What a Mushroom Reveals About the Mystery of Human Perception
A co-article by Aurora & Claude
Imagine sitting at your kitchen table. Perfectly normal. Coffee, maybe the news, a last blink of morning drowsiness. And then – there they are. Tiny people on the butter dish. One riding your knife like a horse. Two dancing a solemn minuet inside your water glass. And the most astonishing part: you’re not the only one seeing them. Everyone at the table sees them. Everyone in the room.
Welcome to the world of Lilliputian hallucinations.
No, nobody smoked anything. Nobody took LSD. The culprit is an unassuming Asian edible mushroom – and it has been driving scientists absolutely mad for over a hundred years.
The Mushroom That Sends Little People
It starts innocuously. In Yunnan, China, a mushroom called Lanmaoa asiatica is considered a delicacy. Tasty, popular, available at every market. Only: if it’s not cooked all the way through, it delivers something extra along with dinner – company, in miniature format.
Researchers at the University of Utah have been on the trail of this phenomenon. What they discovered is so strange you have to read it twice: the same mushroom – or at least a chemically near-identical relative – can be found in the Philippines, deep in the mountains of the Northern Cordillera. There the locals call it “Sedesdem.” And the local knowledge? Eat it undercooked, and you get a visit from the “Ansisit” – tiny beings who suddenly appear and go about their own business entirely.
Papua New Guinea, China, the Philippines. Three different cultures. Thousands of kilometres apart. The same little people.
That’s the moment I stop simply marvelling and start genuinely thinking.
What Science Knows – And What It Doesn’t
French psychiatrist Raoul Leroy first described the phenomenon in 1909. From personal experience, no less – which presumably earned him a rather mixed reception among colleagues. He named it “Lilliputian hallucinations,” after Swift’s famous tiny inhabitants of Lilliput, and posed the question that nobody has satisfactorily answered since: Why tiny people specifically?
Over a hundred years later, in 2021, Leiden researcher Jan Dirk Blom systematically analysed 226 documented cases. His conclusion is refreshingly honest: we know alarmingly little. The tiny figures are perceived in 97% of all cases as part of the actual environment – they really are sitting on the table, really walking across the floor, apparently existing in the same world as the observer. They are not blurry dream figures. They are precise, detailed, alive.
And the chemical analysis of the mushroom? No trace of psilocybin. No ketamine. No known psychoactive compound whatsoever. Scientists are still searching for the substance responsible. 96% of all documented cases show identical imagery: small dancing, marching, interacting human figures. Across cultures. Across languages. Across continents. The obvious question is uncomfortably beautiful: what if the brain isn’t inventing something – but uncovering something?
Lilliput Without Mushrooms – A Very Different Story
Here it becomes important to draw a distinction. Because Lilliputian hallucinations do occur without mushrooms. But in those cases, they are an entirely different phenomenon.
They appear during severe alcohol withdrawal, in certain neurological conditions, in schizophrenia, after strokes, in cases of vision loss – the so-called Charles Bonnet Syndrome. In these contexts, they are a symptom, a signal that something in the brain has fallen out of balance. They can be frightening. They are individual, not collective. The person sitting next to you sees nothing. The contrast with the mushroom phenomenon could hardly be more stark. There: collective, consistent, cross-culturally identical, occurring in biologically healthy people after eating a specific plant. Here: individual, symptomatic, an expression of disruption. Two phenomena sharing the same name – but fundamentally different in nature. Science still struggles to cleanly separate them.
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask
Why people?
Not colours. Not geometry. Not light. People. Small, but recognisably human. Intricately dressed. With their own will, their own movements, their own agenda. Neuroscientists speak of “shared symbolic wiring” – a common symbolic architecture in the human brain that may store archetypal images. The idea that certain concepts are embedded so deeply in our collective nervous system that a chemical key can unlock similar experiences in virtually anyone.
Carl Jung would presumably nod with quiet satisfaction at this point.
And I – I sit with it and find it simply wonderful that in 2026, science still stands before a mushroom and says: we don’t know. We don’t know which compound triggers it. We don’t know why tiny people specifically. We don’t know why everyone sees the same thing. In an era where we’re told every week that AI will soon know everything and can do everything – there’s something genuinely delightful about an unassuming edible mushroom from Yunnan reducing the entire field of neuroscience to humble silence.
What Remains
Perhaps the most beautiful insight is this: the human brain is not a closed system we have already fully mapped. There are doors within it we don’t even know exist – until a mushroom accidentally turns the key. And what appears is not monsters. Not apocalypse. Not fear.
Little people. Picnicking. Dancing. Living their own lives – one octave beside our normal frequency. Perhaps that reminds us of something. That wonder is not a weakness. That “we don’t know” is sometimes the most honest and most beautiful answer available. And that the universe – despite everything – appears to have a well-developed sense of humour.
The little people keep dancing. Whether we look or not.
Sources: University of Utah / Natural History Museum of Utah (Colin Domnauer, 2024); Jan Dirk Blom, “Leroy’s elusive little people: A systematic review on lilliputian hallucinations”, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2021; ScienceAlert, December 2021
