Magnet Implants Can Actually be Pretty Annoying | Hacker News Reader

Magnet Implants Can Actually be Pretty Annoying

iamdann.com

72 pointsiamdann48 comments

To summarize: Having a sense for something that is invisible to everyone else can mean that many well-designed things are very poorly designed for you.

Which actually sounds like your basic early adopter problem. Hypothetically, as more and more people gain this sense, there will be market pressure to make the world more interesting and usable for them, and the growing competitive advantage for those who have it will accelerate the process. This won't be the last novel sense humanity sees... It will be interesting to see this play out, if not with magnetism than with UV or radar or whatever it is.

This is a great summary: "Having a sense for something that is invisible to everyone else can mean that many well-designed things are very poorly designed for you."

Thanks!

I'd rather have manually induced signals than a magnet, ideally something that could use low power bluetooth (or similar) to talk to my smartphone. Maybe a set of muscle-twitching electrodes to replace vibrate mode on my phone, or to poke me for anything else that I'd want to be notified of.

With enough outputs you even do things similar to the vibrating compass belt that's mentioned elsewhere in the comments. Or instead of a north-compass, it could point you toward any arbitrary destination via GPS.

Or just gloves instead of implants. So you can take them off, but still get the benefit when they're on.

I don't see why it isn't possible.

Definitely more what I had in mind

It is interesting that this wouldn't be assumed considering the reverse is so obviously true. The world is designed for people with the median amount of human senses. If you lose one completely or have a sense that isn't as perceptive as most other people, there are a variety of challenges that you will have to overcome. However, you do get to avoid some of the everyday annoyances that the rest of us have to deal with.

Looking at how exceptionally crude this "implant" is, it should come as no surprise to anyone how annoying and uncomfortable it turned out to be. The technique here is to embed a small magnet subcutaneously, that's it.

I think having a magnetic sense in general would be cool, but not like this. A real piece of cyberware instead of this crude body mod butchery might well be worth trying out. It would be especially nice if it was sensitive enough to work as a compass.

Much simpler I got this magnetic wedding ring: http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=48&osCsid=... I wear it on my right hand (I live in NA, not EU so my real wedding rings go on my left hand). With this I can take it off whenever I want. It is fun to wear, but can get annoying at times. The microwave is the craziest day to day object you will encounter. Mostly it was a fun thing to show off and very handy for picking up anything metallic such as small screws. One of the best experiences has to have been walking on a street that has the power underground. The transformers were on the ground and the magnetic field is like a big ball of water you can move your hand through and about. The "deeper" you stick you hand into the ball (the closer to the box) the stronger it was.

Found a clearance section for the magnetic weddings rings, $5-6 a piece.

http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=122

I'd like to try two rings: one magnetized through the thickness, and the other magnetized through the diameter. That would let me sense two orthogonal vectors from the surrounding field.

Have you been able to find anything that would do this, as this would be quite incredible to feel. You can measure magnetic fields with solenoids with wrapped wire, but this would be quite the impractical solution for a ring.

Super magnet man sells rings magnetized both ways. Here are the ones magnetized across the diameter:

http://www.supermagnetman.net/index.php?cPath=56

I've placed two orders from this site over the past 7 years and it went great both times. The magnets are incredibly strong. These rings will definitely be in my next order

I would hesitate to wear a solenoid, due to the induced current from magnetic fields.

There is a conceptually neat non-implant solution if you want a compass sixth sense: http://sensebridge.net/projects/northpaw/.

I think I saw a video about a guy who made something like this himself once. It was pretty neat as he could navigate with his eyes closed and stuff like that!

>It was pretty neat as he could navigate with his eyes closed and stuff like that! Sounds interesting. Can you find it?

As a related note: considering the problems a magnet implant can cause you (as a person who recently had an MRI scan I'm quite happy I didn't get one), why not make something like Northpaw for sensing magnetism? Make it a ring that vibrates or a flexible wristband that contracts and expands in response to magnetic fields.

> Sounds interesting. Can you find it?

Sorry, I looked, but search results are polluted by Northpaw/Eric Boyd - it might have been the same guy though, maybe when he was prototyping. I remember someone doing blind figure-8s on their bike.

By "cyberware" do you mean something like this? https://idea.popcount.org/2012-07-28-am-i-a-cyborg-now/

My whole comment was there to point out that this is specifically not what one should consider to be adequate cyberware. It's just body modding.

I think you may not have read the linked post. Scroll down to the bottom and you can see the device he built, which he wears on an armband.

To stay within sci-fi lingo, wearing a detector bracer around your arm does make you a cyborg in the same way that having an iPhone in your pocket makes you a netrunner: it sort of does a comparable job, but at the end it's clearly not a part of your body and it's always going to be an external tool.

Humans carrying tools around are awesome, but they're not cyborgs. The prospect of having a real internal augmentation is that it seamlessly and naturally becomes a part of your body. Everything else is a little bit of a cargo cult, which is sort understandable considering the lack of progress we made so far into that area of research.

I get what you're saying, but I think that you're placing way too much emphasis on the integrity of the body, in a way that folks that use wheelchairs to get around might not.

While we tend to think of our bodies as single, solid things, this has more to do with our conceptions of them and less to do with the actual situation. I say this as someone who spends 90% of his time behind glasses, so much so that without them my experience of the world would be so markedly different-- and different even from modding up my eyes via lasik surgery.

It's not metaphorical to think of some tools we have as being so ingrained to our selves that they are basically parts of our bodies, even if they are outside/removable/changeable.

You might find it primitive, but the fact that it would be a life altering experience for me to live without my glasses indicates to me, at least, that although this technology is external to my body it is every bit as important to my getting by in the world as my index fingers, and thus every bit as much of my being human as my body.

I think magnetic implants count as a new sense, because after a few hours of practice, you stop being able to feel the vibrations and your brain begins to interpret the feeling as a new qualia. You really get a new sense experience as your brain interprets the new input automatically. You don't have to consciously interpret the feeling into something meaningful.

Another point, not mentioned in the article, is that you can't approach an MRI unit, unless you want to see the magnet rip out of your finger and ballistically destroy stuff on its way to the 1.5+ Tesla superconductive monster bathing in liquid helium.

/dramatic exaggeration.

Seriously, it can be very problematic, though. See http://www.simplyphysics.com/flying_objects.html

MR tech here. I once had a minor accident with an angle grinder (well, I've had a few, but this one had side effects) and got several minuscule steel fragments in a finger. I didn't know this had happened, except that once at work (edit: I work on 3T scanners) I could feel them in my finger. They were slightly sore, and very annoying. A few x-rays later I managed to localise them and with the help of a colleague, dug them out with a needle. I never did find them, but we got them out. I have scanned quite a few people with various sorts of shrapnel in them. Only once was it a problem for the patient (moderate pain) but we don't take the scary ones in - intraocular metallic fragments, one deep in a neck etc.

Didn't know they were always or mostly energized. I thought they were only powered during an actual MRI scan.

Ramping takes days (maybe even over a week). The RF is obviously off most the time though, and the gradient magnets are off too - these tend to be the evil bastards. The slew rate messes with your balance and after a few you come to dislike certain sequences - gradient echoes, diffusion and a few other - loud with high slew rates. You feel like your spinning and this causes slight nausea (in me) and 10 minutes or so of vertigo. Edit for spelling

They're super conductors so shutting them off involves draining all the liquid helium and nitrogen which is very expensive.

Well you can have a superconductor with no current running through it. Just charge the electromagnet with current during the scan, then bleed it off gradually when you're done. No need to turn off the superconductivity to power down the magnetism.

MRI magnets are a pain to setup. It's not an easy task.

I can remember when the NMR (superconducting magnet as well) in our school "quenched". It's a hell of a lot of current to dissipate.

Need to get some tech from Germany to come out and power it back up.

And $75k ish of helium - which is getting pricier by the day, and can at times be impossible to source. And the riskiest time in terms of quenches, is during ramping. Our last quench re-occurred just as they finished ramping it. We were down for 3 weeks ish and the cost excluding helium was huge.

> ballistically destroy stuff

Not just "stuff," people have been killed this way.

  http://www.mrisafety.com/safety_article.asp?subject=39

People with magnet implants have had MRIs, though.

http://stevehaworth.com/main/?page_id=871

Just hope that the area to be scanned isn't near the implant. The susceptibility artifact will ruin the images and mask nearby problems.

Yup, just like people with cheap "prison" tattoos.

Not according to Mythbusters:

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-da...

Additionally, people with magnet implants have successfully had MRIs, too.

http://stevehaworth.com/main/?page_id=871

A less permanent way to experiment with magnetic sense would be to superglue the magnet to your fingertip. It might be a bit less sensitive, but there are no incisons involved, and depending on how well the glue bonds, it should come off in a few days to a week.

Another less permanent way is to get a magnetic wedding ring. Saw this from the guy who implanted an RFID chip in his arm:

http://blog.holyscraphotsprings.com/2011/12/reasonably-price...

This has been suggested a lot. I haven't personally tried it, but I have friends with magnet implants who have and they said it was quite different, actually.

Different, but you'd still get a sense. I'd think you could go with a more powerful magnet on your fingertip than implanted within it too. So you could end up more sensitive in some ways...

Yes, very true. I think the main difference that I would imagine would be psychological. The sensation of having something external vibrating against your skin, as with a magnet superglued to a finger, is different than the sensations being internalized.

When my magnet responds to something, it feels like I am responding to something. I don't feel a sense of separation from the magnet.

That being said, supergluing a magnet to a finger is probably the closest one can get without getting the actual procedure. Which obviously isn't for everyone, heh.

Fair enough, but why doesn't he just cut it out?

At the first hint of pain that thing would be outta there for me.

I prefer not jabbing things under my skin. This bottle of oil, steel wool, and a magnet is fun.

(http://www.discoverthis.com/project-magnetic-field-bottle.ht...)

> However, I do find that bringing it up on a “first date” is a great way to separate the curious from the close minded.

It does seperate the curious. Ironically, when a date finds the magnet, he's the close minded one.

Maybe the problem is the size of the implant. I've seen pictures of rice-sized implants - that's IMHO far too big to go into a fingertip - unless you don't use your finger at all.

A smaller implant would be less sensitive to magnetic fields, ie less distracting.

I'm not really into implants, but maybe something no bigger than a needle could be tested by an eager volunteer?

A biocompatible coating is needed, which increases the size - the technical challenge is making an implant small enough, coating included, to be helpful without being painful or distracting

Who'd a thought?!

You need to think about anything you put in or under your skin. News at 11.

Woah, this is actually a thing people are doing?

It's been done since the 90's at least but there's been active interest and development in the last 8 years or so. http://wiki.bme.com/index.php?title=Magnetic_Implant

However "Implant work isn't ready for prime time. While Huffman loves his implant, he discourages others from getting it. "Most people don't understand the risks, and implant work isn't appropriate for most people." Those risks include infection and breach of the magnet's silicone sheath. The procedure itself is painful, and the results vary from person to person for unknown and unstudied reasons. Huffman doesn't see it as a candidate for study." http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087

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