I sometimes say there are two kinds of prosperity, one is material prosperity and the other is a non-material part of prosperity — that's the experiential benefits of having the stimulus, the challenge, the gratification of solving problems, surmounting obstacles and also the having the thrill of creating something new.
These perceptual stimuli are not themselves experiential in nature, consisting as they do of showers of photons (or, alternatively, patterns of electro-chemical activity on the surface of the retina).
Perceived risk is an affect heuristic, based on experiential learning and emotional response to external stimulus (Slovic, 2009; Weber & Stern, 2011), and influenced by factors that may cause over- or under-estimation of risk.
It may turn out, for example, that the folk conceive of pain as an essentially experiential state with non-essential causal connections to stimuli and behavior.
According to the neuroscientists, meditation forms new neural pathways, which in experiential terms means changing the way your "gut reaction" responds to stimuli.
One possibility may relate to experiential avoidance, which is a psychological process in which individuals block situations and stimuli for self-protection from exposure to high levels of stress [ 27].
It should also be considered that previous research [22] demonstrated that, under some circumstances, naïve chicks show a spontaneous preference for stimuli characterized by asymmetry (finding a complex interaction of this initial preference with experiential factors, indicative that symmetry per se is not necessarily preferred by our animal model, see [23]).
The dual-process theory proposes that responses to external stimuli involve two different processing systems, one being deliberate, slow and rule-based, the other being experiential, quick and intuitive [ 12].
