Social Media Straight Jacket – vibrating with real-time Twitter feedback during David Eagleman’s talk

From the conclusion of David Eagleman’s TED Talk on the prosthetic extension of our senses through the associative reprogramming of our sensory cortex, an area that retains a high degree of neural plasticity through adulthood:

“During the talks this morning, we’ve been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we’ve been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that’s a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone’s doing and how much you’re loving this. (Laughter) It’s a bigger experience than a human can normally have.”