6 ms·

Incredible! A mushroom that bruises blue, but the visions are seemingly unlike traditional tryptamines, and there's no psilocybin found in the mushroom. Also no

Incredible! A mushroom that bruises blue, but the visions are seemingly unlike traditional tryptamines, and there's no psilocybin found in the mushroom. Also no muscimol present (the thing in Fly Agaric, the 'other' type of hallucinogenic mushroom compound) yet there's definitely a consistent syndrome of hallucinations if you eat it undercooked. Could this mean we're on the brink of discovering an entirely new class of hallucinogens?

culi 10mo ago
From the Wikipedia > In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations). It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China. They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there. It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom
- renewiltord 10mo ago
  xiǎo rén rén? Like “small people”? Okay, if the mushrooms are literally called little guy mushroom and you see little guys running around then surely this is an old discovery.
  - culi 10mo ago
    Well yes ofc this is an old "discovery". Boletes are known choice edibles around the world so ofc people would discover that if they undercook this mushroom they would trip. We even have some written history about it: > The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong wrote in Baopuzi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity) around 300 CE that eating a certain wild mushroom raw would result in attainment of transcendence immediately, suggesting that the mushrooms may have been known for thousands of years.
    - Aloisius 10mo ago
      I'm not sure a vague passage from 1700 years ago is much in the way of evidence, especially given he claims the mushroom is a 10 inch tall person riding a carriage which you see before you consume it. Of course, he also claimed another mushroom would let you live for a millennia without aging, there were 1,000 year old white bats flying around and 10,000 year old horned toads and that eating 200 pounds of jade would make you fly, so... a fair bit of fantasy mixed into his works.
  - cess11 10mo ago
    It doesn't count until an occidental university has written some stories about it and claimed to be the real discoverer due to having put some stuff in one of their taxonomies.
    - stinkbeetle 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - estimator7292 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        zzrrt 10mo ago
        I read it as mocking the white savior mentality, not endorsing it.
        stinkbeetle 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        DonHopkins 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        stinkbeetle 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        cess11 10mo ago
        I agree, it's much better to name the movement you represent by its original name and don't waste time trying to engage in conversation.
        10mo ago
  - thaumasiotes 10mo ago
    It doesn't look like 小人人 refers to the mushrooms. It refers to the hallucinations, and is not necessarily expected to include visions of people: > "No!," she said, most emphatically, "They are real. I have seen them myself!" > Miss Oh clearly remembered the hallucinations that began that evening and continued into the next day. The walls moved and shifted in geometrical patterns and strange shapes appeared. > "I'm sleepy all day," she said in English. "I see them. And I see flies bigger than the actual one, perhaps two times big. I see little insects. Not all the time, but when the water splashed out." She apparently became fascinated by the dripping kitchen faucet, for each drop would, upon hitting the sink, sprout wings and legs and crawl away. And she remembered, very clearly, staring intently at the bows of her shoelaces until they turned into butterflies and fluttered off. The paper devotes quite a bit of text to explaining that the mushrooms bearing this quality have no specific name, and in fact are not distinguished from non-hallucinogenic mushrooms at all. They are referred to by their property of turning blue when handled, which is a property not exclusive to the hallucinogenic ones. https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492 Interestingly, despite this prior paper being cited by this press release, and despite the fact that the prior paper devotes almost a page to describing the difficulty of identifying which mushroom(s) might be hallucinogenic given that the people of Yunnan never draw any distinctions between them, this press release assures us that identification of the hallucinogenic species was as simple as asking market vendors in Yunnan whether this was the mushroom that caused hallucinations.
poulpy123 10mo ago
> mushroom sized > blue when bruised > make see small fairy people did they found the schtroumpf village ?
- consp 10mo ago
  Is any of the variants called gargamel or a latin variant of it in the scientific name 'by accident'?
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- decimalenough 10mo ago
  Aka the Smurfs in English.
  - poulpy123 10mo ago
    yep, sorry I forgot it was not the same name in english
bilsbie 10mo ago
Or a new reality…
ipsum2 10mo ago
These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.
- ericmay 10mo ago
  I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.
- isoprophlex 10mo ago
  What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals. The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds. Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do. It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
  - culi 10mo ago
    I think the point GP was making was to take issue with framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals." More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms. While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so. All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)

culi 10mo ago

From the Wikipedia > In 2023, Lanmaoa asiatica received international media attention after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was reported to have eaten a dish that contained it during an official visit to China. Yellen stated that the dish had been thoroughly cooked, and she experienced no ill effects (hallucinations). It seems Rubroboletus sinicus, another bolete, is also suspected to have this effect. These hallucinogenic mushrooms are collectively known as "xiao ren ren" in China. They seem to be relatively well known in parts of China, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea but the ethnomycological work in English is just not really there. It also seems like it's most likely something in the tryptamine class which could explain the blue bruising. The Wikipedia page has more info https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom

renewiltord 10mo ago
xiǎo rén rén? Like “small people”? Okay, if the mushrooms are literally called little guy mushroom and you see little guys running around then surely this is an old discovery.
- culi 10mo ago
  Well yes ofc this is an old "discovery". Boletes are known choice edibles around the world so ofc people would discover that if they undercook this mushroom they would trip. We even have some written history about it: > The Chinese Daoist Ge Hong wrote in Baopuzi (The Master Who Embraces Simplicity) around 300 CE that eating a certain wild mushroom raw would result in attainment of transcendence immediately, suggesting that the mushrooms may have been known for thousands of years.
  - Aloisius 10mo ago
    I'm not sure a vague passage from 1700 years ago is much in the way of evidence, especially given he claims the mushroom is a 10 inch tall person riding a carriage which you see before you consume it. Of course, he also claimed another mushroom would let you live for a millennia without aging, there were 1,000 year old white bats flying around and 10,000 year old horned toads and that eating 200 pounds of jade would make you fly, so... a fair bit of fantasy mixed into his works.
- cess11 10mo ago
  It doesn't count until an occidental university has written some stories about it and claimed to be the real discoverer due to having put some stuff in one of their taxonomies.
  - stinkbeetle 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - estimator7292 10mo ago
      [flagged]
      - zzrrt 10mo ago
        I read it as mocking the white savior mentality, not endorsing it.
      - stinkbeetle 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        DonHopkins 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        stinkbeetle 10mo ago
        [flagged]
        cess11 10mo ago
        I agree, it's much better to name the movement you represent by its original name and don't waste time trying to engage in conversation.
        10mo ago
- thaumasiotes 10mo ago
  It doesn't look like 小人人 refers to the mushrooms. It refers to the hallucinations, and is not necessarily expected to include visions of people: > "No!," she said, most emphatically, "They are real. I have seen them myself!" > Miss Oh clearly remembered the hallucinations that began that evening and continued into the next day. The walls moved and shifted in geometrical patterns and strange shapes appeared. > "I'm sleepy all day," she said in English. "I see them. And I see flies bigger than the actual one, perhaps two times big. I see little insects. Not all the time, but when the water splashed out." She apparently became fascinated by the dripping kitchen faucet, for each drop would, upon hitting the sink, sprout wings and legs and crawl away. And she remembered, very clearly, staring intently at the bows of her shoelaces until they turned into butterflies and fluttered off. The paper devotes quite a bit of text to explaining that the mushrooms bearing this quality have no specific name, and in fact are not distinguished from non-hallucinogenic mushrooms at all. They are referred to by their property of turning blue when handled, which is a property not exclusive to the hallucinogenic ones. https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40390492 Interestingly, despite this prior paper being cited by this press release, and despite the fact that the prior paper devotes almost a page to describing the difficulty of identifying which mushroom(s) might be hallucinogenic given that the people of Yunnan never draw any distinctions between them, this press release assures us that identification of the hallucinogenic species was as simple as asking market vendors in Yunnan whether this was the mushroom that caused hallucinations.

poulpy123 10mo ago

> mushroom sized > blue when bruised > make see small fairy people did they found the schtroumpf village ?

consp 10mo ago
Is any of the variants called gargamel or a latin variant of it in the scientific name 'by accident'?
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
decimalenough 10mo ago
Aka the Smurfs in English.
- poulpy123 10mo ago
  yep, sorry I forgot it was not the same name in english

bilsbie 10mo ago

Or a new reality…

ipsum2 10mo ago

These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.

ericmay 10mo ago
I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.
isoprophlex 10mo ago
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals. The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds. Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do. It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
- culi 10mo ago
  I think the point GP was making was to take issue with framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals." More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms. While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so. All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)