How is the life of Neil Harbisson, the cyborg artist who now seeks to ‘feel’ time

Affected by a rare disease, Neil Harbisson only sees in black and white. But this artist placed an antenna on his skull that allows him to transform colors into sounds and listen to them as music.

Now this 39 year old british cyborg, who lives near Barcelona, you are trying a necklace that you want to allow you to physically feel the passage of time.

At first glance, the metal antenna protruding from its skull resembles a small reading lamp. But it allows you to capture the frequencies of colors and translate them into sounds that, by bone conduction, reach your ears.

“It allows me to feel the colors from infrared to ultraviolet through vibrations in my head that turn into sound, that is, I can really hear the colors,” he tells AFP.

For example, you can listen Queen of the night of Mozart passing his antenna in front of a painting made of bands of bright colors, corresponding to this aria of The magic Flute. You see the colors while listening to the music in your brain already conditioned to make this color and sound association.

Born with acromatopsia, a rare disease that causes me to only see in black and white, Neil Harbisson developed an obsession with color. So much so that he underwent surgery to install the antenna, designed during his studies at the university.

“Being a cyborg means that technology is part of your identity,” he says.

“It’s all part of my perception,” says Harbisson

The bone conduction technique was used 200 years ago by Beethoven when he began to become deaf, as the German composer discovered that he could hear if he put one end of a wooden stick on the piano and the other between his teeth while playing.

“At first, everything was chaotic because the antenna didn’t tell me: ‘blue, yellow, pink’. It gave me vibes and I didn’t know what color was in front of it, ”says Harbisson.

“But after a time, my brain got used to it and it slowly became part of my perception”, Adds this Briton raised in Barcelona (northeast of Spain).

Got used so much that now you can dream “in color” and he realizes when he wakes up that those colors “were created by my brain” and not by the antenna.

In his house, the walls are lined with colored canvases and the stairs adorned with “facial scores” of celebrities such as Leonardo di Caprio, Tom Cruise or Woody Allen, which allow Harbisson to detect the “sound” of his skin color or of lips.

Neil Harbisson’s Time Necklace

Now his attention turns to another project. You are testing a device that looks like a metal necklace that you hope will allow you to feel time.

“There is a hot spot that takes 24 hours to turn around my neck and will allow me to feel the rotation of the planet“, Explain.

The idea is that the brain adapts slowly to the physical sensation of the passage of time, after which it may be possible to manipulate that perception.

“Once the brain gets used to it, you can use an app to make subtle changes to the speed of the hot spot, which should alter the perception of time,” he details.

“You can potentially stretch the time or make it seem like it’s going faster,” he adds.

For now, it is a device welded around your neck. A previous prototype failed as it gave him burns at 6 in the afternoon.

“It is an art that carries some risk, but it is an unknown risk because we do not have much history of the union of bodies and technology,” he asserts. (I)