My name is Sean Adami. While in a recent deep conversation with my older brother, he brought up that he was an empath. After researching “empath,” I found out that empaths hold the ability to perceive emotions of others and have different reactions to environments and people. This was me. So many things that I was curious about had clicked: my passion for creative writing, my interest for neuroscience inventions, and my wide capacity to experience emotions of other people and even forms of entertainment. It was almost cathartic.

When I was young, I found that through storytelling I was able to convey my imagination into something alive. Always hearing my stories and convoluted ideas, my father gave me a black journal where my imagination could run free. Writing with my invisible ink pen, my seven-year-old self flashed the UV light to fill in the secret messages of my short story. As I began to write, my passion was radiating. Over time, I began to develop more complicated syntax and figurative language to strengthen my stories.

During the summer of my Junior year, I began writing the first page of my science fiction novel Spirit Intercom. Incorporating ideas of neuroscience and medical engineering into my writing, Spirit Intercom evolved into a hybrid of these two subjects: neuro-fiction. One year later, I published my 380-page book on Amazon. Publishing this work of art felt so rewarding, and a spurt of confidence amplified so significantly within me that I immediately developed more ideas of future literary works. Approaching friends, family, and even book reviewers on Instagram, I found where my weak and strong points existed in my book, and I immediately took action on most of the suggestions. Filling in plot holes and giving more life to my characters, I set the ground for who I wanted to be as a writer: a writer that gave meaning to a story. As I progressed in my writing, I embellished my passion for neuroscience with more of my stories.

I interned at Alpha Fiber eager to contribute towards the startup's concussion research that uses cameras alone to detect concussions in real time with Dr. Arash Adami. Learning how to write a white paper and analyze MRI data, I sympathized for people who suffered from brain injury and was determined to better boost future prevention for head trauma. Whether the topic was water diffusion changes or dopamine release, my interest in neuroscience continued to grow. As I learned every detail about how our brain electrochemically reacted when under certain conditions, the technology available to solve neural issues such as these intrigued me even more to pursue my interest in this specific biomedical field.

As I interned for Alpha Fiber, 30 different kinds of fictional neuroscience devices gradually popped in my head, such as the post parietal cortex converter that enhances a person’s spatial sensing of what they perceived in the past. I even dreamed of engineering my fictional devices into real physical machines. As my demand for more creative content arose, I developed the idea of writing a prequel and a sequel for my book. Ideas for short films embraced me. Taking inspiration from movies such as WALL-E and Interstellar, I learned how science fiction could leave a marking on people individually and collectively. Maintaining an equilibrium of writing and science changes how I perceive the physical world: not getting too caught up in the laws of the universe while also managing an orderly life of planning and scheduling.

As I have grown, I’ve learned to love myself and independently detach myself from outside voices. Always sensitive to how others thought about me, I learned to handle my neural overseer. Having recently learned that I was an empath, I took initiative to not always take things so personally with my classmates and even my close friends. Wherever I go, I will continue to create and never shut out my curiosity.