Psychedelic substances such as LSD and psilocybin - an active ingredient in magic mushrooms - are powerful, able to change the way people use them to see the world.

As a result, after years of ban, psychiatrists in the US hope to use that power to transform mental health treatments.

And as the new documentary

"A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin" shows, the results we have seen so far are powerful. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the film shows how these things change the people who receive this treatment.

"Psilocybin does in 30 seconds what antidepressants take three to four weeks," said David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology in the department of brain science at Imperial College London describing the Netflix film. Researchers have found that a single dose of psilocybin combined with treatment can have a profound effect on changing mental health - such as a "surgical intervention" - that can treat even the most debilitating and stress-related conditions.

The film follows the researchers and research participants who are at the forefront of this modern era of psychological research. Cancer patients dealing with depression about the end of their life talk about how their knowledge helps them to overcome that stress and accept their condition. Healthy volunteers took psilocybin for the first time to help show that it could be used safely in a treatment setting explaining how “travel” had changed their perception.

It's interesting to see.

At a basic level, the part of the brain that seems to connect emotionally and is most active in depressed situations seems to basically stop working for a while, allowing communication to form between brain regions that rarely communicate with each other. This mimics the effect that can be seen in the minds of good shroom movies. Some of these actions appear to cause the “trippy” effects of the drug.

• Which study participants
• Experience while listening
• To music and sitting
• With trained spectators

As far as these agents are causing hallucinations.

They are not slightly separated, detecting allucination is something that happens to other nerves based on a non-existent system, produced internally," said Stephen Ross, a colleague. professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine, in a discussion on the film. "Compared to deception it can be looking at the wall and the wall melts, that can be deceptive, and these drugs often create deceptive ideas rather than false ideas, it changes the way we perceive the real motive."

To cause these effects, these drugs use serotonin 2-A receptors, explains David Nichols, president and founder of the Heffter Research Institute.

But something about this experience - brain function, deceptive ideas, and hallucinations - seems to do something far more profoundly difficult to comprehend. It can honestly cause what researchers call a "mysterious experience." That experience has much to do with lasting results.

"It was like he was on a roller coaster and was about to go down and I thought to myself, 'I'm taking my mind off myself, I don't know where I'm going but. psilocybin for the first time, explaining his knowledge.

The people returning from that trip changed.

"When we came back it was as if someone had put a lamp inside Annie's head, she was literally shining," said the husband of another terminally ill patient at one of these psilocybin courses at UCLA. "I felt good, I think it was an amazingly useful tool ... what we did, maybe it would take me years of treatment," he admits.

You can read more about the movie here.