ORANGE TONES: Neil Harbisson wearing his “eyeborg,” a device that converts light waves into vibrations that lend a touch of color to his world DAN WILTON / REDBULLETIN
As a kid growing up in Barcelona, Spain, Neil Harbisson could tell you that the sky was blue, the grass was green, and a lemon was yellow. But he couldn’t tell you exactly what all those descriptions really meant. Born with a rare inherited condition similar to the one that plagued the Pacific islanders neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote about in The Island of the Colorblind, Harbisson sees only in shades of gray, and had simply memorized the colors he thought he was supposed to know. But it wasn’t until he was 11 years old that he learned that he didn’t perceive the world in the same way as most people.
“I noticed that other students at school could identify colors easier than me,” he recalls. ...
