Sid’s love of word games started with Scrabble in kindergarten, when he would surreptitiously scan the tiles with his fingertips to find valuable letters. He’s since graduated to crossword puzzles, where his sly operations are now in plain sight, in the clues. His day job involves researching a special kind of cipher: he’s trying to decrypt the electrical signals of the brain and nervous system, especially in conditions like epilepsy and stroke. (It turns out that nature is responsible for the most sophisticated code we’ve ever seen.)