The bell jar

Conscious experience is a bell jar shaped by historical and environmental forces. What we call ‘ordinary experience’ is fashioned by exposure during early childhood and a sensory-network that has evolved over eons of earthly habitation. Recent findings published in the journal Proceeding of the Academy of Sciences help support my bell jar theory. They show that the sensory world is tuned by exposure early in life. Children growing up in cultures where their diets don’t offer much in the way of sugar, eventually lose the taste-receptor for it [ link ]. In the same way, children growing up in cultures where their language doesn’t include sounds found in other cultures eventually lose the receptor sites for them [ link ]. The neuro-pathways for discerning phonemes that are not available in the child’s early environment get ‘pruned away’. For example, children in Asian cultures that don’t have phonemes for the English ‘L’ and ‘R’ lose the ability to hear any difference between them.