“I personally am very excited about this idea of brain decoding, this idea that we can measure brain activity and figure out where your thoughts are,” says Lucas Parra, professor of biomedical engineering at CCNY. “I work in the lab with electroencephalography. It records electric brain signals … how we perceive sound, images … speech. We’re looking at what happens when you’re watching movies or when you’re playing video games,” Parra says. “We get a sense of are people engaged, are they paying attention, will they remember what they saw weeks later. … Different modalities allow you to analyze different kinds of neuro processes associated with decision-making and things that are maybe more downstream from the initial perception.”