Seven years ago Michel Roccati swerved to avoid an animal while riding his motorbike near Turin and smashed into a roadside bench. The crash “exploded the bones in my back”, Roccati says, severing his spinal cord and cutting all communication between his brain and legs.

“My doctors told me then that I would never be able to stand again, let alone walk,” says Roccati, who is 32. Then he activates a series of electrodes that neurosurgeons in Lausanne threaded along his spinal cord in a pioneering operation in 2020.

His body shudders gently for a second or two and he rises from his chair, stepping out confidently across the room, though holding on to a walker for balance. “Every day my ability to walk improves, as my muscles become stronger and my nerves gradually regenerate,” he says.