Patel: It is often thought that direct experience, unlike language and culture, can always serve as common ground for communication among human beings  But people from different cultures inhabit different sensory worlds
Because selective screening of sensory data admits some perceptions while filtering out others, one person' s experience, perceived through one set of culturally patterned sensory screens, is quite different from what anyone from another culture would experience when encountering the same sensory data
No two people from different cultures have the same sensory screens.