(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- “What’s that thing sticking out of your head?” a woman asks the man with a serpentine antenna between his eyes.
Neil Harbisson turns, parts his bowl-cut blond locks, and curves the antenna toward the buttinsky. “It’s a way to hear color,” he says.
“What’s it connected to?” she asks.
Harbisson looks up at her with smiling, cobalt eyes. “My brain.”
At an outdoor cafe at L.A.’s Original Farmers Market, passersby are constantly checking out Harbisson, 34, and his partner, Moon Ribas, 31. In her left arm, she has a Bluetooth implant designed to analyze the earth’s seismic movements. What’s it feel like? “Two heartbeats,” she says.
Harbisson, whose U.K. passport shows he’s the first legally recognized cyborg, was born colorblind. He designed his antenna—which translates colors into one of 360 musical tones he’s memorized—back in 2003 with help from a cyberneticist. At first, he connected it to headphones and a laptop. Eventually, he persuaded a surgeon to drill into his skull, implant a chip, and fuse the antenna to his occipital bone.
The couple say merging technology with their bodies has created new senses. “We are transspecies,” says Ribas, whose three-year-old seismic implant vibrates at different intensities based on data from online seismographs. As with other biohackers, their claims—he says my color registers as an F sharp, for example—are difficult to verify. But their London startup, Cyborg Nest, is manufacturing DIY kits meant to bring their transhumanism closer to the mainstream.
The first kit, the North Sense, is essentially a $425 wearable implant. “It does one simple thing,” says co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Liviu Babitz, who was fitted with one in December. “A short vibration every time you’re facing north.” That doesn’t sound like an advantage worth body modification, but Babitz likens the experience to a second childhood. “I remember my son discovering things as his senses developed and the look in his eyes when it happened,” he says. “I feel the same.”
The sensor itself, a compass chip that detects magnetic fields, is easy to remove. The tough part is installing two pocket-size titanium barbells onto the wearer’s chest, like a piercing. When the skin heals, typically after a month or two, the silicone-coated North Sense slides onto the implant. Babitz says the sensor is designed to allow the free flow of air and avoid skin irritation, and it’s waterproof. It’s certainly nowhere near as conspicuous as Harbisson’s antenna, though it goes a step beyond less invasive wearable devices, such as the ankle kit from startup North Paw that also vibrates when facing magnetic north.
Cyborg Nest, launched in 2015 with about $200,000 in pooled funds, began shipping North Senses in February. The company says about 1,000 people have ordered one. (Babitz verifies their identities to make sure they’re adults.) The Romanian, who used to work for the human-rights group Videre Est Credere getting cameras and other technology to oppressed communities to expose government abuses, admits his wife and friends have been skeptical. Then again, he says, laughing, “What I did before I started this was no less crazy.”
Stanford genetics department chairman Michael Snyder says these implants aren’t as fringe as they sound, noting that he employs similar medical sensors to detect colds, Lyme disease, and diabetes risk. He calls the North Sense “analogous to the radiation monitor that I use.” The World Economic Forum says Cyborg Nest’s type of biohacking could be commonplace by 2020. “If you’re alive today, you’re probably going to end up having at least one electronic attachment,” Babitz says.
Journalist Mark O’Connell, who wrote To Be a Machine, a book about the transhumanist movement, isn’t convinced that the niche use for the North Sense will appeal to a mass audience. “I don’t see it taking it off,” he says. “Then again, tattoos are everywhere now.”
Babitz declined to discuss Cyborg Nest’s next projects, but Harbisson and Ribas have a wish list: a Bluetooth tooth for silent communication; a way to detect pollution; eyes in the back of the head. The big question, Harbisson says, is how to adjust a person’s mental perspective to accept those kinds of inputs. “The body isn’t the focus,” he says. “Modifying our minds is what really changed us.”
The bottom line: Cyborg Nest has sold about 1,000 DIY implants that vibrate when a wearer faces north, retraining their sensory comprehension.
To contact the author of this story: Adam Popescu in Washington at adampopescu@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeff Muskus at jmuskus@bloomberg.net.
©2017 Bloomberg L.P.
