I am a cyborg and cyborg comes from the union between cybernetics and organism
and that's how I feel.
I have a visual condition called achromatism, which is total color blindness.
My antenna is a body part and it allows me to hear colors, so it has a color sensor
that picks up the light frequencies in front of me,
it sends the light frequencies to a chip at the back of my head.
and then the chip transposes the colors into sound waves.
So I hear color through bone conduction.
Is this a program?
This will be short documentary on the internet
and it will be about colors, hearing colors or I don't know...
What is your surname?
Neil Harbisson
Yeah, I can write it down if you want.
I don't feel that I'm using technology,
I don't feel that I'm wearing technology,
I feel that I am technology.
I feel no difference between the software and my brain
or the antenna and and the other body part.
The software is a part of my mind and the antenna is a part of my body.
I convinced the doctor to have it surgically implanted and now it's just inside.
- Is it? Yeah. Is it? Oh, wow! - So, it's just the antennae implant.
So you have it on all the time?
Yeah, it's permanent, it's a body part.
- So you take it of and put it back? - How do you sleep?
I sleep with the antenna, I take showers with antenna, it's just a new body part for me.
Wow!
So having new senses or new body parts will create new conversations between people.
And it will be conversations about their perception of reality and about senses.
They are also interested in knowing for example how their face sound I just scan their face
and tell them how they sound so it creates
conversations that I would never have had with people,
If I didn't have this sense.
So before I realized that people would make connections between things or objects,
and I could not see the link between these two objects,
for example, the color of the sky and the color of someone's eyes.
I mean the grayscale world is no connection.
Now that I can hear color I have such connections and connections go beyond that as well,
cause also when I hear sounds I can relate the sound to an object
or a color so if I hear the g-sharp of a taxi
like the horn of a taxi that to me is related to lion for example.
Cause it sounds just like a lion.
I used to think that humans were black and white, and since I hear color I've detected it's completely wrong.
There's no black skin, people that say they're black, they are actually very, very dark orange.
And people that say they're white, they are not white, they actually very very light orange as well.
So we are actually all sharing exactly the same hue.
The same happens with cities, people say cities are grey,
and this makes me realize that maybe people are colorblind, cause cities are not grey,
there's no grey in cities, it's almost impossible to find grey.
If they look closer, they will see that it's not grey, it's usually unsaturated brown, or unsaturated blue.
There's always some hue, there's always color.
Time square is one of the most exciting places in the world, I think it's just music everywhere
you look at, so there's maybe twenty different electronic concerts going on at the same time, in the same space.
I love it, it feels very special.
Color for me is energy that moves so fast that I can see,
or it moves so slow maybe that I can see. So its energy that keeps bouncing all over the place
and that people can actually see and then they have names for it.
Now I can't see but I can hear it and it's, it's still the same for me, it's, it's an energy.