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My grandmother is amazing. She is the strongest person I know. Every morning, she walks three miles, taking each step with such an intensity that I’m surprised that the ground doesn’t burst into flame around her. Once, she fell while walking. Had we not by coincidence planned a doctor’s appointment for the next week, we would not have known that she broke her shoulder. She did not complain once. Because of her, art has become an integral part of my life. Not a day goes by when I do not put pen to paper and draw, or imagine how I could mix my paints to capture the colors of the trees or the sky. The painting above is her. She is the one who taught me to paint. She explained that when we force our perceptions on the world, we are blind. She taught me not to look for what I believe, but to see things as they are. For all her self-confidence, she hated having her picture taken, because the skin around her mouth and jaw is darkened as though she has been sunburned, or as if a permanen...

The mind has always excited me. Since I was young, I’ve grappled with concepts such as consciousness, perception, and memory through deep reflection about the way my mind works. But as I grew older, I ran into a problem: thought alone can’t be used to discover truths about the mind. To learn about the mind, we must to create experiments and make measurements. That is why I want to approach the questions of the mind from a different angle: science. Through science, the intricate puzzle of our mind has begun to be pieced together: we have even created machines that can see into our dreams. However, progress is still slow. But what if we could bypass the senses and communicate directly with the brain? Information would be closer than our fingertips: it would be one thought away. The implications of a brain-machine interface reach past even revolutionizing our interactions with machines. We could finally understand human consciousness and perception. I'll admit, my dreams sound li...