How Will Our Perception of Bodies Change as We Augment Them?

At night, as John Kriesel slept on his bed at Walter Reed Medical Center, his prosthetic legs were locked in a closet. Kriesel had just recently lost both his legs when a bomb blast tore through his Humvee in Iraq.

He was glad to be alive, but his recovery was incredibly painful. His prosthetic legs felt like stilts, and the weight of his body drove the still tender stumps of his legs into them. His legs were locked up because he wasn't supposed to be using his legs alone, without supervision. He struggled to find normality.

"At first it was extremely difficult," Kriesel told me. "The prosthetics felt completely foreign to my body."

Kriesel now needed to make sense of his body, and where his prosthetics fit in. While this question is much more drastic for amputees, this process will become more and more relevant for society as a whole as technology is increasingly able to transform our bodies. After all, no one is able-bodied forever, and everyone to some extent uses technology to augment their bodies.

Kriesel knew prosthetics could help him walk again, but more than anything, he just wanted life to return to normal. Not having his legs meant he couldn't do certain things the same way, and would have to teach himself anew. He wanted to coach his son's baseball team. He wanted to fish again. He said he understood he lost his legs, but he needed to focus on the things he could control: his attitude and his will.

This often occurs with recent amputees. In her book Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self, the anthropologist Lenore Manderson explored how people who have undergone massive bodily changes struggled with finding their identity. Life after an amputation was the search to feel normal again in a society which defines them by what they are not. In her book, the women measured their progress by their ability to look "normal," while the men felt happiest when they could do what other men do.

"A constant in my interviews: people say they have not changed, their body has gone changes as a result of an accident or injury, but they themselves are the same person as before," Manderson said over the phone.

During his recovery, Kriesel used the same internal drive that led him to becoming a staff sergeant in the Army. First, he walked on his legs using parallel bars with a helper. Then, as he grew comfortable with the bars, he graduated to a walker, with someone walking behind him. Soon, he could walk using two canes, and then one. "It was the only way to get back to the life back home, to battle through the pain," he said.

When he got home, however, he found that people could not help staring at his new legs. Adults would try to hide their glances, while children were more obvious about it. People didn't know how to talk about or approach his prosthetics. This is an anxiety that goes back to the dawn of war: an amputation was a physical reminder that a person's body was no longer the same as everyone else's.

"Physicians, therapists, psychologists, and ordinary citizens alike often regarded veterans as men whose recent amputation was physical proof of emasculation or general incompetence, or else a kind of monstrous de-familiarization of the 'normal' male body," the professor David Serlin wrote in the book Artificial Parts, Practical Lives.

The replacement of human body parts with technological parts carries with it an additional stigma. Prosthetics in fiction are often portrayed as menacing or villainous: Darth Vader, with his breathing apparatus and prosthetic limbs, was deemed "more machine than man." In addition, the debates over steroids and blade legs in sports or plastic surgery in Hollywood show a certain wariness regarding artificial changes to the natural processes of the body.

"People think technological interventions of this sort, if taken too far, will change humans and what we've come to know as a human, but on the other hand, there's no fixed thing as a human," Abou Farman, a professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, said. "We've changed the human body for generations."

Many of us, for example, make use of medical technology with our bodies. Contacts and glasses to fix our sight. Dental fillings to fix our teeth. Pacemakers to repair our hearts. These are augmentations to build our bodies.

"Bodies are socially created entities," Farman said. "Physiologically, bodies are shaped by the things they ingest, what they're asked to do, the environments they live in—these all shape the body in the exterior. The body of a bodybuilder or a runway model or a person who works an office job is going to be different."

Seen in this manner, the human body has constantly been augmented by technology, and will continue to be in the future. The cyborg Neil Harbisson wears a bowtie around his neck, and an antenna on his head. Harbisson, a London artist who suffers from total colorblindness, enlisted the help of a cyberneticist to develop a device he implanted into his skull to transform colors into sounds. He calls his device an "eyeborg." Other possible advancements in prosthetics include legs that feel and brain chips to restore memory to injured soldiers.

These advancements could be part of a prosthetic flowering, in which the goal is not going back to "normal," but understanding that normal is created for everyone. Manderson, for example, cannot use her hand anymore without a brace. There are certain surgeries she could undergo to "restore" her hand, but she does not feel they are worth the risk. Instead, her brace became a part of her identity, and she adorned her brace to make it beautiful.

Motherboard met up with Neil Harbisson in 2012.

"After 15 years of wearing a brace, I can't imagine being any other way, because for me, that's how I am," Manderson said. "My identity now is a person who has a brace."

It's been eight years with his new legs, and Kriesel now feels they're a part of him. Gradually, as he used them everyday from morning to night, they began to feel like part of his body. "This is my life now," Kriesel said. "I don't feel I have prosthetics, although every night I'm reminded. I'm just used to them."

Kriesel eventually found what he called "a new normal." Once he medically retired and found a job, he began to feel again like he was contributing and doing something, instead of just sitting in a hospital bed. He ran for election in the Minnesota House of Representatives, walking door to door on his prosthetics. He won, served a term, and today works for veterans groups.

He also seeks to normalize his prosthetics with others. When he sees people staring, he often asks people if they had any questions. To the children, he tells them that he had an "owie in Iraq" and now has "robot legs." He said there should be more conversation about prosthetics, so there can be more empathy.

Not everyone has access to the kind of technology and care Kriesel received, of course. And technology cannot cure social ills when social inequality and bad policy reign. If a society wants fewer legless veterans, for example, the solution is not better prosthetics—it's less war.

Still, as more amputees are show off their devices, perhaps some of the unfamiliarity will go away.

"Normal is obviously relative," Kriesel said. "I had to realize I couldn't do things the way I could be before. I can still go fishing. I just can't do it in the same way. Once I learned this I learned to be comfortable with myself."