"seeing little people" is such a hyper specific visual effect, it begs questions. Since I am well aware how my mind fills in gaps in the visual field with attempts to map what I would expect or want to see (try holding your head rigidly ahead and look with a steady gaze at a near field pattern like floor tiles to experience your brain filling in the missing pieces in the field) I ask: what could this actually be?
For instance, when I get (got: my blood pressure is treated) migraine visual effects, I would say "lightning bolt" but thats just a textual analogue/simile. What I actually saw was more complex than that: lightning is white. My effect was polychrome.
When I had posterior vitreous detachment (PVD), the visual effect was as if I was looking at TV "snow" from the analogue days, combined with a shape unquestionably like red blood cells. Was I seeing blood? I am told no: I was seeing small points inside the focal zone of my eye, below the minimum resolving size, and the optical path turns points into rings.
So is "little people" moving stimulation of the nerve endings interpreted as "walking" and a strong vertical alignment for some reason? Is the colour an aspect of rods and cones being involved, or the nerves going to rods and cones being differentially effected?
Huh weird. When I have a high fever, usually from the flu, sometimes I start to hallucinate. The typical hallucination is lots of "little people", usually doing something I don't like. I wonder if it triggers a similar part of the brain?
The wild part isn't just that the compound is unknown, it's how specific the hallucination is. 96% of people see tiny figures, and there's a third-century Chinese text describing the same mushroom letting you "see a little person." That kind of consistency across centuries feels less like a random trip and more like it's reliably tripping some existing brain circuit.
Worth noting micropsia ("Alice in Wonderland syndrome") shows up in migraines and epilepsy too, so maybe the mushroom just hits a failure mode that's already wired in. Still, "evolved its own psychoactive pathway, and it's closer to porcini than to anything in Psilocybe" is a great sentence.
I'd love it if someone went through all of the historic fairy tales and folklore and tried to validly link local psychoactive and hallucinogenic plants to them.
That would be the sociological equivalent of saying "Zoom in, enhance, zoom in, enhance" forty times in a row, until you can identify the shooter from a reflection off a raindrop.
"Where are mushrooms with these chemicals found?" "In ~50% of arable land on Earth." "When was the earliest known rendition of this fairytale?" "8-10 generations ago."
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 34.0 ms ] threadFor instance, when I get (got: my blood pressure is treated) migraine visual effects, I would say "lightning bolt" but thats just a textual analogue/simile. What I actually saw was more complex than that: lightning is white. My effect was polychrome.
When I had posterior vitreous detachment (PVD), the visual effect was as if I was looking at TV "snow" from the analogue days, combined with a shape unquestionably like red blood cells. Was I seeing blood? I am told no: I was seeing small points inside the focal zone of my eye, below the minimum resolving size, and the optical path turns points into rings.
So is "little people" moving stimulation of the nerve endings interpreted as "walking" and a strong vertical alignment for some reason? Is the colour an aspect of rods and cones being involved, or the nerves going to rods and cones being differentially effected?
Worth noting micropsia ("Alice in Wonderland syndrome") shows up in migraines and epilepsy too, so maybe the mushroom just hits a failure mode that's already wired in. Still, "evolved its own psychoactive pathway, and it's closer to porcini than to anything in Psilocybe" is a great sentence.
"Where are mushrooms with these chemicals found?" "In ~50% of arable land on Earth." "When was the earliest known rendition of this fairytale?" "8-10 generations ago."