The whole thing started to snowball once the initial group of students who’d signed up to participate in my experiment for extra credit took to social media in praise of the experience. Whereas before I’d had great difficulty generating any interest at all in my work, I suddenly found myself booking sessions weeks in advance for some and turning others down altogether.

The kids got it. They understood the purpose of the machine. They had beautiful experiences with it and left my lab forever changed.

I admit it–I felt pretty proud of myself for having invented a machine that was surely destined to significantly alter the way human beings communicated with and understood one another.

A reporter for the local ABC affiliate caught wind of what I was doing and asked if she could sit in on a session. I gladly obliged, and the cameras rolled as a white man…