[Feature: The Frontlines of Brain Science] Takayuki Tatsumi: The Wandering Cyberbrain—A Genealogy of Cyberpunk Imagination

2022/03/07

In 1935, Kyusaku Yumeno attempted a thorough critique of brain imperialism in his monumental eccentric masterpiece Dogra Magra, which challenged traditional psychiatry. Ultimately, he spun a tale that juxtaposed "Western scholarship" with the "blood of the Japanese race." Dr. Kyotaro Masaki, a professor of psychiatry at Kyushu Imperial University depicted in the book, proposed a theory of "liberational treatment for the insane," suggesting that rather than the mad entering mental hospitals, there is essentially no one on Earth who is not insane. He also proposed a "Brain Theory" proving the thesis that "the brain is not the place where one thinks," and a "Fetal Dream" theory based on "psychological heredity," which posits that a human fetus experiences the entirety of human history from ancient times to the future before being born. He reinterpreted dreams biologically, treating the dream and the subject as unrelated. "A dream could be called the unique art of the cells, which combines groups of memories of objects, hallucinations, and associations—images symbolizing moods and feelings understood only by the cells that are the protagonists of that dream—without logic or plot, depicting the transitions of those moods with extreme clarity" (Dogra Magra, Kyusaku Yumeno Complete Works Vol. 4, San-ichi Shobo edition, p. 140).

More than half a century later, at the end of the 20th century, as if to substantiate Yumeno's brain theory, American psychoanalyst and neuroscientist J. Allan Hobson pointed out under the banner of anti-Freudianism that dreams are by no means the result of transformed memories repressed in the subject's unconscious. Instead, he noted that dreams are merely the sleeping brain attempting to create a somewhat coherent story by combining internally generated signals, and he even discovered the groups of cells that start and stop REM sleep. In other words, "It is not the human who dreams; the brain dreams of its own accord." The brain is a non-human artist, a non-human wielder of phantom magic coexisting within the human being, and it may itself be an organism independent of the human.

I first became aware that brain science could be a narrative when I read Professor Dowell's Head, a novel whose first draft was published in a magazine in 1925 by Alexander Belyaev, one of the founders of Soviet SF.

The setting is Paris. To outmaneuver his mentor, Professor Dowell, who was a leader in cutting-edge research on reviving dead organisms, his disciple Professor Kern regenerates the head of Professor Dowell himself after he dies of asthma. While gaining suggestions for subsequent research, Kern steals his mentor's achievements. However, Professor Kern's skills in surgery are genuine. Along with his assistant Marie Laurent, he revives Briquet, a deceased former cabaret singer, by connecting her head to the body of Angelica, an Italian singer who died in an accident. Since they were originally different people, it was necessary to adapt Briquet's brain to Angelica's body, but eventually, the youth of the latter rejuvenates the former. The head and body fuse perfectly, and Briquet escapes the Research Centers and Institutes to sing again at her old cabaret. By this time, however, the assistant Laurent begins to have doubts about the work, so Kern imprisons her in the Ravineau Asylum to silence her. Just then, Armand Laray, Angelica's former lover who noticed something strange upon seeing Briquet sing, consults his best friend Arthur—Professor Dowell's son. Suspecting Briquet is a synthetic human, a great adventure to expose Professor Kern's misdeeds begins.

I read this book about half a century ago in the third volume of Iwasaki Shoten's "Belyaev: Juvenile Science Fantasy Selection" (6 volumes, translated by Yoshitaro Magami, 1968) in my junior high school library, and later in the eighth volume of Hayakawa Shobo's "World SF Complete Works" (35 volumes, translated by Ippei Fukuro, 1969). Whether read as a junior high student or reread now from a 21st-century perspective, the book's appeal remains unchanged. In terms of framework, it is a type of mad scientist SF in the lineage of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the origin of SF. However, it anticipates issues of research ethics and bioethics—which have recently drawn strict warnings from MEXT—and hints at the possibility that the body connected to Briquet's head could have been a male corpse, pioneering today's gender-bending SF. Above all, it evokes the 1980s cyberpunk sensibility of connecting cranial nerves to cyberspace through dermatodes (skin electrodes).

The appeal of Neuromancer (1984), the debut novel by William Gibson, a leading figure in cyberpunk SF, is not just the adventure of a computer hacker (a "cyberspace cowboy" in the story) who gets caught up in events while trying to recover his stripped ability to "jack in" to cyberspace. Scenes where the protagonist Case experiences the nervous system of the heroine Molly Millions—who wears surgically implanted mirror shades—through a "simstim" (simulated stimulation) to perceive reality should be noted as an example of how easily high technology can deconstruct gender.

"Sudden impact, and he was in someone else's body. The matrix was gone, a wave of sound and color—Molly was moving through a crowded street. [...] The mirror shades didn't seem to block the sunlight at all. Perhaps internal amplifiers corrected it automatically. Blue alphanumeric characters flashed the time. Lower left of Molly's peripheral vision. Showing off. [...]\n'How's it feel, Case?'\nHe heard the voice and felt Molly say it. Molly put a hand inside her jacket and, with her fingertips, stroked a nipple under the warm silk. Case gasped at the sensation. Molly laughed." (Neuromancer, Chapter 4 [Hayakawa Bunko SF], translated by Hisashi Kuromaru, p. 96)

It is by no means rare for people playing inside virtual reality to find the greatest pleasure in disguising their own gender. The first line of Venus City (1992) by Japanese cyberpunk writer Goro Masaki was "I've decided. I'm going to change my sex tonight." Similarly, the brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, who filmed the definitive cyberpunk Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), originally envisioned depicting the transition from the real world to the Matrix world through a sex change. Ultimately, instead of depicting it in the film, both transitioned to become sisters Lana and Lilly Wachowski after the trilogy was completed. This issue is likely not unrelated.

This kind of "simstim" is what opens the door to future entertainment.

Today, when the cyberspace assumed by cyberpunk is almost equivalent to today's Internet, and the Metaverse vividly described by Gibson's successor Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash (1992) has become a new market pioneered by the former Facebook (now Meta), the SF devices of the 1980s might seem to have long since been realized and become obsolete. However, the technology known as "simstim" (simulated stimulation) has still not been realized and will likely remain for posterity as a Gibsonian invention. This is because the simstim industry is what should replace the Hollywood film industry; simstim stars, rather than movie stars, are those who earn enormous profits by letting consumers experience their own nervous systems.

For example, suppose you take an international flight for a business trip. On that flight, services are currently provided that allow you to freely choose the movies you want to watch. The future entertainment medium that will replace those movies is simstim. Marly Krushkhova, the heroine of Gibson's second novel Count Zero (1986), chooses a software of the top simstim actress Tally Isham and finds herself "slotted into the tanned, lithe, and incredibly comfortable sensory apparatus" ([Hayakawa Bunko SF] Chapter 23, translated by Hisashi Kuromaru, p. 320).

Or consider Gibson's short story "The Winter Market" (1986, included in Burning Chrome [Hayakawa Bunko SF], translated by Hisashi Asakura), published around the same time. The story begins when an editor named Casey takes Lise—a woman in an exoskeleton whom waste artist Rubin picked up like trash while scavenging on Granville Island—as a new subject. Congenitally disabled, she cannot move at all without the help of her exoskeleton and drugs. The exoskeleton is a polycarbon prosthetic as thin as a pencil, but it is connected directly to the brain via a myoelectric interface, and everything from her graceful walk to every other movement is programmed within it. After being pestered into letting her stay the night, Casey plugs a visual terminal into the socket on the back of her exoskeleton, connecting their senses directly and discovering the terrifying drama of her unconscious. "A raw rush, the king of hell's hitmen, the unedited real thing, exploding in eight directions from Sunday, splattering into the foul-smelling void created by poverty, thirst for love, and anonymity" (translated by Hisashi Asakura, p. 215). Thus, he names these dream fragments "The Kings of Sleep," prepares a brain map, edits and patches them together to make them playable, and after recording, manages to release them, making them a massive hit that sells three million sets. Here, Lise's cranial nerves and the dreams they produce all become commodities, recovered by the advanced capitalist market.

What cyberpunk exposed is a genealogy in which critiques questioning the Western metaphysical premise that the brain possesses some kind of spiritual transcendence have continued since the era of Belyaev and Kyusaku Yumeno, becoming increasingly universalized through the connectability of cranial nerves and cyberspace. In that sense, it is no coincidence that the Derridean critique of logocentrism linked up with the cyber-materialism of the early Internet era.

Until around the 1960s, giant artificial brains were often depicted, such as the HAL 9000 that controlled the nuclear spacecraft Discovery heading for Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), co-authored by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. However, because HAL 9000 was originally programmed with commands that were too complex to achieve the mission, it eventually went insane and began to harm the crew. To resolve the situation, Captain Bowman takes a decisive stand, enters HAL 9000's memory center, pulls out units inside various panels one after another, and forces the giant artificial brain to cease functioning. At this moment, he mutters to himself: "I never thought I'd end up playing amateur brain surgeon—and performing a lobotomy outside the orbit of Jupiter" (Chapter 28 [Hayakawa Bunko SF], translated by Norio Ito, p. 223). Regarding this scene, Yasuki Hamano, in Kubrick Mystery (Fukutake Shoten, 1990), provided a sharp analysis by analogy with the ending of American counterculture writer Ken Kesey's masterpiece novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), where the mental hospital rebel McMurphy is ultimately turned into a vegetable by a prefrontal lobotomy.

The technique of lobotomy (or leucotomy) was proposed by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz in the 1930s, and he received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this research. However, the harmful effects of destroying a patient's personality and intelligence under the guise of alleviating mental disorders were exposed, and by the 1960s, it began to be banned in many countries, including the US and the USSR. Therefore, by the time One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was written, the surgery was already on the decline. Nevertheless, the fact that Kesey incorporated it into the story means he envisioned a theme he wanted to assert even by committing a kind of anachronism. That is, a countercultural critique condemning the United States itself—which forces lobotomies on mental patients or simply violent people—as a giant mental hospital harboring terrifying madness. The trend of confining inconvenient people who are not actually mental patients in asylums was already depicted in the aforementioned Professor Dowell's Head by Belyaev. Cases of corrupt scientists and corrupt asylum directors joining forces are by no means rare.

However, with the arrival of the 1980s and the heyday of microchips, Neuromancer assumes a multinational capitalist society where computer networks have permeated the entire world, even under people's skin. The protagonists of the stories are outlaw technologists who try to make a quick buck by skillfully exploiting that system. For them, jacking in to cyberspace is a greater pleasure than tripping on drugs, and having that ability to immerse oneself stripped away as punishment for some crime is equivalent to falling into a "prison of flesh." For cyberpunks, even if they have to rely on black-market medical care rather than a lobotomy, soaring into cyberspace is the ultimate paradise.

Consequently, computers, which had a strong maternal impression of embracing humanity as giant artificial brains in SF until the 1960s, transformed from the 1980s into life-sized or infinitely transparent artificial intelligence (AI). In Neuromancer, recall that it is an AI named "Wintermute" that hires Case, and the job is to attack the AI itself in order to unbind certain shackles so it can fulfill its dream of merging with another AI (Neuromancer) located in Rio. The development where a cunning AI regards even harm to itself as a step toward achieving a higher purpose evolved into the narratology of The Matrix Resurrections (2021). In this film, no matter how much humanity resists, even those movements are recovered by machine intelligence for a higher purpose, and the cyber-civilization finds effective software for its own survival within the Christian system of sacrifice, atonement, and salvation that is the cornerstone of human civilization.

The fact that post-cyberpunk SF allowed cyber-culture to permeate globally also brought about changes in the treatment of the human brain itself, the "main deity." Look at the masterpiece short story "Appropriate Love" (1991) by Australian writer Greg Egan, who rose to prominence in the 1990s. In it, the narrator Carla receives a startling offer from Allenby of the insurance company regarding what to do with the body of her husband Chris, who was irrecoverably injured in a train accident. If she wants to revive her husband through regenerative medicine using cloning, it will take about two years; during that time, they say the cheapest way to provide biological life support is to store his brain inside her own uterus. The heroine, after much hesitation, eventually accepts the offer. Two years later, after starting a new life by combining her husband's brain—which she preserved in her uterus—with a fully grown clone, an emotion different from their previous marital love is born...

While Kyusaku Yumeno's Dogra Magra critiqued brain imperialism and spun a "Fetal Dream" theory, in Egan's "Appropriate Love," the husband's brain itself is nurtured in the wife's uterus like a fetus, yet she cannot feel maternal love for it. What is interesting here is that if technology allows a body to be formed separately from the brain and eventually synthesize the two, then just like Belyaev's Professor Dowell's Head, the brain and the body it is housed in do not necessarily need to be the same person or the same gender combination. Recall that in Gibsonian simstim, it was possible for someone other than a woman to access a simstim actress. Egan's work explored the possibility of separating and recombining the brain and body through hard SF, and in the process, questioned the essence of marital and maternal love. From that vantage point, new stories will likely emerge in the future that seek solutions not only for gender identity disorder but also for various issues facing racial minorities.