I watched a show last night called MODIFY.  Not to spoil it for anyone but it was mostly about Body Modification which encompasses peircing, tattooing, slicing, dicing and anything else in what appeared to be an attempt to becoming different *looking*.  I was wholely dissappointed with the show with the tiny acception of one small mention of a person who had embedded magnets under his skin thus gaining a new ability to sense magnetic flux.

My dissappointment lay in the fact that I was hoping that the show would be about true human augmentation instead of being about a bunch of people who feel so out of sorts in their own skin that they in some cases mutilate their own bodies.  When the show was over the only thing I could ask is why?  Other than the esthetics of it there was no good reason for most of the mods.  The ability to hang from hooks by your own skin doesn't strike me as highly advantageous in any way.

On the other hand I also heard about someone who attached pager vibrators to his belt with a digital compass that would buzz the vibrator to the north on a regular basis so he essentially gained a constant sense of direction which augmented his experience of the world.  Advantageous?  Maybe not particularly but definitely additive in the sensory field.

Also in the field of augmentation, yours truly tried his hand at one of the more mainstream types...  LASIK or actually PRK in my case.  I'd love to say that it was a great experience and rave about it but honestly I'm still lukewarm on it and would hesitate to advocate the idea to anyone.  I ended up exchanging my good reading vision for mediocre driving vision without contacts.  Unfortunately I was one of those lucky guys that could wear contacts for days and never suffer bad effects and had a prescription that was better than average sight.  Now I kind of feel like I can sort of see most things and don't have to fumble for my glasses in the middle of the night.  A good trade?  Not sure.

That being said, there are a few other augmentations that I would probably sign up for pretty quickly.  Memory augmentation would be awesome.  Even if it was simply an embedded calendar/clock that could remind me of appointments, tasks, anniversaries, etc.  Can you imagine going to the grocery store with a list of a dozen items and not getting home to realize you'd forgotten the most critical thing?  (Coffee creamer of course)  Instant recall of names and faces would be a snap and I would no longer grope helplessly for the name of the person I'm talking to at the moment.  (more sleep might help that too...)  And I can't even count the number of times I've measured a board or a plumbing part, walked across the room and then had to go back and remeasure again.

How does a "head's up" display sound?  Supposedly there's experimentation going on to allow direct injection of video signals ot the optical nerve.  All I'm asking is for them to figure out how to do that without wrecking the signal I get already.  I'd like an overlay on my eyesight that does object recognition (back to remembering faces again) or maybe an x y ruler so I can make quick but accurate measurement estimations.  I haven't even touched on the possibility of having incoming email streamed to one side of your sight.  (We might end up with a few more auto accidents...)

Does the iPad look cool?  Try running a couple fingers across the palm of your opposite hand.  Press harder.  Use a fingernail or barely make any contact at all.  Do you think Apple can make anything nearly that sensitive?  So how's about using your palm as an input device.  Multi-touch input?  Yeah... we can do that.  Let's modify that display a little and use both eyes so we can output in 3D.  Now we can manipulate drawings and data in three dimensions with no external input, save it to our internal memory and then copy it to a share with a thought using wi-fi.  Hopefully IPv6 has enough IP's for all the humans AND their devices.

Now I just need to worry about getting my wetware hacked!

I think there's something in every Maker that drives us to find new ways to improve ourselves.  I'm not talking about reading self-improvement manuals and organizing our desks.  I'm talking about manipulation of this walking bag of meat that we each call home.  We secretly think that athletes using steroids may be the next stage in evolution.  We want to embed RFID tags under our skin, add heads up displays to our optical nerves, and anything else that might make us more efficient.

A couple of new topics have crossed my browser recently that I'm toying with now.  The first and probably most interesting one is called binaural beats.  It's the theory that you can alter the state of your brainwaves by playing two frequencies (one in each ear) that differ by the number of  Hz of the brainwave you wish to induce.  Your brain processes the two frequencies together and actually creates an "audible" beat in your brain which doesn't exist in the tones themselves.  So for instance if you want to encourage your mind to fall into a Theta wave state (meditation and REM sleep) you play two frequencies that differ by about 6 Hz.  There's some mention of these techniques actually being used to simulate drugs.  I've been looking at them as a sleep aid.  I've never been good at just going to sleep and it seems like age isn't helping matters.  Maybe when I was younger I was just able to survive on less sleep.  So far what I'm finding is that by using binaural beats, I relax more, go to sleep faster, and sleep better.  I can't say whether the beats actually change my brainwaves or simply disrupt my ability to keep thinking so I drift off.

Still on the topic of sleep, the other hack I stumbled upon was called polyphasic sleep.  This is the theory that rather than sleeping all in one whole chunk at night (monophasic sleep) by taking ultra-short naps throughout the day you can be awake more during a 24 hour period.  Since what we really need are the 5 or 6 sections of REM sleep we experience during our sleep cycles the theory is that you can get those in one hour or 30 minute segments during the day.  According to these theories if you can get your naps at the right time you may actually be able to survive and thrive on 3 hours of sleep a day without any bad effects.  There are of course some dissenting theories as well but just the thought of gaining an extra 5 hours of time during my day has my head spinning...

And now I will need to use my binaural beats to get the 8 hours of sleep I really need.

P.S. This also means I'm on the hunt for an inexpensive way to tell if this works (OpenEEG, biofeedback...)