And now, this 39-year-old British "cyborg", living near Barcelona, ​​is testing a collar allowing him to physically feel the passing of time in order to change his perception of it.

At first glance, the antenna protruding above his head looks like a strange lamp.

But capturing the frequencies of the colors, it transforms them into vibrations which, by bone conduction, reach its inner ear.

"It allows me to feel the colors from infrared to ultraviolet through vibrations in my head that turn into sound, so I can hear the colors," he told AFP.

He can thus hear Mozart's "The Air of the Queen of the Night" by passing his antenna in front of a painting composed of a series of colored bands, the colors and widths of which correspond to this air of the "Magic Flute", and mentally sees colors as soon as he listens to music, his brain now being conditioned by this color-sound association.

Born with achromatopsia, a rare disease causing black and white vision, Neil Harbisson grew up obsessed with colors.

So much so that he had an operation to fix in his skull this antenna, designed during his studies at the university, and which is now an integral part of his body, thus transforming him into a "cyborg".

Artist Neil Harbisson wears an antenna fixed in his skull allowing him to transform colors into sounds to hear them like music, September 23, 2021 in Mataro, near Barcelona Josep LAGO AFP

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

A cacophony of colors

This bone conduction of sound was used before by Beethoven when he began to become deaf.

He then discovered that he could still hear by placing a wooden stick on the piano and squeezing the other end between his teeth as he played to feel the vibrations.

Some 200 years later, bone-anchored hearing aids work the same way.

“At first, everything was chaotic because the antenna didn't tell me: blue, yellow, pink, it was sending me vibrations and I had no idea what color I had in front of me. my brain got used to it for a while, ”he recalls.

Artist Neil Harbisson wears an antenna fixed in his skull allowing him to transform colors into sounds to hear them like music, September 23, 2021 in Mataro, near Barcelona Josep LAGO AFP

And he's got so used to it that he can dream "in color" and realizes when he wakes up that these colors "were created by my brain" and not by the antenna.

In his house, a flowering of colorful canvases are attached to the walls while the stairwell hosts curious "facial scores" of celebrities such as Leonardo di Caprio, Tom Cruise or Woody Allen.

As part of an artistic project, they all let Neil Harbisson approach them with his antenna to detect the frequencies and the "sound" of their skin tone and the color of their lips, which have become of enigmatic charcoal lines.

The necklace of time

But beyond colors, Neil Harbisson tries, through his art, to find new ways to extend his senses by modifying the brain's perception of reality.

He is about to begin a one-year trial with a device in the form of a metal collar intended to physically perceive the passing of time.

"There is a point of heat which takes 24 hours to turn around my neck and which allows me to feel the rotation of the planet", he explains.

Artist Neil Harbisson wears an antenna fixed in his skull allowing him to transform colors into sounds to hear them like music, September 23, 2021 in Mataro, near Barcelona Josep LAGO AFP

The goal?

That the brain slowly adapts to the physical sensation of the passing of time, after which it should be possible to manipulate this perception.

“Once the brain gets used to it, you can use an app to make subtle changes to the speed of the heat point, which should alter your perception of time - you could potentially stretch time or make it seem like that it passes faster, "he says.

For now, it is a wearable device rather than an implant.

A previous version had to be scrapped because it systematically "burned" it at 6 p.m., he smiles, before judging that "it's an art that involves a form of risk because we don't have a lot of history of fusion between bodies and technology ".

© 2021 AFP