Mindstate Design Labs, backed by Silicon Valley power players, has created what its CEO calls "the least psychedelic psychedelic that's psychoactive." While there's growing evidence that psychedelic drugs can effectively treat severe mental health conditions, especially in cases where traditional treatments have failed, they still come with downsides. Their hallucinogenic effects can be scary and overwhelming, with dosing sessions lasting several hours. Good treatment is heavily reliant on the individual's mindset going into a session and the environment in which they receive it. And though it's rare, psychedelics can sometimes worsen existing mental illness.

Users of a naturally occurring psychedelic drug are convinced they've encountered real alien beings, including'machine elves,' which inhabit a realm beyond our Earth. These machine elves, described as chattering, mischievous entities, consistently appear in the visions of those who take DMT, which one neuroscientist suggested could mean users are actually entering a shared alien reality. DMT (or N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is present in thousands of plants, including ayahuasca, which is used in religious ceremonies, but is also present in small amounts within the human body. Dr Andrew Gallimore, who has a PhD was in biological chemistry and has studied computational neuroscience, said he encountered these beings firsthand after being transported to a hyper-dimensional world teeming with intelligent lifeforms. Unlike earthly creatures, these beings - ranging from insectoids to God-like figures -seem to exist in a space that defies our three-dimensional understanding.

Psychedelic drugs have been used in adult mice to reopen so-called "critical periods", which are crucial windows of development and learning in the brain that usually happen in adolescence. During critical periods, the brain is highly plastic and capable of learning specific skills such as language. Once this window closes, it's nearly impossible to acquire certain abilities. For instance, children who aren't exposed to language in their first year of life may never fully grasp sentence structure.

Randomized clinical trials, which involve giving some participants a drug, others a placebo, and comparing the effects of both, are considered the gold standard in such studies. But such trials are slow and expensive, and tend to involve only a small number of participants. "[It takes] multiple years, costs a seven-digit amount of money, [and] the ethics approvals take forever," says Bzdok. Instead, his team used natural language processing to assess 6,850 written accounts of hallucinogenic drug use. Each account was written by a person who took one of 27 drugs--including ketamine, MDMA, LSD and psilocin--in a real-world setting rather than as part of a lab-based experiment.

Research into the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs was pioneered by psychiatrists way back in the 1950s, but the emergence of advanced technologies in pharma appears to have breathed new life into the field. As interest in the psychedelics market gains stream, a number of drug companies are now employing artificial intelligence (AI) methods in their search for new psychedelic compounds to treat a range of mental and physical conditions. One in four people in the UK will experience some kind of mental health problem every year, and figures are almost identical in the US. Despite this, treatments for psychological conditions are relatively limited – and for many patients, the drugs that are available come with side effects that negatively impact their quality of life. Psychedelics are hallucinogenic drugs that alter a person's perception and mood and affect their thought processes.

People suffering with depression could soon have a new treatment, in the form of a drug based on a common psychedelic substance found in plants, developers claim. The first patient dosing of the drug, based on the compound DMT (N-Dimethyltryptamine), is being given to'healthy brained' first time drug users in a clinical trial that will examine the impact the substance has on the brain. If successful, the second stage of the trial will see the team experiment with different dosing levels and strategies and eventually treat people with depression. It works by sending the patient on a hallucinogenic trip that acts to'break down' blockages in the mind, that can then be restored with a course of therapy. British biotech firm Small Pharma are running the trial, and CEO Peter Rands told MailOnline said it had the potential to help people not supported by current drugs.

A treatment that combines an artificial intelligence therapist with psychedelic drugs to treat depression and addiction has been approved for clinical trials. Life science firm atai and digital therapeutics specialist Psyber are working on a brain computer interface (BCI) based around an electroencephalogram (EEG). The system will allow for the automated monitoring and assessment of patients who have been prescribed psychedelic drugs to treat mental health conditions. The device will record electrical activity in the brain for real-time interpretation of emotional, behavioural, and mental states, providing the patient with live feedback. Dr Srinivas Rao, Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at atai told MailOnline the goal was to democratise therapy and provide direct, and instant treatment to people in rural locations that may not have access to a licensed psychiatrist.

Artificial intelligence could help us better understand the effects of psychedelic drugs, by analysing narrative reports written by people who are using them. Scientists barely understand how existing psychedelic drugs work to alter perception and intensify emotions, let alone keep pace with new ones flooding the market – often sold as "bath salts" or "herbal incense". Matthew Baggott of the University of Chicago and colleagues used machine-learning algorithms – a type of artificial intelligence that can learn about a given subject by analysing massive amounts of data – to examine 1000 reports uploaded to the website Erowid by people who had taken mind-altering drugs. They found that the frequency with which certain words appeared could identify the drug taken with 51 per cent accuracy on average – compared with 10 per cent by chance. MDMA (ecstasy) usage was identified with an accuracy of 87 per cent.