If the technology existed to swap your perfectly good eyes with malfunctioning ones and then swap them back again a day later, would you?

It’s not as ridiculous an idea as it might sound; technology is advancing rapidly and it’s perfectly plausible that in the future we’ll have the capability to exchange one set of eyes, ears or limbs for another. Mix this technology with a trend towards an aspiration for extending life, enhancing human bodies and our constant desire for new experiences and you’ve got the embryo of a culture that would quite willingly swap good body parts for bad so they knew how it felt.

If that seems unbelievable then consider Dans le Noir, a popular restaurant in London where you eat in the pitch dark; a fascinating experience that goes way beyond the food. It was the strangeness of such an evening that prompted me to imagine the leap from this simulation to actual body part swapping.

The big question though is whether it would change the nature of our society; how would we view those that choose to keep the faulty bodies they were born with? Would we be more sympathetic because we’d had a taste ourselves, albeit briefly, or less sympathetic because they could be ‘fixed’ if they wanted to?