Mostafa “Neo” Mohsenvand often walks around with a fisheye lens on a smartphone strapped to his chest and a black, electrode-covered neoprene EEG cap on his head. All, mind you, for science.

Mohsenvand, a graduate student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab, is trying to learn about what makes moments memorable by zealously gathering as much data as possible about himself and the world around him, and matching up his biometric signals with times and events.

Since January, Mohsenvand has been wearing the camera and a black physiological signal-tracking band strapped to his left wrist, generally for three to 16 hours a day. In June he also added the mobile EEG headset in order to gather brain-wave data while on the go.