SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Starting April 2023, some people may visit this page based on the announcement we put in the latest email from the BCI Society with our newsletter. Thank you for your interest in movie night! I’m on the BCIS Communications Committee that wrote the newsletter and will organize the BCI-fi movie night if there’s enough interest. — Brendan Allison.
The Neural Futures Installation at MIT has a database with over 450 BCI-references and many BCI-fi exhibit items, including analyses of BCI-fi. The BCI Guys produced a video about it.
There’s a Wikipedia page titled “Brain Computer Interfacing in Fiction” with over 50 examples.
The BCI wiki also lists many examples of BCI-fi.
The Neurratives podcasts explore neuroscience in fiction, with several podcasts about BCI-fi.
Nick Halper’s article, Brain Computer Interfaces: The reciprocal role of science fiction and reality, includes some good early examples of BCI-fi.
Professor Andrea Kübler published an article in the journal “Brain” titled Brain-Computer Interfacing: Science Fiction has Come True. This short article doesn’t focus on BCI-fi so much as how real BCI technology is catching up to examples from BCI-fi. Prof. Kübler has been a top expert in BCI research for over 20 years, and her 2001 review article is underappreciated (Kübler, 2001).
Many awards and anthologies feature BCI-fi amidst broader topics like science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Check out the Hugo, Nebula, and Saturn awards, or anthologies like Weird Tales, Galaxy Magazine or Amazing Stories.
Becca Caddy wrote an article titled Star Trek | How Close Is Today’s Tech to TNG’s Ktarian Game? Indeed, the different Star Trek shows have often addressed BCI-fi.
The very first episode of Star Trek featured a BCI, and is one of the best and most realistic portrayals of modern BCIs in any BCI-fi. It’s realistic by modern standards; we’ll hopefully have better BCIs in the 23rd century. Here’s what I wrote about that first episode (Graimann et al., 2009):
These are only a few examples to get this section of bcifi.org started. If you know of examples that I’m missing, please let me know via email or in the comments below.
References
Graimann, B., Allison, B., Pfurtscheller, G. (2009). Brain–Computer Interfaces: A Gentle Introduction. In: Graimann, B., Pfurtscheller, G., Allison, B. (eds) Brain-Computer Interfaces. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Kübler, A., Kotchoubey, B., Kaiser, J., Wolpaw, J. R., & Birbaumer, N. (2001). Brain–computer communication: Unlocking the locked in. Psychological Bulletin, 127(3), 358.
Thanks to Professor Emeritus Anton Nijholt for sending me some of these examples. Anton has been a huge figure in BCI and Arts and is one of the most easygoing guys I know.
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