Hello world! My name is Teon, I’m from Charlotte, NC (Go Hornets!), and a Carolina alum (Go Heels!). I am finishing my PhD at NYU in cognitive neuroscience (defending today! Oct 13! #TeonDefends). Soon I will be a researcher at The Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

As a researcher, I am interested in understanding how the brain processes language via its storage and retrieval. I am also interested in understanding what exactly does this “mental dictionary” of words look like.

I use some pretty cool technology:

I use a machine called an MEG, which stands for magnetoencephalogram. It kind of looks like Cerebro, and we use it to measure very, very small, like femto-Telsa (0.000000000000001 T!) small, magnetic fields that our brain produces when it does a task.

 

I also use eye-tracking equipment. This allows me to look at your eyes as they scan the world and take in information. I use it to understand the eye movement behavior the brain produces to process  written text. I look at the way your eyes from word to word, sometimes staying a short while or sometimes hopping along to the next word.

I also work on developing software that allows us to take all this data in and make sense out of it. There are two major projects that I am working on: the MNE project and the OpenEXP project.

MNE is a community-based project for researchers and developers who are interested in analysis MEG and EEG data (see what we did there ;) ).

The OpenEXP project is envisioned as a collection of projects to make science great again! Its core product, expfactory, developed by Vanessa, allows us to run a battery of psychology experiments on the interwebs. A related product, openexp, developed by me and Andy, aims to build on this and jsPsych and create a desktop-friendly app for researchers and learners, alike.

We want to build on this core product, and re-imagine how experimental psychology and cognitive science is taught. There are developing plans to redo introductory psychology with hands-on experiments, coding, and more.

I love teaching and I recently piloted a new workshop on DIY Cognitive Science. With my friend, Piya, and our awesome team of volunteer instructors, we taught a two-day workshop in Bangkok, Thailand (#DIYSciThai) on building eye-trackers and EEG headsets. Our goal is to team up with the OpenEXP project and teach coding, hardware hacking, and basic cognitive science, making it accessible to all.

Follow along my adventure. My goal is to create open-source software that help researchers get stuff done, learners get stuff learned, and bring science to everyone in an accessible way.

Twitter: @teon_io
Website: teonbrooks.github.io
GitHub: @teonbrooks