We Are All Bewildered Machines - Issue 66: Clockwork 

When did you realize you were a machine? But one whose parts and operations can be described like the components of a computer. I remember a day in 2012 when this thought pierced me to the bone. I was in the lab of John Donoghue at Brown University. Donoghue is a professor of neuroscience and a pioneer in the development of brain-computer interfaces. With easygoing authority, Donoghue was detailing for me the ways he and his colleagues taught Cathy Hutchinson, a 58-year-old woman who had lost control of her limbs in a stroke, to control a robotic arm with her thoughts and sip coffee from a bottle.