Me and a trip buddy were talking during a comedown on mushrooms about the topic of if the experience you experience depends on how smart of a person you are. As a college student I thought that being smart is only subjective, and has nothing to do with how your experience goes. When ever I trip I will spend a good portion of the time philosophizing, self reflecting and "ego losing" and if I take enough I'll temporarily leave my body and my trip will always end in a new-found respect for reality. But, my friend who claims he isn't nearly as educated as me(didn't do as well in high-school and never made it to college) has an entirely different experience where he is able to still communicate coherently, think somewhat clearly and almost never self reflects(he hasn't ego deathed in a long while) which seems absurd to me but is clearly evident during our trips together.

Under any psychedelic influence do you think what you experience all together, or what differs from your regular state of consciousness varies depending on how smart(societies idea of being smart) you are? Does it mostly have to do with your expectation?

Here is my highly subjective opinion:

The likes of an Alan Watts or Terrence Mckenna would surely get more out of a psychedelic experience than the average person just looking to get high, though I doubt the quality of the experience would be different.

For one thing, the uneducated person would not be able to articulate their experience, thus they wouldn't really be able to understand and appreciate the significance. If one was aware of philosophic problems, for example the body mind duality, one would be all the more prepared for any insights received, over the person who had never thought of such things.

An artist, who studies human anatomy, and is intimately aware of all the curves and features of the body, perhaps has a greater appreciation of the human structure, however, the body very likely just as beautiful to one unaware of anatomy, who gazes with an unstudied eye. Though the advantage of the artist, is they would all the more easily be able to express what is observed, whereas the other would not.

To continue the artist/human body metaphor, the artist can also know more about the body by simply looking at it; the artist knows and can compare the minute curves whereas the untrained eye might simply take in the whole, or focus on those parts of most interest.

One side of it is undifferentiated observation (stupidity) and then there is observation via intelligence, which usually is paired with judging (until that ability goes @ ego death ). The first type is more prone to "bad trips" (read: getting their ass whooped) and the latter is prone to delusional psychosis brought on by making incorrect judgements.

If you notice, less intelligent people cannnot tell you what was so "bad" about a "bad trip", they can only call it "bad". "Oh yeah don't ever take acid duude, I had like a BAAAD trip on that shit, it's really BAAAD" .

I think of it more like music. I have a musician friend who can't stand crappy music. Not being an artist myself, I'd never see how the music was "crappy" and so I'd love it, even while he hated it. But some time later, I took on his understanding and started to actually listen to the music to find the music so to speak, and it was then that I realised that so many of the songs I liked were absolute piles of trash that merely sounded entraining to the ears, I was smoking crack and calling it spice.

Intelligence has EVERYTHING to do with it. Tripping is a very "whatever this then whatever that" sort of thing and intelligence is the ability of an individual to handle the "degrees of difference between different degrees of difference", to consider the ins and outs of a certain thing. And when they are rushing into your head at 3000 miles per hour, you need all the intelligence you can get to get these insights out.

If you do not have the intelligence I think one of two things happen. Supposing your brain can handle the insight (the OS is compatible) but lacks the verbal ability (the software is not installed ) then you get the insight as a "thought form". The only difference is that it's harder to keep it at the forefront of consciousness; when you label something you create a tag in the brain that it can keep bouncing through in order to summon up that concept.

However if you are stupid (running an 8-bit OS in a 64 bit world) then you will not even be able to handle even that. Thus it will be a transient feeling, which can feel good/bad but it flashes out of consciousness without user control. Intelligence is analogous to how "good" a computer is.

Of course, "good" is a dynamic term, I doubt IBM's Blue Gene would be all that "good" to play Call of Duty on and conversely, you are not going to calculate how proteins fold on your pocket calculator even though a pocket calculator is obscenely good for getting your ass into a good job during school. In the same way I imagine that people get things out of their trips that correspond to their unique sense of intelligence, no matter how statistically stupid/intelligent they are.

If an average human is a PC and spice is analogous to heavily overclocking it, I wonder what autistic savants such as Daniel Tammet would be like spiced up, it's like Blue Gene running at 40x the capacity.