A Mushroom That Conjures Tiny People: Scientists Still Can't Explain the Lanmaoa asiatica Effect

In restaurants across Yunnan Province in China, a red-capped bolete mushroom comes to the table with a rule attached: do not eat it until the 15-minute timer goes off. Most restaurants that sell Lanmaoa asiatica follow the precaution. Skip it, and, as Colin Domnauer told the BBC, "you might see little people."

Domnauer is a doctoral researcher in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah. The visions he describes have a clinical name, Lilliputian hallucinations, after the tiny inhabitants of the island in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. They show up with several conditions, including schizophrenia and alcohol withdrawal. But none of those causes produces them as reliably as L. asiatica does when it is eaten raw or undercooked. Scientists only formally described and named the species in 2015.

In Yunnan the mushroom is prized for its rich umami flavour and sold in markets. Locals call it 'Jian shou qing' and the little people it summons 'xiao ren ren'. The same mushroom turns up independently in two other places. In the Cordillera Administrative Region of the Philippines it is called 'Sedesdem', and the elf-like figures 'ansisit'. In 2024, DNA sequencing by Domnauer confirmed that the Chinese and Philippine mushrooms, though they look different, are one species.

Papua New Guinea may be a third location. Reports from the 1930s describe missionaries in the Western Highlands meeting a wild mushroom local communities called 'nonda'. People who ate it seemed to go temporarily insane, a state later dubbed 'mushroom madness', and Lilliputian hallucinations were among its features. In the 1960s, American author Gordon Wasson and French mycologist Roger Heim went to find the cause. They sent specimens to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist famous for discovering LSD, who found nothing of interest, and the research stopped there.

In December 2025, Domnauer's supervisor travelled to Papua New Guinea to look for the same mushrooms and found none. Domnauer told the BBC it could be the same species, which would be surprising because Papua New Guinea typically doesn't share species with China and the Philippines. If it is a different species, he said, the question becomes more interesting from an evolutionary perspective, since the same strange effect would have evolved independently in different mushrooms on different continents. The history may also reach back much further: a Daoist text from the 3rd century CE describes a 'flesh spirit mushroom' that, eaten raw, lets a person "see a little person" and "attain transcendence immediately."

The chemistry has deepened the puzzle. Analyses at the Dentinger Lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah found that L. asiatica lacks the gene clusters that build psilocybin, the compound in magic mushrooms, and ibotenic acid, the compound in fly agaric. Whatever causes the hallucinations is unlike any known psychedelic and works through a mechanism science has not yet described. Domnauer told Psychedelics.co.uk that hunting for an unknown psychoactive compound is a frontier for understanding the brain and mind.

The effects are odd in other ways too. The trips begin 12 to 24 hours after eating and last one to three days. Side effects such as delirium and dizziness sometimes put people in hospital, and one hospital in Yunnan treats hundreds of such cases every year. Most psychedelics vary from person to person and from one experience to the next, but the little people appear reliably and repeatedly. "I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations," Domnauer told the BBC.

Researchers hope that identifying the compound will reveal more than a new psychedelic. It could inform questions about consciousness and the link between mind and reality, and perhaps explain what causes Lilliputian hallucinations that arise spontaneously with no mushroom involved. Whether the Papua New Guinea mushroom is the same species remains unresolved.