The more I think about this question the emptier my mind gets. Even thinking about the person in the link who can't smell and didn't know it for 14 years, to me the fact that she didn't know it suggests to me that smelling isn't a universal human experience. We all experience things differently, and not smelling is just a variation on that. One person watches a football game with excitement while another prefers the excitement of running a marathon. To me, the only thing we can apply universally to all of us is that nothing is universal. I think there are common human experiences, but the human mind is so complex that lacking some of those experiences makes us no less human. And I think that's a good thing.What other universally human experiences might I be missing out on?
I'm not so sure. It depends on how 'universal human experience' is defined. If it's defined as 'something that every human experiences in the same way,' then I would be in agreement. As this article and the linked visual imagination one within it show, our personal perception of experiences are anything but objective. On the other hand, Cambridge Dictionary Online states that experience is simply 'something that happens to you that affects how you feel.' With this is mind, I'm more inclined to think of 'universal human experience' as an event or occurrence that the majority of humans encounter during their lives. Whether or not they all have the same subjective impression of said experience is irrelevant. Of course we all percieve things differently and they'll always be exceptional outliers, but that doesn't mean that, for the most part, we don't all experience the same thing. A person who watches a football match experiences a football match, whatever their impression of it turns out to be.
Agreed! I was just wondering what other things we accept as universal that are actually pretty different from one person to another. I mean, we can all see how everyone's hair color is different but I never really thought there were other ways to read than the way I did it (by subvocalizing). I just assumed that everyone reads/thinks that way, the same way that nobody thinks about making their heart pump if you know what I mean. It might sound obvious but it blew my mind that people actually think very differently. I somehow assumed everyone thought more or less the same way but just had different... preferences?