Soft lighting. Comfortable furniture. Art decorating the walls.

To the untrained eye, this setting appears to be a living room. But it’s not. It’s a research facility specially designed to evoke comfort and ease.

Psilocybin, the active ingredient found in “magic” mushrooms, or “shrooms,” is a powerful psychedelic.

Despite being about 100 times less potent than LSD, it’s capable of altering perception of space and time, causing visual distortions, euphoria, and mystical experiences.

Unlike marijuana, which has seen a dramatic shift both in terms of support of legalization and recognized therapeutic uses, or MDMA, which has grabbed headlines in recent years for its potential to treat PTSD (some researchers believe the drug could see Food and Drug Administration approval as soon as 2021), psilocybin lacks the same degree of cultural cachet.

And one could be forgiven for thinking of “shrooms” as nothing more than a remnant of the excess of the psychedelic 1960s.

But make no mistake: Psilocybin has a number of potential medical benefit