While [UC-Berkeley's Jack] Gallant decodes what we see, Moran Cerf from the California Institute of Technology is decoding what we think about. He uses tiny electrodes to measure the activity of individual neurons in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in creating memories. In this way, he can identify neurons that fire in response to specific concepts – say, Marilyn Monroe or Yoda. Cerf’s work is a lot like Gallant’s – he effectively creates a dictionary that links concepts to patterns of neural activity. "You think about something and because we learned what your brain looks like when you think about that thing, we can make inferences," he says.