“How much can I consciously evolve the human body — to do it more, do it better, do it faster, do it stronger?” asks Shawn Sarver, a barber and self-dubbed cybernetics engineer, in the intriguing short documentary American Cyborg.

“I just want to see how far I can push the human,” Sarver says in the video, moments before getting a neodymium magnet inserted into his finger at a tattoo parlor in Pittsburgh. Implanting magnets into the fingertips is a particularly popular body hack that gives the sensation of a “sixth sense,” the ability to feel magnetic fields in the environment.

Sarver and his friend Tim Cannon formed a group they call Grindhouse Wetware that explores body hacking and transhumanism. Like other DIY body hackers, they tend to do their experiments in home labs, outside the confines of hospitals and operating rooms and beyond the watch of medical professionals.

These homebrew body modders, sometimes called “grinders,” glean the information they need from numerous sources — including Wikipedia, Google searches, online forums like biohack.me and books — as well as from trial and error.

The fascinating and sometimes graphic documentary by Ben Popper also gives a brief look into the life of extreme Scotland-based biohacker Lepht Anonym and pioneering body modder Kevin Warwick, cybernetics professor at the University of Reading in England.

An in-depth story, “Cyborg America: Inside the Strange New World of Basement Body Hackers,” accompanies the short film on The Verge.