Mycology

If you consumed a wild mushroom and suddenly started seeing tiny people around you, you might reasonably assume it contained a familiar psychedelic.

Also would love ideas on the granules on the cap. Not snot, not bugs, but I vaguely remember seeing something that it could have been…maybe another fungus? I should have written it down lmao

“At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, ‘Don’t eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,’” says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. “It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there.”

California officials are warning foragers after an outbreak of poisoning linked to wild mushrooms that has killed one adult and caused severe liver damage in several patients, including children.

By twisting the dials on key neurotransmitter systems in our brains, psychoactive compounds in a few kinds of mushrooms can provoke profound psychedelic experiences. The same compounds also show promise in treating illnesses such as therapy-resistant depression. But researchers don’t fully understand how they work in the brain—and why they evolved in the first place is a deeper mystery.

Psilocybin is so nice, mushrooms evolved it twice.