Ricardo, let me introduce you to the Pacific Ocean. Down there the ferries take off in direction Okkaido Island. – And he points to some old platforms with antique “Hovercrafts” that are now like pieces of a floating museum. –My parents lived on the other side of the city, capturing beautiful moments, peacefully getting older, recycling trash while waiting for the next earthquake. –I detect a melancholic shine in his eyes that goes away and he finishes off with a joke: -Over there in Spain what we have are tapas.

-Welcome! –He says in perfect Cervantinian Castilian, lightly bowing down, and from the frame, a man in his seventies opens the door, dressed in Western clothing- Shoes off! 

We go barefoot through a narrow corridor full of knick-knacks that we avoid, like tricks, not without certain difficulty. Alberto walks into a subtly woven spider web, catching himself on the handlebars of an anachronic bicycle, and gives the septuagenarian arachnid a piece of his mind in the language of the emperors. He answers:

-Yes, Mr. Ho. Every day including the rainy ones. The University is a bit less than 2 miles from here and my heart and this monstrosity have made intimate friends. I admit that I feel like getting out of this cubicle and returning to my home in the outskirts of Utsumi –He then looks at me and adds, revealing his telepathic aptitudes: -Don’t worry Mr. Galán, we dispose of a totally westernized room where you won’t need to interview me “sprawled out” on a tatami. I know how much you appreciate the anthropological use that evolution bestowed upon our rear ends.” And he keeps his promise, making an effort and achieves being the perfect host: Before a cola and a decaf coffee, and with our bums well stuck to the cushions of a comfortable sofa, we start our work:   

-FT: We would like to thank you on behalf of our magazine, Future Times, and on our behalf as well, the courtesy that you have had to lend us a few minutes of your valuable time. As you can see, we don’t have any photographers with us, just as you asked. As you may have already deduced, Alberto will help us when we get stuck on the edge of any technical concept.

-MATSUO: Good, let’s start then. Do you know anything about Japanese literature? –he asks, changing roles, armed with two interrogations.

-FT: Well, in my house, we read some Mori Ogai, the Nobel Prize winner Oé Kenzaburo and even Yukio Mishima, even after the ugly detail of him committing suicide.- my partner answers, obviously. I admit my limitations and recognize that the most Oriental that I have read is Dostoyevsky, all Muscovite, and relative of Ausiàs March, a brilliant Valencian from the fifteenth century.

-MATSUO: I mean old Japanese literature. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro was a courtesan and poet of the twelfth century, who centered his writing on the feelings and places that he remembered frequenting with his late wife. If that exceptional writer had spilled his memories in “our machine”, as they settled in his limbic system, and had disposed of some kind of method to “return” them afterwards to his brain, maybe…   

-FT: ….maybe….-We are thankful for the interesting introduction that Doctor Ashikaga makes, directly submerging ourselves in “the subject”.

-MATSUO: …he would have never written such beautiful poems if he had known the disillusionment that was to come. We lie when we remember: We sculpt the reality that is convenient to remember, not what really happened. The bad minimizes and sweetens, the good maximizes, the unknown is deduced, when it’s not simply invented.

-FT: Do you mean that they would have to incorporate a polygraph into their machine, as you call it, in order to check that what a subject remembers is true?

-MATSUO: No Mr. Galán. Our memory not only tricks us, but, or as a consequence, it will do it with any polygraph test as well. We aren’t interested in what the reality was, but only the bio-electronic mechanisms needed to spill memories into a computer, and if we are successful, do the opposite process. Half the work is already done.

-FT: That’s why it’s called “The Hunter”, of memories, I assume. Following the simile, it still doesn’t know what to do with the pieces that it hunts, whether to put them above the chimney as a taxidermy trophy or treat them like a piece of steak to swallow up at the Sunday barbeque with friends. 

-FT: That is why you have centered on old memories, is that correct?

-MATSUO: Yes, although for more reasons than that. The electro-chemical signs from these were simpler for us, or less complex to decode. I assure you that without the mathematical and technical computer team that we dispose of, we wouldn’t be here talking to you. Ah, and before you ask me the foolish question of if any of his colleagues have perpetrated: What is in the quantum-digital support is mere data, stored in n-dimensional matrixes, that allow many matrixes, many fields in a database, but in the end, data. It’s got nothing to do with “artificial intelligence”, terms that I detest seeing written together in the same sentence. I know that you sporadically collaborate with the Claymstrom Corporation quantum bio-robot. Ask him if you have the chance: I’m convinced that he will agree with me.   

-FT: You don’t think then, and please excuse the conceptual heresy, in artificial intelligence.

-MATSUO: We have been trying to agree on what our intelligence is for thousands of years, too long to now play gods by inventing a new modality, that, we most likely won’t be able to define. Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled with the appearance of new artificial entities but let’s not call them intelligent, but say that they develop intelligent conducts, which is not the same. The new advances have allowed me to virtually penetrate a human brain, like maybe no one has ever done before, and I assure you that what is “boiling” in there has nothing to do with what gives conscience to your new buddy at the magazine. And I’m not just talking about the evident electro-chemical difference…
 
-FT:- …Yeah, I understand you, it’s not just about potassium and sodium ions that overcome potential differences in our little heads, inside our neurons…

-MATSUO: -…good, I see you’ve done your homework…Yes, the equivalent would be bits and quantum spins that flow from one side to another. But I was saying that the concept differences in the procedures are so profound, and the human intellectual spectrum is so wide, that any comparison is merely cheap literature. Never underestimate the human brain by comparing it to an artificial mechanism! Don’t put William Shakespeare on the same level as a toaster. –we decided at that moment to redirect the interview. We don’t want to get into another debate with the doctor and dissuade him of believing that Copernicus X is the most exceptional toaster ever conceived of.  
 
FT:- All right, doctor Ashikaga, now that we’ve gotten to this point and to dig deeper into something that you cited hastily…how near is science to covering the second part of the journey? I think you know what I mean.

MATSUO: -Well, in the first place I can tell you that we don’t know if the process is reversible. The University of Jerusalem, pioneer in controlling the motor function of parts, after decoding signals emitted by the brain, is working on a very special machine. It is a portable biochemical laboratory governed by a quantum computer. Or if you prefer, a quantum computer gifted with a periphery that generates bio-compatible and potentially injectable substances into a human being, combined with electric impulses, of course. Maybe “injecting” memories will go from being a way of speaking to something literal. To answer your question, I’ll tell you that I don’t know if we are near or far from our objective, but what I do know is that we are, which is primordial.  

-FT: And these electric impulses would have as a specific mission…

-MATSUO: …to stimulate regions of the hippocampus, and microscopically stimulate axons or the prolongations of concrete neurons; and the dance starts from this impulse: vesicle stimulation…-he looks for a word precisely in the place where one speaks and can’t find it. He glances as Alberto and after saying it in Japanese he clarifies:- presynaptics, and he repeats it:- that’s it, presynaptics, liberation of these by neurotransmitters to the synaptic cracks or micro-space between neurons, depolarization of the adjacent neuron thanks to its specialized receptors, and the chain goes on like that. You asked about: Problems?: All kinds. We have no idea which areas of the hippocampus would be the most adequate to achieve this stimulation. We don’t know if the current micro-electronic technology will allow us to select concrete groups of neurons without “electrically contaminating” the dependent ones. We don’t know if current biochemical science can supply identical substances and in identical micro-doses to that which the human brain synthesizes and that act as catalysts to the process.    

-FT: Of course, it’s not about turning your successful experiment inside out, as if it were a sock…

-MATSUO: Not at all. The memorization and rescue processes of memories are not symmetrical in the human brain. Electrochemically they are really different. Every time someone remembers something, among other things, an electric flow circulates from areas of the temporary medial lobe of the cortex, creating new connections in it, modifying its- Alberto sets up his simultaneous translator again- citoarchitecture- intracellular changes, protein synthesis, connections to these in the synaptic terminals, and the ulterior increase in number and thickness of them. Remembering changes our brain, although it also makes it “fabricate” new memories: The hippocampus is in charge of “transporting” information that it finds in the short term memory of the cortex, where they are finally kept. A damaged hippocampus impedes the generation of new memories. We ascertained this information thanks to the investigation of lobotomized people, with deteriorated brains because of accidents or illnesses. These martyrs allowed neurophysiology to advance in gigantic steps.  

-FT: You must use another kind of martyr now, a hairier one with fewer compromises than humans…

-MATSUO: That’s the idea. On the Administration Council of the International Organism for the Knowledge of the Brain’s desk there is an investigation project whose protagonists are two beautiful orangutans, Yin and Yang. They are trying to show one of them the guidelines to find food in its cage, store the memory in a support and try to imbue it to, or transmit it to the other one, who has never been within those four walls. The experiment, I admit, is very complex starting with what has already been achieved on a human level with J.N.D: How the hell do you convince a simian to think about something in an intense and specific way? We want to connect him to a machine at the same time that he looks for the food and, therefore his different cortical regions start to light up on our little screens. His physiology and histology are similar enough to those of a human for us to be able to make an enormous leap in the investigation. -Then he turns to my colleague and asks him something and then adds another more or less long sentence. Alberto Ho earns his months salary by translating two sentences: - “What do I care if his development is ontogenetic, his pia mater, his brain or his somatotopic projection are different than ours? Orangutans differ from humans in their so-called spindle cells, in the anterior cingulate or in the frontoinsular cortex but this isn’t relevant to articulate a transfer mechanism viable to homo-sapiens.” – The doctor, at this time seems to get hotheaded but after his rhetorical question he calms down, confessing: -Pardon me, it’s just that I’ve been arguing with the Council for months, and they are the ones who provide the funds for the experiments. Without their acquiescence we can’t do anything.

-FT: Do you think they will give it to you? I suppose that its resounding success helps in a way.

-MATSUO: I don’t think so Mr. Galán. I myself have formed part of that Council since 2029 and I am within a shocking minority. This reminds me of your compatriot, the ineffable Salvador Dalí, from last century. He was expelled from the Surrealist Movement for being too…surrealist! To be sincere, I don’t know if they will end up throwing me out of the International Organization for the Knowledge of the Brain precisely for devoting my life to the epigraph that defines it. Audacity moves the dented wheels of the world, but it does so by overcoming, apart from the intrinsic difficulties of the final objective, the sticks that the conservative mummies jam into the mechanisms so that they stop moving.

-FT: Getting away from the fiduciary-administrative problems, what expectations open up from what you have achieved in your Nagoya laboratory?

-MATSUO: All. None. A galaxy of possibilities on paper, written in stone, and in our imagination. Metamorphosing that theory in tangible realities would take a lot of effort and…centuries! The frontal granular cortex formed by pyramidal cells encloses more secrets that the humongous Egyptian constructions of the Gizeh plateau.

-FT: Great, but…can you specify anything to us? We have heard rumors that your scientific finding may implicate a sliver of hope for people with inoperable brain tumors, contrary to those who suffer from bacterial, viral or prionic infections.

-FT: It wasn’t our intention to offend you Mr. Ashikaga. Think that we all unconsciously try to interpret what happens and extract, I suppose all too often, absurd consequences.

-MATSUO: I’ll put myself in charge. A beneficial mutation most probably arose in our brains approximately 38,000 years ago, in the depths of the superior Paleolithic. From then on we have been more curious, and therefore more interfering, but also more creative. I think it was in that prehistoric moment that our brain took the leap that will one day make us reach the stars.

-FT: Thank you Mr. Ashikaga, for allowing us to conduct this interview and also for interpreting my indiscretion as a fruit of chromosomal deliriums that were involved in that leap for humanity. I owe you dinner.

-MATSUO: I’ll take your word for it. Forget about the interstellar trip: Spanish cuisine and your wines are, without a doubt, the culmination of the leap.  

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