There is a new trend such as 'maids with cat's ears' that are called 'moekyara' (characters that induce fetishistic sexual attraction). The aspect of 'moe' (fetishistic sexual attraction) belongs to qualia from our point of view of brain science. 'Qualia' is a concept which has been very much focused upon in the last ten years or so. Qualia is everything that is grasped as 'feeling' in the consciousness. The problem of qualia is one of the major agendas in brain science today, and the grand challenge is to analyze the mechanism by which qualia emerges within the 100,000,000,000 nerve cells in the brain. This is difficult because modern science until now has dealt with things that can be expressed by numbers, that is to say, those things that can be written in the form of formulas. Things like texture which cannot be represented by numbers have not been objects of modern science up to now, and no methodology has been established. Therefore, brain scientists of the new generation are attempting to investigate the mechanism by which qualia is felt by methods which have not existed in the past.

　

 Qualia has various levels, even with regards moe, the way a mania would get excited and the way an ordinary person would of course be different. For example, Professor Funabiki might react with a different kind of moe when he goes to a maid café to the kind of moe an experienced Akihabara otaku would feel. Qualias have strata. There are shallow qualias which can be understood by seeing red or round, and there are deep qualias which are understood by carefully associating with them. I think this stratification is very important when thinking about how the brain functions when it perceives a character. There may be universality to some extent in the way a person perceives the character of Godzilla, but when a Japanese person perceives Godzilla it might be related to the memory of Daigofukuryumaru, the boat affected by the hydrogen bomb experiment. The qualia of Godzilla perceived by Americans and that perceived by Japanese are sometimes different. When we see a picture of Natsume Soseki, we think about all sorts of characteristics of a great writer of the Meiji period; but if an English person saw it, for example, he/she would only think that a Japanese is dressed in European style. There are historical and cultural contexts involved in the perception of qualia, but to deal with this theoretically, we need to touch upon the problem of memory. There are different analyses about memory in brain science, but in a word I think it is about editing. It is often thought that memory involves simply storing information and reproducing it, but in fact the reason why memory is interesting in brain science is because memory contains a process of editing. In other words, a memory once stored continues to change over a long period inside the temporal lobe and comes to have meaning by being linked to various connections and contexts. It is this process of editing that is most interesting. For example, we rarely learn our mother tongue Japanese by using a dictionary because we create the structure of meaning from everyday episodes, that is, through editing so to speak. Of course, the way in which a character is perceived will depend on what kind of memory a person has in the brain. Therefore, to deal with characters which are deep phenomena, the issue of memory becomes indispensable.

 There was research conducted in America called 'Famous people only of that time', which examined the brain function by investigating famous people only of that time who remained in people's memory. The experiment used famous people who were given intensive coverage by the media in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s only momentarily at that time and later not so much, so we can say that memories regarding these people were created at that time. In the case of President Kennedy who continues to be covered by the media, we do not know when memories regarding him are created. In the research using 'Famous people only of that time' as the stimuli, the location of the memory changes within parts inside the brain. That is to say, it has been shown that memories are transformed over decades. For example, we see the national treasure Hayaraigo, the picture scroll of Hyakkiyako, Zeami's noh, the Buddhist statue which is a national treasure at Kofukuji, and so on. As we see these things, I think the way in which we the Japanese perceive characters obviously becomes different. This seems to be because in the brains of the Japanese, there is a particular stratification of memory as memory is passed down from generation to generation by historical units and accumulated in the temporal lobe. I think this is an important point when considering the uniqueness of Japanese people's character cognition and creativity, and a historical perspective is essential.

 In the case of Godzilla, which is a very typical character, since the first Godzilla had a great impact, different variants and editing continue, starting with mechanical Godzilla. When we think about characters, we should not just deal with the cognition at a particular moment but also consider the process of how this character is transformed and edited through the memory implanted in our brains.

 To memorize something is usually thought to be the opposite of being creative, but the British mathematician Roger Penrose presents a hypothesis in his book published in 1989 The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics that creating is similar to remembering. Let me talk a little about a case of a mathematician. When a mathematician attempts to prove a new theorem, he starts to get a feeling of knowing that it is possible to prove this theorem. The feeling of wanting a particular theorem is similar to the feeling one gets when trying to remember the name of a friend which one has forgotten momentarily. At that time this hypothesis in the end was thought to be based on Penrose's subjective experience. However, in recent years, Penrose's hypothesis is considered probably correct by brain science.

 Just now I said that reproducing a memory accurately is not creative, but there is a case which studied a person with that kind of abnormal brain. The Russian neuropsychologist Luria conducted a thorough research of the brain of a man who could very accurately reproduce conversations that took place ten to twenty years ago. Since the man was alive, he could not dissect him so he investigated by observation. As a result, it was found that in fact this man retained such ability because he had lost the ability to edit memory. For example, if I meet Professor Makino several times, I gradually come to understand Professor Makino's personality, compile different episodes of my meetings with Professor Makino in my brain and establish Professor Makino's character. However, this man lacked that kind of ability. No matter how many times he met a person, he could not establish the person's character. In other words, character cognition in the brain emerges as a result of process of editing and does not exist a priori as memory. A dramatic example of this would be the picture drawn by an autistic girl called Nadia when she was five years old. Autism is generally diagnosed as lack of communicative and linguistic abilities and decreased ability in memory editing. However, the picture on the left is a picture that was drawn by this child when she was five years old after seeing a running horse for just a moment. It is such a realistic drawing that some people even say that it is superior to Da Vinci's drawing. Recent findings in brain science consider that this kind of mechanical memorization ability differs from editing ability to establish characters. For example, the findings of brain science today tells us that such a clumsy picture drawn by an ordinary child in fact represents the magnificence of human memory capacity. What does a picture of a circle represent? Face, body or backside? If it represents a face, we should think that it is strange that hands come straight out of the face, but we think that it is alright. Unless it is pointed out, we do not think that a picture that depicts hands coming out of a circle is particularly strange. The currently emerging idea is that this kind of clumsy good drawing is closer to the core of character creativity than Nadia's drawing. Cave painting of the ice age drawn with an amazing power of depiction has been discovered in Chauvet in France. Although it is a painting from around 30,000 years ago, it is really incredible and some people call it the Sistine Chapel of the ice age. It minutely depicts horses and rhinoceroses in layered drawings, and was most likely drawn by Neanderthal people. They are thought not to have had language, so there is an obvious question about how they could have drawn such excellent paintings. The British psychologist Nicholas Humphrey's theory on this is the most influential. He proposes that these people's mental states contained a very special ability known as the savant effect found in an autistic child. This is one view, but it can be seen that the horses in the Chauvet wall paintings are minutely drawn in layers though the compositional arrangement as a whole is not thought out. This matches the characteristics of drawings by savant children. This is not direct evidence, but is considered to be strong indirect evidence. The Chauvet cave is in a very bad condition and apparently one must crawl for about 300 meters from the entrance to get there. People in those times went to such places and drew these pictures. The prominent theory is that this ability was probably based on precision machine like memory rather than ability for character creativity.

 Nicholas Humphrey presents this theory in his book The Mind Made Flesh. This book also has deep implications philosophically and develops a theory based on the idea that evolution is not unilinear, and gaining something also means losing something at the same time. Nicholas' argument is that we have gained language ability, but at the same time we have lost the ability to minutely memorize things as they are. In other words, geniuses such as Tezuka Osamu and Da Vinci in a sense might have both the ability to see the world as it is with a precision machine like memory like savants and the ability to see the world in terms of symbols like ordinary people. For example, when we see a desk, we think it's a desk and do not see any further details, but savant children see the shapes and colors of things instead of cognizing the world in that way. This is in a trade-off relationship and in most cases people can only do either, but some people who are called geniuses can be thought to go beyond existing mind sets and presuppositions, see the world as it is and bring back these perceptions into the symbolic world. In one sense, a person who is a character creation genius can go back and forth between these two worlds, and bring the world as it is on the left side to the symbolic world on the right.

 I get the feeling that character cognition ability, especially 'moe', is a peculiar cognitive capacity which human beings have acquired in the process of evolution. Here, let me discuss an interesting cognitive phenomenon called scale error. This is a phenomenon recently reported by an American researcher, which appears temporarily in 20 to 24 month old children who behave by ignoring the factor of scale. These children try to slide down miniature toy playground slides, get into miniature cars, and sit on miniature sofas. They are not acting, but are attempting very seriously. This scale error phenomenon is observed from around 20 to 24 months of age and then disappears again. In one sense, these children live in the world of Alice in Wonderland. There is no established theory about why such phenomenon occurs, but one leading theory is that the world of symbols goes out of control ignoring the relationship with the body, which I will discuss later. As a result, the child ignores the scale of the item and confuses a toy car with an actual car. This is an ability that only human beings have and animals do not make this mistake. Humans can consider both the toy car and an actual car as the same car. Adults can of course perceive by relating the scale between the thing and their own bodies, but there is an argument that the ability to symbolize goes out of control in some, though not all, children in the process of development.