The geographically inequitable distribution of physicians has long posed a serious social problem in Japan. The government tackled this problem by establishing and managing Jichi Medical University (JMU) and regional quotas (RQs) for medical schools. JMU/RQs recruit local students who hope to work as physicians in rural areas, educate them for 6 years without tuition (JMU) or with scholarship (RQs), and after graduation, assign them to their home prefectures for 9 years, including 4–6 years of rural service. JMU/RQs entrants now (...) occupy 11.6% of all medical school entrants. While JMU/RQs have been shown to be highly effective in securing physicians for rural areas, ethical issues related to these policies have been raised, such as whether the government truly needs to implement these policies using tax money, and whether it is acceptable to limit the personal freedoms of the physicians. In this paper, we discuss these issues from the perspectives of social justice, utilitarianism, luck egalitarianism, liberty, medical professionalism and consistency with national health insurance and the Japanese Constitution. We conclude that JMU/RQs are necessary and ethically valid policies, and also propose some institutional improvements to better secure the integrity and maturity of these systems. (shrink)

現在のコロナ禍とイラク人質事件に通底する日本人の精神的な抑圧的構造を暴き、日本人とは何かを問う警世・警告の書.

紀元前五世紀のインドで生まれた仏教。中国では布教に漢訳の経典が用いられたのに対し、日本は漢文のまま経典を輸入した。両国においてサンスクリットの原典は、ほとんど顧みられていない。中国は漢訳ならではの解釈 を生み出し、日本では特権的知識階級である僧が、意図的に読み替えた例もある。ブッダの本来の教えをサンスクリット原典から読み解き、日中両国における仏教受容の思惑・計算・誤解を明らかにする。.

サンスクリット原典の徹底的な精読を通じて明らかにする、『法華経』の教えの真意と現代的意義。.

Intervention studies on sedentary older adults have demonstrated that commencing physical exercise at an older age has a positive effect on brain structure. Although this suggests that older athletes with lifelong sports training have larger gray matter volume in some brain regions compared to age-matched non-athletes, evidence in the literature is scarce. Moreover, it remains unclear whether a larger GMV is associated with training intensity or period of training in life. To address these gaps in the literature, we compared regional (...) brain GMV between 24 older athletes and 24 age-matched non-athletes. The period of sports training and the current training time of the athletes were assessed. Both groups were evaluated for physical activity intensity as well as cognitive and motor performance. Although no group differences were noted in cognitive and motor performance, athletes reported higher physical activity intensity than non-athletes. Whole-brain structural analysis revealed a significantly larger GMV in several brain regions in athletes. Notably, the GMV of the precuneus in athletes was positively correlated with earlier commencement of sports training and training duration but was negatively correlated with current training time. Our findings demonstrate that early-commenced and continued sports training predicts structural maintenance of the precuneus in old age. Our results also suggest that excessive training time in old age may have a negative impact on the GMV of the precuneus; thereby delineating how the precuneus is associated with lifelong sports training in older athletes. (shrink)

This study compared 30 older musicians and 30 age-matched non-musicians to investigate the association between lifelong musical instrument training and age-related cognitive decline and brain atrophy. Although previous research has demonstrated that young musicians have larger gray matter volume in the auditory-motor cortices and cerebellum than non-musicians, little is known about older musicians. Music imagery in young musicians is also known to share a neural underpinning [the supramarginal gyrus and cerebellum] with music performance. Thus, we hypothesized that older musicians would (...) show superiority to non-musicians in some of the abovementioned brain regions. Behavioral performance, GMV, and brain activity, including functional connectivity during melodic working memory tasks, were evaluated in both groups. Behaviorally, musicians exhibited a much higher tapping speed than non-musicians, and tapping speed was correlated with executive function in musicians. Structural analyses revealed larger GMVs in both sides of the cerebellum of musicians, and importantly, this was maintained until very old age. Task-related FC analyses revealed that musicians possessed greater cerebellar-hippocampal FC, which was correlated with tapping speed. Furthermore, musicians showed higher activation in the SMG during MWM tasks; this was correlated with earlier commencement of instrumental training. These results indicate advantages or heightened coupling in brain regions associated with music performance and imagery in musicians. We suggest that lifelong instrumental training highly predicts the structural maintenance of the cerebellum and related cognitive maintenance in old age. (shrink)

「近代の超克」から「近代の止揚」への“燎爛たる分裂”。西田幾多郎、三木清、戸坂潤の哲学を「個人‐市民‐大衆」形成論として捉える。.

Representational momentum is a well-known phenomenon that occurs when a moving object vanishes suddenly and the memory of its final or vanishing position is displaced forward in the direction of its motion. Many studies have shown evidence of various perceptual and cognitive characteristics of RM in various daily aspects, sports, development, and aging. Here we examined the longitudinal developmental changes in the displacement magnitudes of RM among younger and older nursery school children for pointing and judging tasks. In our experiments, (...) the children were asked to point at by their finger and judge the spatial location of the vanishing point of a moving stimulus. Our results showed that the mean magnitudes of RM significantly decreased from 5- to 6-year-old children for the pointing and judging tasks, although the mean magnitude of RM was significantly greater in the 5-year-old children for the pointing task but not for the judging task. We further examined the developmental changes in RM for a wide range of ages based on data from the present study and our previous study. This ad hoc examination showed that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in 5-year-old children than in adults for the pointing and judging tasks. Our findings suggest that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in young children than in adults and significantly decreased in young children through adults for the pointing and judging tasks. (shrink)

Refusal is considered a face-threatening act, since it contradicts the inviter’s expectations. In the case of Japanese, native speakers are known to prefer to leave sentences unfinished for a conventional indirect refusal. Successful comprehension of this indirect refusal depends on whether the addressee is fully conventionalized to the preference for syntactic unfinishedness so that they can identify the true intention of the refusal. Then, non-native speakers who are not fully accustomed to the convention may be confused by the indirect style. (...) In the present study, we used event-related potentials of electroencephalography in an attempt to differentiate the neural substrates for perceiving unfinished sentences in a conventionalized indirect refusal as an FTA between NS and NNS, in terms of the unfinishedness and indirectness of the critical sentence. In addition, we examined the effects of individual differences in mentalization, or the theory of mind, which refers to the ability to infer the mental states of others. We found several different ERP effects for these refusals between NS and NNS. NNS induced stronger P600 effects for the unfinishedness of the refusal sentences, suggesting their perceived syntactic anomaly. This was not evoked in NS. NNS also revealed the effects of N400 and P300 for the indirectness of refusal sentences, which can be interpreted as their increased processing load for pragmatic processing in the inexperienced contextual flow. We further found that the NNS’s individual mentalizing ability correlates with the effect of N400 mentioned above, indicating that lower mentalizers evoke higher N400 for indirect refusal. NS, on the contrary, did not yield these effects reflecting the increased pragmatic processing load. Instead, they evoked earlier ERPs of early posterior negativity and P200, both of which are known as indices of emotional processing, for finished sentences of refusal than for unfinished ones. We interpreted these effects as a NS’s dispreference for finished sentences to realize an FTA, given that unfinished sentences are considered more polite and more conventionalized in Japanese social encounters. Overall, these findings provide evidence that a syntactic anomaly inherent in a cultural convention as well as individual mentalizing ability plays an important role in understanding an indirect speech act of face-threatening refusal. (shrink)

エンジニアの「知」は21世紀を拓けるか。モノを「つくる」とは、どういうことか。技術者の心に由来する「知」のありように迫る。技術における「知」の現代性を確認する。.