A man decided to turn himself into a goat so he could take a break from being human — here's what it was like

Tim Bowditch

When life gets unbearably stressful, most of us opt for a vacation that relieves us of the worries of day-to-day life.

Thomas Thwaites, a UK-based designer, decided to take that a step further and take a break from being a human entirely. He became a goat.

Seriously. With the help of a team of researchers and the financial support of London-based biomedical research group Wellcome Trust, Thwaites built himself a suit to achieve goat status and cross the Alps, all of which he chronicles in his upcoming book.

For Thwaites, the project wasn't just a physical adventure. It was a psychological one, too.

"I started thinking of the project as kind of this investigation into what present-day science and technology could do to help me achieve what I think is this ancient human desire of becoming more like an animal," Thwaites told Business Insider.

Here's what the experiment was like:

This is Thomas Thwaites. He's a designer. You might know him from his TED Talk about building a toaster from scratch. Last year, he decided that he wanted to take a break from being a human.

Watch that TED talk here.

At first, Thwaites wanted to try being an elephant. Its size, he thought, would make it easier to transition from a two-legged person to a four-legged animal. But he changed his plan after speaking with a shaman who said that he'd connect better to his environment if he chose to become a goat.

Next, Thwaites went about discovering how to be a goat. He spoke to goat behavioral experts to find out how and what goats think. After finding out that activity in several parts of his brain distinguish him from a goat, he met with a neuroscientist at University College London to try and hack a system for temporarily shutting those parts off, particularly the Broca's area, which is related to speech. To Thwaites' dismay, the technology to turn off a person's ability to understand language isn't there yet. So, Thwaites decided to focus on the physical aspects of becoming a goat.