Synopsis

This novel is built on an interview conducted by a young writer, Emma Printemps, with an affective neuroscientist about her lifelong work on neuroinnovations. It eventually becomes a last testament of a complex, slightly phony but dedicated scientific mind that reveals Dr Paulina Kochanowska’s unattainable lifetime dream to cure loneliness. Throughout the story, the narrator reflects upon the many conditions of the human soul: the apparent duality of human nature, heart break, dysfunctional recurrent memories, etc., and envisions ways in which we could manipulate the brain to alleviate such conditions, based on neuroscience of human memory, emotions and decision making.

Written in a humorous and sarcastic way, the story paints a vision of a world where we will have constructed neuroinnovations to elicit happiness (it is, after all, just a brain state). It is a reflection upon what it means to be human in times when we have come to understand the fabric of the human experience – feelings and emotions.

Accessible language that does not compromise the complexity of the state-of-the art science makes this book attractive for the nerds and geeks, scientists and science-lovers of all ages, as well as all those looking for an entertaining and thought-provoking read. You will laugh, reflect and sympathize as you get to know the inner workings of a light-hearted but lonely, meta-analyzing mind of the main protagonist that is slowly dissolving in her last invention. 

This is my first novel. Publishing a piece of creative writing has been my innermost dream ever since I started writing stories at the age of four. In 2016, after completing my PhD in neurosciences, I felt ready to write.

Outline

There are 18 chapters in the book + a short prologue. The chapters are composed of short sub-chapters sometimes separated by *** , shifting between dialogue between the main characters and Dr Kochanowska’s internal thought monologue that is later revealed to come from either a hypnagogic vision, or mind wandering or a dream.

Plot summary:

Dr Paulina Kochanowska, a neuroscientist in her 60s is under house arrest because a pilot experiment she has installed has begun damaging some of its participants. The experiment, known as Project Unison, is being investigated by the national ethics council. While she’s locked in her Geneva home where she lives with her affective robot Salvatore, a young writer, Emma Printemps, comes to interview her for a biography. The scientist reminisces upon the many neuroinnovations she has created over the years. For instance, sleep cuing for learning and problem solving, dream engineering for un-learning and changing habits, the matching algorithm for finding the right life partner, and all the AI that’s gone into creating her companion affective robot. Finally, she discloses the details about this current brave undertaking that decodes and transfers the activity of several brains to one connected network. All along, the doctor is experiencing some recall problems while the network evolves. She doesn’t remember the beginning of the last project and is confused about how she has helped create the affective robot. Was it her who did it, at all? Turns out that she is the victim of her most recent experiment and has started losing memory after a marked event that happened just a few weeks before. Eventually, the questioning leads Paulina to come to understand her condition and Emma reveals the true reason for her presence in Kochanowska’s home prison.

Prologue

1.      House arrest

Affective majordomo service robot informs Dr Kochanowska that she’s received an invitation from Emma Printemps, a manga comic writer, to be interviewed for a biography.

2.      The writer

In her home, Emma Printemps is preparing for the meeting. She’s trying on her new writer personality.

3.      The dream

Paulina had a fantastic dream last night. It’s been recorded in the connected minds network. Her friend, prof. Ponjee, also a network participant, has co-experienced the dream and is concerned about her state.

4.      The writer in the room

Emma comes in for a first visit. In the interview, the women ponder upon what it takes to be a good artist. Paulina reveals that she feels miserable most of the time.

5.      Inventions

Paulina can’t remember about project Unison’s beginning so she talks about sleep neurohacking innovations.

6.      Another sleepless night

There was a period in Dr PK’s life when she was insomniac. Nothing worked so she came up with a way to neurohack her sleep to forget about a man she was in love with without reciprocity.

7.      On human nature

Paulina tries to remember the beginning of neuroinnovations that were supposed to help people attain a harmonious mind state. She recounts the basic workings of the human brain that had to first be understood and then neuro-hacked.

8.      The forgetting machine

Describes a memory reconsolidation-based therapy for forgetting about lost love.

8.1   The scientist acknowledges that the forgetting pod wasn’t as efficacious as desired. Although her memories of those events are blurry presumably because she has successfully erased them while testing the protocol on herself.

8.2   She recounts two other disconnected anecdotes about the nature of god that she claims come from the times of the first testing of the forgetting machine. Emma is not impressed and the doctor feels embarrassed. She’s experiencing obsessively recurring memories about that man she loved.

9.      The diagnosis

Paulina takes a cold shower to collect her thoughts. She comes to the claim that the problems of mankind are due to poor memory. Another problem of the human condition is the uniqueness of each experience that cannot be truthfully recreated for another person.

9.1   The case for Neurodiversity

Instead of visiting in person, this time Emma video-calls. Dr Kochanowska starts by announcing that the motivation for her research and development activities which was to tackle the hardships of the human condition. First, diversity. Some of us are so unique that they feel isolated. Kochanowska promoted the harvesting of neurodiversity using the case of high sensorial sensitivity and the utility of such individuals in society.

9.2   The matching algorithm

Dr Kochanowska tells the story of the early trial for utilizing existing data to help match partners for harmonious relationships.

10.   The feeling machines

Dr Kochanowska explains how the affective robot forms his memory. Majordomo Salvatore replays his early experiences on 3D projections.

10.1          Decision making

Reflects about the process of decision making by humans and how it can be modelled in artificial intelligence. Emma is perplexed by the discourse where Kochanowska shows we really never fully know anything. This serves to explain how curiosity is programmed in robots.  

10.2          Gender differences

Explains that a robots had to be designed genderless so they can be free to learn what they want, and not be addicted to love or any other cocktail of neurochemicals called reward.

11.   Cogito ergo…?

Kochanowska ponders about answering Emma’s question “how do you know anything at all” and comes up with an esoteric answer. Since memory is unreliable, the solution was to start registering our first-person experiences on smart integrated devices and storing them in private cloud caches so that they could be replayed when needed.

11.1          Curious machines

Explains the story of scientific progress in designing curious learning machines.

11.2          Everybody wants to be right

An anecdote on how reward parameters inside the affective robots’ algorithm had to be normalized in order to curb their perfectionistic behavior.

11.3          AI Breakthrough

Paulina explains that intelligent learning machines need to know when they have made a decision.

11.4          Noise

…and that to be able to improvise, the algorithm needed noise. 

11.5          Hard core memory

Describes the battle in the team designing the first prototype of an affective robot about how to structure their memory. Kochanowska argued that the robot should use their owner’s emotions as memory modulating signals but the team disagreed.

12.   Travel

A little trance intermezzo in which Kochanowska explains the memory-modulating mechanism of surprise and inner reward. Emma stays over for the night.

12.1          No flow

Kochanowska reminisces on a session with a counselor that she’s had as a PhD student. She found her work un-flowable. “Science is an ungrateful mistress and God is a prankster”.

12.2 Outflow

She wakes up to find out that the reminiscence was a dream Emma observed on the computer decoding her brain activity. She retraces the activity of the last one hour in the brain data transfer and is puzzled by why the source memory is confused.

13.   Narcomancy

Next night, Paulina wakes up too early and realizes that she is going insane. Emma finds her on the terrace and once again wants to know about project Unison. The scientist proposes that they engineer her dream to find out.

13.1          What do you do to be happy?

Paulina asks prof. Ponjee to help cue her dream to remember what motivated her to connect her brain to the server. In the dream, she recalls the anger over one of her lover’s inability to understand her feelings.

13.2          About being naked

The second brief dream is a memory of a hot bath under a starry sky. Emma doesn’t even seem interested in understanding how it is connected to the origins of project Unison. But in fact, another memory network miracle has just taken place.

14.   The consolation

Salvatore takes tender care of Paulina in the morning detecting that she feels desperate for an answer and tired from insomnia.

14.1          Playtime

Kochanowska goes out to walk around the house and ponders about her microbiome influencing her own decision making when she hears a voice in her head.

14.2 Connected Minds

She rushes into the transfer computer to find out that it is another friend, Calinda, who’s brain is connected to Unison who’s discovered a way to mind-communicate with her.

14.3          Everything has a price

Calinda tells Paulina a memory from when she went to course on transcendental meditation and dispels several neuro-myths. Paulina wonders whether Calinda hasn’t began having the same symptoms as her.

15.   Disruptive change

Paulina is excited about the discovery of mind-to-mind communication. She posits that her dream engineering must have stirred up a large portion of shared memories which have accumulated due to coherence across the connected memory network. The common link, she figures, was Marco, her ex-lover. Then she suddenly loses the train of thought and feels overwhelming sadness. She decides to let Emma view her registered memory stores as last resort, hoping she’ll be able to patch her autobiographic timeline.

15.1          Seek and you shall find

Emma browses in Kochanowska’s memory stores and can’t seem to find what she’s looking for because she doesn’t understand the salience-coding on the memory records.

15.2 The revelation

To help reconstruct the timeline of her biography, Paulina asks Salvatore about his earliest memories. He brings up a video projection of a familiar voice that Paulina recognizes as Marco’s and her eyes fill up with tears.

16.   The coming of Jesus?

Emma reviews another one of Paulina’s memories. In the baby blue room, Paulina implores Salvatore to show her another memory from his “childhood”. She becomes agitated and Salvo stops the recording. She starts to doubt that she was at all involved in the design of the first affective robot.

17.   Coming to your mind

Meanwhile, in the memory storage room, Emma has given up on the semantic tag ‘god’. Paulina walks into the room and sees Emma view a recent memory of her and her colleagues raising a glass to “happy senility”. She is coming to understand the facts.

18.   The wisdom of crowds

 Paulina comes to understand the truth about her affective robot Salvatore. She is devastated and hysterical. Emma remains calm and communicates to Paulina that Marco has died some weeks ago and that this is when they started observing the glitches in the connected memory network she’s become a victim of… She drifts into unconsciousness listening to the cheering voices of her connected friends in her head. 

Audience

This book is aimed at all those interested in the working of the brain-mind and neuroscience fiction. Especially women may appreciate it because we seem to be marginalized both as sci-fi authors, scientists and academic researchers/professors in the STEMI. It may also be particularly appealing to young adults as a light-format introduction to how emotions and memory work.

If you enjoyed movies like “Ex Machina” and “Her", you may be intrigued by a plausible vision of the future of applied neuroscience offered in this book. If you liked mind-travelling in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”, in books like SJ Lem’s “Solaris” or the mosaic musings in “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” by James Thurber or the first-person narrative by a very special mind like that in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” by Mark Haddon, you may find this novel appealing. 

I envision that readers will most enjoy an audiobook version of this novel as it will give the full experience of being inside Dr Kochanowska’s head. The old-fashioned and artsy readers (my generation, I guess) will want a print copy to read in bed. Others may prefer to download an e-book . 

Promotion

I envision early promotion through my personal social networks: Facebook friends from across the globe, many of them scientists and science-fiction enthusiasts. My local networks (Geneva, Switzerland) include universities where I did my PhD: Geneva and Lausanne. In December, I will participate in the science movie-making hackathon “Exposure” in Lausanne which will allow me to expand my network to Swiss-based filmmakers and science-film lovers. 

This work is a tribute to affective neuroscience reflecting upon what it means to be human in times when we have come to understand a bit more about the fabric of the human experience – feelings and emotions. The message unites art and science and transmits a vision of future applications of neuroscience. It can therefore be regarded as a form of science communication intended to inform and attract especially young audiences to neuroscientific research. I intend to obtain support and promotion from the research centers I am affiliated with: Centre Interfacultaire des Sciences Affectives; Fondation Campus Biotech; Geneva Finance Research Institute.

Furthermore, I am a member of Geneva Writers Club which is a very supportive community uniting all English-language writers in Geneva. Earlier this year, I wrote a guest blog post for a local physicist-turned sci-fi writer, Massimo Marino: http://www.massimomarinoauthor.com/connectome-quest-self.

Ideally, I would like to have my book displayed at the Geneva book fair in April 2018.

I have recently been requested to write a blog entry for the Sustainable Finance Institute which will increase my visibility.

Finally, I intend to launch a personal website to unite all my writing and research activities. 

Competition

There are not many books like this out there. Some sources talk about a sub-genre of sci-fi called “neuroscience fiction” which is the closest fit for it. It is near-future sci-fi, humorous and reflexive. I compiled a list of stories that resemble mine in terms of content or format.

“INSIDE OUT”: a first movie explaining to a young audience what we know about the neuroscience of human emotions.

“GIRL IN WAVE: WAVE IN GIRL” by Kathleen Ann Goonan: a vision of a future where science and technology transform the way we learn. Proposes dazzling human enhancements that transform the world by providing a universal literacy and an education system that is tuned to the neurological and cognitive needs of each individual learner. 

Amelie Nothomb’s “HYGIENE AND THE ASSASIN” has a similar format. It is an interview of a famous novelist who has only 2 months to live by a woman journalist who confronts him to discover appalling secrets from his past.

 “REDDEVIL 4” by Eric C. Leuthardt: a story about a dangerous near-future of neuroprosthetics controlling free will, written by a neurosurgeon.

“SOLARIS” by Stanisław J. Lem: the themes of the nature of human memory, experience and the ultimate inadequacy of communication between human and non-human species.

“GETHEN” by Ursula Le Guin: A story about discovering the nature of a people. Genly Ai is an ambassador who arrives on Gethen (Winter), Ai truly comes to understand the people of Gethen and how their unique biology has shaped a society that has never known war. But this revelation comes at a cost, as he ends up betraying the person to whom he owes the most.

“DR. HEIDENHOFF'S PROCESS” by Edward Bellamy: A novel about a doctor who develops a method of eradicating painful memories from people's brains so that they can feel good about life again. 

“EXCESSION” from Culture’s Minds by Ian M. Banks: the novel reads like emails without headers exchanged between super-intelligent artificial intelligence beings. There is the strong theme of morality in how the sentient beings preside over humans.

“ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND“, created by Pierre Bismuth with C. Kaufman and M. Gondry. It follows an estranged couple who have erased each other from their memories and then started dating again. The film uses elements of the psychological thriller and a nonlinear narrative to explore the nature of memory and romantic love.

“TIMEQUAKE” by Kurt Vonnegut isa semi-autobiographical work using the premise of a timequake (or repetition of actions) in which there is no free will. Vonnegut relays  tangents to the plot and comes back dozens of pages later.

“I, ROBOT” by Isaac Asimov:  It deals with the relationships between human and robot, and the stories are interconnected as Dr. Susan Calvin tells them to a report, our narrator, in the 21st century. Several stories involve Dr, Calvin, the chief robopsychologist at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., the major robot manufacturer company.

“WHEN HARLIE WAS ONE” by David Gerrold. Harlie was designed by David Auberson, a psychologist who was responsible for HARLIE's development from a child into an adult (as far as a computer can develop along these very human concepts). The novel follows Harlie on this very human journey and it develops the philosophical questions of what it means to be human when Harlie fights against being turned off. Gerrold has mixed in humor with his philosophical musings.

“QUEEN CITY JAZZ” by Ann Goonan: A book that gets close and intimate with an emerging technology (nanotechnology in the 1990s). Written in a free-flowing, jazz-tinged prose the central story tells of the quest of a clone to revive her dead boyfriend and recover her telepathic dog.

“BRAIN RULES” by John Medina: a popular science book explaining most important ‘laws’ of how the brain really works to a non-technical audience. My favorite book about the brain for its user. Although this is a non-fiction work, my novel also features explanation of the brain mechanisms of, for instance, emotional memory formation.

“QUEEN OF THE STATES” by Josephine Saxton: The states of the title could refer to the USA, since the heroine, Magdalen, believes she is reigning in the White House. But it more accurately refers to her states of mind, because Magdalen is also a patient in a mental hospital. On yet another level, she has been abducted by insect-like aliens, who are busy exploring her various states of mind. What emerges, through Magdalen's engaging voice, is a sharp and revealing insight into what it is like in someone else's mind, someone else's view of the world.

“WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE” by Philip K. Dick: the theme is implanting memory from another person to the brain of an average Joe. Paranoia as an omnipresent theme of the story with a bitter ironic ending.  

“THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY” by James Thurber: a story of daydreaming to fill in the gaps of dullness in one’s life that leads to a rebirth. A series of disconnected little episodes jumping between reality and Walter Mitty’s imagination.