Color-Blind Man Is Now A Cyborg Who Can Hear Color

When Neil Harbisson was a kid, he could only see in black and white.

In fact, he wasn't totally convinced that colors actually existed.

But now, Harbisson can sense color.

He still can't see colors. But now he can hear them with a device he helped create in 2004 called the Eyeborg.

The device can detect 360 colors the human eye can normally perceive. It also detects infrared light.

"Hearing colors changes the way you see everything," Harbisson says in a Cyborg Foundation video.

Harbisson says he finds the sounds generated by colors in supermarkets "stimulating."

He also turns music, like Justin Bieber's "Baby," for example, into vibrant paintings—translating the sounds of the song back into the colors he's learned to associate with them.

Harbisson says that he is the first legally recognized cyborg in the world, as his passport photo shows him with the Eyeborg attached to his head.

"It's not the union between the Eyeborg and my head what converts me to a cyborg," Harbisson says. It's "the union between the software and my brain. My body and technology have united."

Watch the video of Harbisson using the Eyeborg below.

CYBORG FOUNDATION | Rafel Duran Torrent from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.