Coinciding with the 2017 OHBM meeting is the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first three fMRI papers using the BOLD effect. In the quarter century since those seminal papers came out, fMRI has become an essential, noninvasive methodology for the OHBM community and has yielded many insightful contributions about brain function across disciplines as diverse as education, neuroscience and business. Well over 15,000 fMRI papers have been published in over 3000 journals an it's safe to say more than 10 times as many conference abstracts have been submitted. fMRI has even made it into pop culture, with frequent references on TV shows such as House, CSI and Grey's Anatomy. At this important juncture in time, it is worth taking a pause to look back on where fMRI came from, where it stands today and where it is going in the future - especially as many brain initiatives around the world continue to develop around the technique. Uniquely, this symposium will include first person accounts of those historic events combined with perspectives of what has surprised us over the intervening 25 years (Ogawa, Menon, Bandettini). Insightful commentary by two current leaders in MRI hardware and data analytics (wald and and Mourao-Miranda) will attempt to address the future of fMRI. Through this symposium, an entire new generation of researchers will be reconnected with the exciting and inspiring events that lead to the discovery of BOLD and its application to functional brain imaging, and catch a glimpse of where the field may be going.