According to a new study, eating magic mushrooms could 'reset' the brains of people suffering from depression.
After securing special legal permission, scientists gave mushrooms containing psilocybin to 19 depression sufferers who had not been helped by traditional treatments.
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They saw that the scans on the participants' brains showed that their 'neural circuits' had been reset, pushing them out of their depressive states.
Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, Head of Psychedelic Research at Imperial, who led the study, told the Independent: "Several of our patients described feeling 'reset' after the treatment and often used computer analogies. For example, one said he felt like his brain had been 'defragged' like a computer hard drive, and another said he felt 'rebooted'.
"Psilocybin may be giving these individuals the temporary 'kick start' they need to break out of their depressive states and these imaging results do tentatively support a 'reset' analogy. Similar brain effects to these have been seen with electroconvulsive therapy.
"We have shown for the first time, clear changes in brain activity in depressed people treated with psilocybin after failing to respond to conventional treatments."
Psilocybin causes both audio and visual hallucinations, a distorted sense of time and can alter perception.
Dr Stephen Ross, director of addiction psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center, who led a similar study last year, told the Guardian: "Our brains are hard-wired to have these kinds of experiences - these alterations of consciousness. We have endogenous chemicals in our brain.
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"We have a little system that, when you tickle it, it produces these altered states that have been described as spiritual states, mystical states in different religious branches.
"They are defined by a sense of oneness - people feel that their separation between the personal ego and the outside world is sort of dissolved and they feel that they are part of some continuous energy or consciousness in the universe. Patients can feel sort of transported to a different dimension of reality, sort of like a waking dream."
Many leading scientists have long been pushing for the use of psychedelics as a means of treating mental illness to be taken seriously.
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They say that this sort of approach could pave the way for a new way of treating people, without the need to use potentially harmful medication on a daily basis.
Featured Image Credit: PixabayTopics: UK News, Drugs, Depression