I just got finished reading about a man who got a magnet inserted into one of his fingers. Technically, it's "5 small neodymium discs strung together, then cased in gold, then coated in silicone," totaling no more than 2mm in length and completely invisible. Why would anyone do such a thing? Simple, he says, he wanted to have a sixth sense.

He now claims to be able to feel any magnetic field he's near: Be they library demagnetizers, anti-shoplifting gates, wireless communication sources, or electric pencil sharpeners. The implant isn't strong enough to actually hold anything heavier than the lightest of magnets or demagnetize his credit cards. However, it's implanted just on the inside of the nerve cluster in his fingertip, and it gives him a window of feeling onto an otherwise invisible world.

I think this is insanely cool.

While I read about it on the SA Forums, which aren't open to the public, I did some poking around and found that Engaget reported on someone else who had the procedure back in May.

The fringe communities of serious body-modders, futurists, and transhumanists are of course all over this. There are very few people in the US who perform the procedure at this point, but there seems to be a lot of interest. The idea of being able to feel the invisible fields which surround us is very seductive. It's a form of body customization which, unlike tattoos or piercing, has a purely functional basis.

Obviously, there are all kinds of issues here. Not the least of which is: What do you do if you ever need an MRI? You've either got to get the implant removed first or risk having it shoot out of your fingertip at high velocity. The implantee claims to not have set off airport security alarms, but I'd think that with a bit more sensitivity on their part you might end up sitting in a back room in a jiffy, trying to explain that you're just an ordinary Joe with magic fingers. The implantee says he can type normally, but can feel the hum of electromagnetism from his equipment when he's around it. While cool, I wonder what the effect of this would be over the next couple of years. And what if you ever had to do battle with Magneto? He'd fuck your shit up.

No, I'm not going to go and get implants, not now anyway. But there's a real allure here. Unlike the RFID implants that are starting to crop up, this implant is for your benefit, not that of some monitoring agency's. It's sensory, and while distinctive, isn't uniquely trackable. And, unlike the mundane benefits of an RFID chip like, say, immediate medical identification, you get the equivalent of a third eye.

And while we're talking about outlandish pseudo-cyborg technology, you can read up on pierced eyeglasses. The inventor of these also wants to move towards only mounting a magnetic base through the piercing rather than the glasses themselves; thus avoiding the risk of snagging the glasses and tearing one's face open. That's a good risk to avoid.