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.

The elves are always there. The mushroom just lets us see them.

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.

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.

This article ended before it really got interesting. I was hoping it would actually go into the brain chemistry and controlled trials underway.

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 hallucinated gnomes after I took medicine they prescribed me at the hospital, following a bike accident.

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.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46717442

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.

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?

Is this where Smurfs (Smurves?) came from?

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.