People do not all perceive things the same way, suggests this study:
“Perceptual Differences Between Hippies and College Students,” Robert Brothers [pictured here] and Rosslyn Gaines, Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 9. no. 2, 1973, pp. 325-335. The authors, at UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, report:
“Perceptual differences were investigated between 50 college students who were non-drug users and 50 hippies who used LSD…. The first hypothesis was that hippies would respond to the perceptual measures in a developmentally more primitive or childlike fashion than the college students. The second hypothesis was that hippies who reported mostly bad drug trips would be more like college students than the hippies who reported good drug trips. The results support part of the first hypothesis in that hippies performed significantly differently from college students in the predicted direction on the Color-Form Attention, Judgment of Sounds, and Autokinetic Effect Tests only. No significant differences were found between hippies reporting good vs. bad drug trips.”
(Thanks to Tom Stafford for bringing this to our attention.)
BONUS: Video of students and hippies, circa 1967: