that allow agents to maintain awareness of threats that otherwise erase themselves from human memory. The drugs are used to combat antimemetic entities by enhancing memory and enabling users to perceive or recall information that self-erases.
Finally a rational explanation.
You can also sign a contract with them so you are able to see them. It's all explained in the Hilda documentary series.
Occam's Razor ... it's the simplest explanation isn't it?
William of Ockham confirms
They Live!
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.
Curious what happens if you’ve never been introduced to the concept of elves.
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.
Machine elves as a specific is probably closer to a mass psychosis. Someone named them that at some point, then everybody talks about them, so everybody saw "machine elves" and future people interpret what they see that way because that's what they heard before they tripped.
Really, DMT trips kinda go like an acid trip but you've taken 100x times the dose and died in the process. Reality itself kind of dissolves away and you forget what you are frequently.
In that state, there's a lot going on, with a fair bit of synesthesia and trying to decipher exactly what's happening. Things breath in and out rapidly, but it feels like lifetimes.
Anyway, the "machine elves" aren't really elves... Or machines. Even on sub-breakthrough doses, you start seeing eyes and mouths in the spaces around you, you may even hear voices/singing - IME often a beckoning. Once you break through, those hallucinations have been ramped up and your brain is filling in so many gaps (at this point your eyes will have closed) they come across almost like deities that exist in between time and space. They don't have consistent forms; they speak in tongues / songs that you can sometimes "understand". They tend to be "neutral / neutral", so to speak.
It's profoundly difficult to explain, since language wasn't really designed to capture that state of mind and lacks the adjectives. But someone tried to make something relatable with "machine elves" at some point and it stuck because "yeah, that's weird enough to capture the essence of it".
Some people do take these experiences as more than what they are, though, and act like machine elves are "real" lore or that they are something that actually exists "beyond the veil" or whatever. And now that so many people learn about it well before tripping, they may be seeing more concretely "machine elves". But that's way more... Pedestrian(?) than what I experienced without that bias.
From the fine article:
>What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.
The GP is talking about DMT, not the mushroom mentioned in the article.
For my two cents, I asked what my friend was seeing and he said “tin foil”. No elves - quite disappointing - but he enjoyed it
The elusive tin foil elves, what a lucky find!
I was under the impression that the "machine elves" were very different from the tiny people described in this article.
Are they the ones that are claimed to be racist?
yeah, this was my first thought -- it must have DMT in it. but surely Vice, the biggest and best of the erowid-aura-scrapers, would know this?
The one time I tried it I saw the elves in the form of a living Persian carpet.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fsn3.70583
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.
Probably turtles.
yeah, it's probably turtles all the way.
Quite a light article. There are entire lives dedicated to finding out what is really real and what is just a perception of reality.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/not-imagining-it/
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717442
So they discovered Can-D from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch?
Now we just have to wait for a visitor from Proxima with more potent Chew-Z. The grim future is closer than we think...
I hallucinated gnomes after I took medicine they prescribed me at the hospital, following a bike accident.
Yeah it used to be common advice to not take any drink, food, or medicine prescribed by gnomes.
I need to learn how to construct sentences better :(
English isn’t your first language, right?
You’re doing fine, they’re just busting your balls, ha
That may have been a bad reaction. Ask your doctor is KDE is right for you!
I switched to xfce since, much better
Sounds like you may have been hallucinating to begin with.
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?
I read about this before and did a some half-assed "research". My understanding is that this is much less fun than it sounds. It isn't people take this mushroom and see elves and have a good time. It is more that people eat this mushroom in food and when it isn't cooked properly, they get violently ill and also happen to see the same elves. So, it does seem consistent, but not something you could do safely recreationally.
It'd be amusing to try to trace legends of "little people" to incidence of these particular mushrooms. Not sure how you'd do that though.
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.
Hobbits are between two and four feet tall.
I think the "little people" in the article are more fairy sized or smaller. The BBC article linked to at that article says they were seen on dishes.
>fairy sized
This isn't as helpful a unit of measure as you imagined when you wrote that, fyi.
Good point. I meant like Tinkerbell.
Legendary trip
>That’s where researchers investigating “mushroom madness” ultimately dismissed the accounts as cultural myth after chemical tests turned up nothing. Makes sense since the species wasn’t formally described until 2015. [..] Domnauer visited Yunnan’s mushroom markets and asked vendors which of these mushrooms is the one that’s making people see little people? All the vendors said L. asiatica.
This is a surprisingly common research failure mode. Actually talking to people is important.
> Genetic testing confirmed its identity, and lab studies showed that extracts cause dramatic behavioral changes in mice
Presumably, causing them to see little mice.
Is this where Smurfs (Smurves?) came from?
Not directly, but elves and gnomes already existed and were an inspiration, so wherever that comes from...
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/p/peyo.htm
Smii
Interesting paper that generalizes "Lilliputian Hallucinations" a little to other contexts:
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Lilliputian-Hallucinat...
There was a game called: "Little Computer People" [1].
I call those the... "Little Shrooms People".
[1] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People#/media/...
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.
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.
The overall field of visual paraperception is very interesting. You have Charles Bonnet Syndrome as described, and other really interesting phenomena like blindsight and complex visual agnosias, and then Anton-Babinski anosognosia where a patient IS blind but confabulates their visual field and maintains they can see!
I started reading into this from my interest in neuropsychiatry, but what is most interesting is that visual hallucinations are really quite rare in the schizophrenic population. Most visual hallucinations, it seems, have nothing to do with mental illness.
also, if you are blind from birth or go blind within a year of birth you won't develop schizophrenia. those folk are completely absent in the population.
Great point. I forgot about that one. It’s a very interesting observation and I’ve never been able to square it with my other reading into SCZ
Makes me wonder if there's some consortium of effects that just causes our very active face recognition system to start perceiving faces.
I would speculate, that the mushroom triggers specifically the pattern-matching for people in the distance. And the center that triggers that motion tracking.
> The trip can last so long that it’s impractical as a recreational drug, which is why no culture seems to use the mushroom intentionally as a psychedelic. Not yet, at least.
NOT YET
My theory about UFOs and aliens is that they're actually just fungal spores. Repeat abduction experiences are just a fungal infection.
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."
Yes, you've discovered archetypes. Go read Jung's Red Book, none of this is new.
Sort of but not really. I’m talking about actions, not why patterns appear in culture. I don’t really think “archetypes” quite captures the meaning.
More like Eigenvectors/-modes of the mind, which certain stimuli amplify into resonance
This article ended before it really got interesting. I was hoping it would actually go into the brain chemistry and controlled trials underway.
Turn on the TV and I tune to snow, the ask a room full of people who have just smoked marijuana what the collectively see.
How do you get snow on your TV these days? The last few televisions I've had show a blue screen when there's no signal.
Your best bet is probably to attach a VCR, if you can find one; they generally have a tuner, and I think most TVs still usually have a component input and/or, in Europe, SCART.
I'd be a little surprised if anyone still makes a TV with an analog tuner.
If any of you manage to get snow and have a smoke, let us all know how you go in the comments :)
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Drinkin outta cups
I still don't see any reference here to Terence McKenna and the "Machine Elves" very broadly experienced under DMT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna#Machine_elves
These reports were the first I ever heard of different people having a common experience during use of a psychedelic.
The reports of little people resulting from consumption of Lanmaoa asiatica mushrooms seem similar.
Just one web search result on the DMT "machine elf" subject:
https://www.iflscience.com/why-do-people-see-elves-and-other...
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