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

In his 1935 masterpiece Dogra Magra, which challenged traditional psychiatry, Kyusaku Yumeno attempted a thorough critique of cerebral imperialism, ultimately spinning a narrative that juxtaposed "Western scholarship" with the "blood of the Japanese people." In this book, Dr. Kyotaro Masaki, a professor of psychiatry at Kyushu Imperial University, proposes the "liberating treatment of the insane" theory—suggesting that rather than the mad entering mental hospitals, there is essentially no one on Earth who is not mad. He also proposes a "theory of the brain" proving the thesis that "the brain is not where one thinks," and the "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 provides a biological reinterpretation of dreams, treating them as unrelated to the subject. "A dream can be called an art unique to the cells, which combines groups of memories of objects, hallucinations, and associations—figures symbolizing moods and feelings understood only by the cells that are the protagonists of that dream—without logic or plot, depicting the transitions of such moods with extreme clarity" (Dogra Magra, Vol. 4 of the San-ichi Shobo Edition of the Complete Works of Kyusaku Yumeno, p. 140).

More than half a century later at the end of the 20th century, as if validating Yumeno's theory of the brain, American psychoanalyst and neuroscientist 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 consistent story by combining internally generated signals, and he even discovered the cell groups that start and end 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 living symbiotically inside the human, and it may be an organism independent of the human itself.

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. In an attempt 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 usurps his mentor's achievements. However, Professor Kern's surgical skills are genuine; along with his assistant Marie Laurent, he connects the head of Briquet, a deceased former cabaret singer, to the body of Angelica, an Italian singer who died in an accident, and revives her. 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 start singing again at her old cabaret. However, by this time, 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 that Briquet might be a composite human. Thus begins a great adventure to expose Professor Kern's misdeeds.

I read this book about half a century ago in Volume 3 of Iwasaki Shoten's "Belyaev: Selected Juvenile Science Fiction" (translated by Yoshitaro Magami, 1968), which was in my junior high school library, and then in Volume 8 of Hayakawa Shobo's "World SF Complete Collection" (translated by Ippei Fukuro, 1969). The book's appeal remains unchanged, whether read as a junior high student or reread now from a 21st-century perspective. 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 pioneers today's gender-bending SF by anticipating issues of research ethics and bioethics—about which the Ministry of Education has recently issued repeated warnings—and by hinting at the possibility that the body connected to Briquet's head could have been a male corpse. Furthermore, it evokes the 1980s cyberpunk sensation of connecting cranial nerves to cyberspace through skin electrodes (dermatodes).

The appeal of Neuromancer (1984), the first novel by William Gibson, a leading figure in cyberpunk SF, lies not only in the adventure of a computer hacker (a "cyberspace cowboy" in the story) who gets caught up in events while trying to recover his lost 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) link to perceive reality should be noted as an example of how easily high technology can deconstruct gender.

"A sudden shock, 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. Did the internal amplifiers compensate automatically? Blue alphanumeric characters flashed the time. Lower left of Molly's peripheral vision. Showing off. (...) 'How does it feel, Case?' he heard a voice say, and he could feel Molly uttering 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. This issue is likely related to the fact that the first line of Venus City (1992), the first novel by Japanese cyberpunk writer Goro Masaki, was "I've decided. I'm going to change my sex tonight," and that the Larry and Andy Wachowski brothers, who filmed the definitive cyberpunk Matrix trilogy (1999–2003), originally had a concept of depicting the transition from the real world to the Matrix world through sex reassignment—and ultimately, instead of depicting it in the work, both transitioned to become the Lana and Lilly Wachowski sisters after the trilogy was completed.

This kind of "riding along" opens the door to the entertainment of the future.

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, this technology commonly known as "simstim" 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, and "simstim stars," rather than movie stars, are those who earn enormous profits by letting consumers experience their own nervous systems.

For example, suppose you are on an international business trip. On that flight, services are currently provided where you can freely choose the movies you want to watch on board. The future entertainment medium that will replace those movies is simstim. Marly Krushkhova, the heroine of Gibson's second novel Count Zero (1986), selects the software of Tally Isham, a top actress in the simstim world, and finds herself "slotted into the sun-browned, lithe, and tremendously comfortable sensorium" ([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 Casey, an editor, 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 make a single move without the help of her exoskeleton and drugs. The exoskeleton is a polycarbon prosthetic organ as thin as a pencil, but it is directly connected to the brain via a myoelectric interface, and everything from her graceful walk is programmed within it. After being pestered into letting her stay the night, Casey plugs a visual cortex jack into the socket on the back of her exoskeleton, connecting their senses directly, and learns of the tremendous drama held in her unconscious. "A raw rush, the king of the hell-bound killers, the unedited real thing, exploding in eight directions from Sunday, splattering into the stinking 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, patches and edits them to be playable, and after recording, manages to release them, scoring a major 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 of critique that has continued since the era of Belyaev and Kyusaku Yumeno, questioning the Western metaphysical premise that the brain possesses some kind of spiritual transcendence. This critique is becoming increasingly universalized through the possibility of connecting cranial nerves to 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 bound for Jupiter in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), co-authored by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. However, because HAL 9000 had been programmed with commands that were originally too complex for the mission's success, it eventually went mad and began harming 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 be an amateur brain surgeon. —And doing a lobotomy outside the orbit of Jupiter, at that" (Chapter 28 [Hayakawa Bunko SF], translated by Norio Ito, p. 223). Regarding this scene, Yasuki Hamano, in The Kubrick Mystery (Fukutake Shoten, 1990), provided a sharp analysis by drawing an analogy to 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 starting 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 became apparent, 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 if it meant committing a kind of anachronism. That is, the countercultural critique that condemns the United States itself—which forcibly performs lobotomies on mental patients, or people who are not mentally ill but simply violent—as a giant mental hospital harboring terrifying madness. The tendency to confine inconvenient people who are not mental patients in mental hospitals was already depicted in the aforementioned Professor Dowell's Head by Belyaev. Cases of corrupt scientists and corrupt mental hospital directors joining forces are by no means rare.

However, with the arrival of the 1980s and the heyday of microchips, what Neuromancer assumes is 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, rather than tripping on drugs, jacking in to cyberspace is the ultimate pleasure, and having that ability to jack in 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 sciences instead of lobotomies, 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 as well, recall that the one who commissions Case for a job is an AI named "Wintermute," and the content of the job was to actually attack itself in order to release certain shackles to 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 software effective 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 has allowed cyber-culture to permeate globally has, conversely, brought about changes in the treatment of the human brain itself, the object of worship. 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 shocking 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, and during that time, the cheapest way to provide biological life support is to store his brain inside her own uterus. After much hesitation, the heroine eventually accepts the offer. Two years later, after starting a new life by combining her husband's brain, which was 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 cerebral imperialism and spun the "fetal dream" theory, in Egan's "Appropriate Love," the husband's brain itself is nurtured in the wife's uterus as if it were 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 for the two to be synthesized in the end, then just like Belyaev's Professor Dowell's Head, the brain and the body in which it is stored 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 narratives will likely emerge in the future that seek solutions not only for gender identity disorder but also for various issues facing racial minorities.