Recall that in Chapter 2 we explored the pristine experiences of bulimic women; we discovered fragmented multiplicity, multiplicity that increases with the urge to vomit and decreases after vomiting. Those results were unpredicted and provocative, which we took as evidence that carefully examining moments of truth might unlock experience in ways that reveal characteristics of people that are obvious and immediately at hand (the hay in the haystack) but systematically overlooked by almost everyone.

Now, we again focus on the pristine experience portion of the moments ↔ experience ↔ genuinely-submitting-to-the-constraints co-determination by exploring the experience of adolescents and older adults. We will see that we get some perspectives on the development of experience that, as in bulimia, have rarely if ever been noticed.

Our aim here, as in Chapter 2, is to demonstrate the productivity of carefully focusing on experience. I will make a few provocative speculations about the development of experience. I do not intend this chapter to be anything remotely resembling a treatise on developmental psychology. Our samples of younger and older individuals are not as large and not as well replicated as the bulimia studies of Chapter 2. However, we have seen enough to make some provocative suggestions, enough to demonstrate the essentiality of carefully observing experience.

SPECULATION 1: FEELING IS AN ACQUIRED SKILL

We use the term “feelings” in the same way most psychologists (Kagan, 2007) do: to refer to emotion experience.