Nielsen not only wants to measure what you watch, it wants to know what you think. The audience measurement company announced that it has made a “strategic investment” in NeuroFocus, a company that applies brainwave research to advertising, programming and messaging. The two companies will work on to creating new forms of measurement and metrics from a neuroscientific perspective. The amount of the investment was not revealed.

Some of the Berkeley, CA.-based company’s services have been used by marketers for a while, such as eye-tracking. NeuroFocus’ claims to take in viewer data on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis - tracking attention and memory retention. Nielsen will begin offering NeuroFocus to particular clients within the consumer packaged goods, TV, film and emerging media areas. At the same time, Nielsen will mix NeuroFocus’ techniques with its own as it tries to promise advanced engagement analytics to its customers. So while this doesn’t mean Nielsen will be able to exert any control over viewers’ brains, Mediaweek, a Nielsen unit, with its tongue planted in cheek, does ask: Can chips embedded in the brain be that far off? Release