If you ever watched a big-brained cartoon character’s head radiate with a green or yellow glow when they’re using the incredible powers of their mind and wondered, why not me? Why can’t my brain glow when I think? Good news! It does, you just need a lot of highly specialized and incredibly expensive scientific equipment to see it.

As reported by Popular Mechanics and discovered by researchers at Algoma University in Ontario, your brain emits faint flashes of visible light. These aren’t bright brain beams that can light a darkened room. They’re extremely weak photon emissions, or UPEs. Essentially, when your brain burns through energy, it sheds teeny-tiny particles of light as a byproduct. Every time you form a thought, you’re turning yourself into a giant, meaty flashlight.

This isn’t like the bioluminescence you encounter in some jellyfish here on Earth or on everything on the Na’vi homeworld of Pandora. UPEs are something else entirely. They’re little ghost flashes caused when electrons in your brain lose steam and release photons as a chemical sigh of exhaustion.

The scientists targeted the left occipital lobe (which deals with visual stuff) and the right temporal lobe (which deals with nonverbal stuff) to determine if UPEs could be separated from normal brain chatter. They can, and the researchers think these faint flickers might actually be used for medical diagnostics someday.

Since UPEs are tied to oxidative metabolism, they could help detect things like brain tumors, trauma, and early signs of neurodegenerative diseases, without needing to stuff your head into a billion-dollar MRI machine that can rip out that one awkwardly placed piercing you forgot to remove. Instead, some other type of machine that doesn’t exist yet will pick up the subtle twinkles your neurons leave behind.