I am one of a group of biohackers involved in a project to test the limits of human visual perception by increasing retinal sensitivity to NIR light. Our project, which we crowdfunded last Autumn with the Experiment (nee Microryza) scientific crowdfunding platform, is a pilot study using ourselves as the test subjects/data points of a brute force metabolic hack which we hypothesize will permit us to visually perceive radiant energy in the NIR range of wavelengths.

Essentially, we intend to purge our bodies of a significant percentage of stored retinoids (vitamin A) via reduction of body fat and the adoption of a vitamin A deficient (VAD) diet supplied to us by Rob Rhinehart of Soylent fame, and supplement with the compound 3,4-dehydroretinol (vitamin A2) and retinoic acid. Based on research by Dr. George Wald, the man who discovered the role of vitamin A in phototransduction, and multiple murine studies performed on mammalian subjects, we hypothesize that this will result in the metabolic pathway normally used by the human body to produce photopsin and rhodopsin in the rods and cones of the human eye instead being coopted to produce porphyropsin, a phototransductive pigment described by Dr. Wald in his whitepaper "The Porphyropsin Visual System" that is sensitive to wavelengths of light far in excess of those humans are normally sensitive to on the NIR portion of the spectrum.

The primary tool we will use to measure a shift in visible wavelengths quantitatively will be an open source electroretinography (ERG) device in combination with a homemade stimulator device that utilizes several LEDs of a known wavelength in the NIR.