Upon hearing first of BCI (brain-computer interface) technology several years ago, my first thought was not “wouldn’t this be useful for medical patients?”, but rather “this holds an amazing amount of promise in the arts”. Everyone seems to be thinking about low level spatial movements – things on the order of controlling limbs with thoughts or – if they’re ambitious – moving pointers across a screen. None of them seem to be thinking thoughts such as “Can we decode artistic or musical ideas and represent them instantly on a computer?” Now that would be amazing.

It’s a significant research challenge, but the idea needs to be present before the research can begin.