Mechanical elves and Kant

Sabine Hossenfelder casts her very sceptical eye over some sciencey types who have written about whether the aliens (or deities, or mechanical elves) who turn up when people take DMT are real.

The comments that follow the video have a lot of useful (and, of course, witty) things to add.  (It is an idea that I don't think has turned up in any movie, yet.  Surprisingly.)

And - almost certainly it's the first time a Hossenfelder video has mentioned Kant - although a lot of people are a little worried about how it sounds with a German accent.  

Worth watching: 

Update:  Thanks to John in comments for the link to a BBC story earlier this year that I had missed.

Apparently, a mushroom in China is well known for causing "visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture", if eaten raw or insufficiently cooked.

Yet the chemical component that causes it is still unidentified.  And as the effects can be long lasting, there isn't much incentive for  self-experimentation.

I was particularly interested in this part, about spontaneous hallucinations of this type, which does happen:

It could also provide important clues about what causes spontaneous lilliputian hallucinations in people even when they're not consuming L. asiatica. The condition is rare, and as of 2021, only 226 non-mushroom-related cases had been reported since lilliputian hallucinations were first described in 1909. But for those relatively few people, the outcome can be serious: a third of those patients who came down with non-mushroom-related cases did not fully recover. 

I would guess someone has considered this as an explanation for fairy lore?