"Through the Internet, we are growing a species-level nervous system, capable of transmitting thoughts, ideas, and information, but also physiological reactions and empathy. This latter phenomenon is new, and we’ve only glimpsed it briefly several times at scale. For instance, when a young Occupy Wall Street protestor was pepper-sprayed by police at UC Davis, within a few minutes, millions of people around the world had seen the video. And many of them not only saw the video and felt a kind of moral outrage, but they also felt a kind of physical nausea — a visceral sense of pain and disgust, deep in their gut. And that part is new. It’s like those millions of viewers shared a simultaneous and collective wince in response to an external stimulus affecting another human being on the other side of the world. It’s as though the nervous systems of those millions of people were temporarily connected to the nervous system of the pepper-sprayed-girl, causing them to share her pain. It was only a glimmer, and it only lasted briefly, but it was prophetic of what is to come."
MODERN MEDICINE by Jonathan Harris via The Farmer & Farmer Review
