• nialv7@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    What if those little people are real and the mushroom just allows us to see them?

    • photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      21 hours ago

      Occam’s razor: are they real beings such that we can’t usually see them and they don’t interact with our universe in ways we can otherwise measure, or is it more likely that they’re hallucinations caused by a chemical that make our brains think funny thoughts?

      • nialv7@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        i think there’s an easy way to check. ask two people having this hallucination if what they are seeing is consistent with each other.

        • AndyMFK@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          18 hours ago

          These mushrooms produce pretty consistent results. From what I’ve heard, most people that eat them report seeing tiny men. Wayyy more consistent and specific of a hallucination then eating a standard cubensis mushroom.

          I’m not claiming there’s anything more than a hallucination going on here, but it is fascinating how specific and consistent the results are. Makes you wonder about the future of hallucinogens, perhaps one day we can synthesise specific trips, kind of like a total recall situation where you could choose what you want to experience

          • AxExRx@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            Sounds way more consistent than any halucinogen with a common theme that people see. Like DMT makes people see the ‘machine elves’ but afaik it’s well less than 50% of people / experiences who see them, and they take wildly different forms for different people. I also think a lot of that is psychosomatic- people going into an experience expecting to see something specific will sometimes synthesize that experience for themselves.

            The effects of deleriants tend to be more reliable, from my understanding, like dramamine making people see people who aren’t there / are dead. Which was a really uncanny experience when i tried it; youre not hallucinating the experience, but rather the memory of it having just happened, almost like waking up from a dream over and over. Like id looks up at the empty chair in my room and think ‘wasnt my brother just there talking about walking in the woods? Oh wait, he couldnt have been, he passed away 3 years ago’ i also kept hallucinating a cigarette, like id think I had just had ine between my fingers, had just taken a drag, and go to take another, then think I must have dropped it, only to realize there was no smoke in the room, I was just falsely remembering.

            I suspect these mushrooms have a mild deleriant compound in them, although even then were talking very consistent results.

            • hector@lemmy.today
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              12 hours ago

              Lots of trip reports on delerients involve talking to devils and demons and the like.

        • photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          21 hours ago

          People on drugs don’t usually make the most reliable observers. But I suppose if you can insulate the trippers from one another their answers wouldn’t influence each other. Then you could interview them about the same scene and see if you get different answers. Again, these wouldn’t be reliable observers and idk how eloquent their answers would be under the influence.

          All of this to say I’d put my money on drugs causing hallucinations, as we have decades of research which confirm this.

        • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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          18 hours ago

          Very specific psychiatric symptoms can occur even when there’s nothing actually there. There are quite a lot of special-purpose structures in the brain, and if they’re triggered by something like a tumor, you can hear things that aren’t there, see things, smell things, become impulsive, experience intense emotions: all from direct physiological causes. So while it’s comforting to believe that those little people represent some form of reality that is only revealed to these mushroom-eaters, there is plenty of precedent that says that it’s not necessarily so, and reproducibility of the perceived phenomena doesn’t necessarily imply that those perceptions correspond to any objective reality.

  • treadful@lemmy.zip
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    23 hours ago

    “At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,’” says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica.

    I’m not sure if I would take them seriously.

  • SillyDude@lemmy.zip
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    20 hours ago

    I thought those looked like boletes. Which I’ve heard can be hallucinogenic, but those also had analysis showing it’s just a small amount of regular psilocybin. This is neither psilocybin nor muscimol, pretty interesting. I’d eat them raw.

    Wikipedia:

    Chemical and genomic analyses have shown that the Lanmaoa asiatica does not contain any known psychoactive compounds such as psilocybin or muscimol. It is likely that there remains an unknown hallucinogenic compound yet to be discovered in this species.[3][6] Chemical analysis of Lanmaoa asiatica has identified numerous compounds and their pharmacological activity has been studied, but as yet none of them have been linked to the reported psychoactive effects.[7][8][9][10]

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      12 hours ago

      Interesting. I thought it was a bolete too. There is one other hallucinogenic bolete, the blue meanie, in central europe and I don’t know where else. It is a giant one too I believe. Psilocybin I believe.

    • BarrelAgedBoredom@lemmy.zip
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      15 hours ago

      I had the exact same thought when I read this haha! But when I went looking for which bolete variety had psilocybin I couldn’t find it

  • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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    1 day ago

    Oh lol yeah, I’ve had a couple chinese friends from over there tell me we should hang out and try as much, I guess mushrooms don’t count as drugs in Yunnan.

    I should be able to try some over the summer.

    • B-TR3E@feddit.org
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      23 hours ago

      Idk, but 12 to 24 hours trippin’ doesn’t sound like my cup of tea. To most people four hours are funny but slightly exhausting, eight defiitely too much and I don’t even want to think of 24…

      • Lucy :3@feddit.org
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        19 hours ago

        14 hours of LSD was OK, with enough time and starting early with enough sleep, that’d be a lot of fun

        • B-TR3E@feddit.org
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          5 hours ago

          As far as I understood the article the shrooms were not offered for their psychedelic effect but as ordinary food - with the advice to cook them long enough to eliminate the psychoactive bits.

          • Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz
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            2 hours ago

            Correct, by the restaurants. But that doesn’t stop individuals from suggesting we eat the mushrooms that make you trip. I’ve heard people from Yunnan have a reputation for this sort of thing.