I would say that my experiences have been similar to yours with dissonance. Perhaps the biggest dissonance I experience now is trying to understand why some people struggle so much with accepting evidence when it seems so natural to me, and perhaps this is what has led me here. It would be interesting to see how someone that is a recovered YEC would describe their experience with the bubble boundary/ies.
I wouldn't call that dissonance, in the sense of cognitive dissonance. Everybody has some confusion over why other people 'just don't get it'.
So let me run you through one of my key moments of cognitive dissonance. It's not YEC, but my beliefs were held with a similar degree of fervour.
Haha! Their religious views are all clearly made up, I know the truth, and they're getting it all wrong.
How do I know the truth
Because I've experienced it first hand.
Well they say they've had experiences too
Then clearly they're lying.
Are you calling your friends liars?
*Prickly feeling. Gnawing doubt. Somethings amiss here. Quickly! A solution must be found. But how to square the circle? I know!*
Then they're mistaken.
What if you're mistaken, and they're not?
*Sudden sinking feeling. A sense that the world is spinning. Shutup shutup! Think about something else!*
*Several years pass*
They really believe that? How on earth can they believe that?
We've been here before. The last time you changed your views, you implicitly accepted you were mistaken
I'm not mistaken now
How do you know?
Because I've had direct personal experience to confirm it!
When Newton apocryphally personally experienced an apple falling, was that sufficient?
It was sufficient to prove to Newton that gravity existed
But what if other people thought the apple fell up?
Then you'd devise an experiment that could be run by anybody which would prove the direction of the apple's fall.
Can you run such an experiment to confirm your religious beliefs, or falsify theirs?
*uncomfortable moment as I juggle these two ideas. Again, a sinking feeling, again a prickly feeling, body temperature seems to rise, heart beat too.*
You don't run experiments on religious ideas!
Then how can you say who, if anybody, is right?
I've personally experienced these things
So have they; you've talked to a schizophrenic about what they have personally experienced. Do you doubt their reports? Do you believe what they reported?
*the symptoms mount, the prickliness threatens to produce sweat. The desire to consider something, anything else grows.*
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they're wrong. Maybe we're all wrong. If anyone is right, we'd never know.
*Dissonance resolves, discomfort melts away.*
Not how things went exactly, of course, but it followed that general pattern.
It seems fairly clear to me now that everyone's personal worldview (embedded within their cultural worldview), and it's impact on accepting and learning new information is their personal cognitive dissonance bubble, their worldview bubble, with the strength of the bubble wall being dependent on the tenacity of strongly held personal beliefs vs the willingness to discard falsified concepts and incorporate new ones.
Indeed - I like to try and identify the part of a person's worldview is causing them difficulties with the matter under discussion - and then trying to challenge that directly. Trying to battle cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias or cultural beliefs by reasoned argument and evidence is such a hard battle. If it's done regularly enough it has a chance of getting through, so its still a tool worth employing, of course.