Ok, so I haven't read the whole article yet, and I don't have a link to the article, so you'll have to bear with me. There's an article in New Scientist that seems to answer a question i've always had: to what extent is personal experience universal? That is to say, if you see something green, and I see something green, we can agree it's green, but are we both experiencing the same color sensation? We're both seeing light with a 420nm wavelength, but do we experience it similarly? I don't even mean does it stir up the same memories, I mean, if I were to suddenly start experienceing the world as someone else does, would I feel like I was having some sort of acid-induced visual hallucination?

Allright, I've never been able to pose the question very well, and I sure didn't do a good job here. I guess there's something about the privacy of subjective experience that is just really difficult to penetrate. Anyway, it looks like the answer is no. There is no universal mode of perception even on the lowest levels. Scientists are finding this out through various modes of research, including genetics and neuroscience.

If I wasn't so lazy i'd get you links to abstracts of the relevant journal articles and even a link to the article in the magazine. Maybe once i've actually finished reading the article.