"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."

Domnauer is on a quest to solve the decades-old mysteries about this fungi species and identify the unknown compound responsible for its unusually similar hallucinations – as well as what it can potentially teach us about the human brain.