This multidisciplinary subject in clinical anthropology was started in April 1996 among 206 students distributed over all Colleges and Schools in the University of Tsukuba with the exception of School of Medical Sciences. After every class students write down their comments on a compulsory attendance slip, and these comments were examined. Female students agreed with the surrogate mothers and homosexuality more than male students. Male students denied childcare by homosexual parents more than female students. Sex selection insemination with the exception (...) for disease prevention was denied by female students significantly more than male students. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify the ethical issues faced by home care physicians and nurses, and the support they require. It was conducted in collaboration with the Japanese Association for Home Care Medicine from November to December 2020. An e-mail was sent to 2785 physicians and 582 nurses who are members of the society, requesting their participation in a web-based survey targeting physicians and nurses with practical experience in home care; 152 physicians and 53 nurses responded. Home care physicians and (...) nurses face ethical issues, some of which are that “the patient’s wishes cannot be reliably understood owing to their impaired decision-making capacity” and “there is disagreement between the patient and their family members over the necessary healthcare.” The respondents sought “experience with, and insight into, healthcare ethics” and “home care” from people with whom they would consult on ethical issues, but at the time of the actual consultation, those individuals were the main healthcare professionals involved with the patient. In addition, the respondents desired to have “multidisciplinary discussions in the community,” “participation of healthcare ethics experts at meetings,” and “meetings held by healthcare ethics experts” to discuss specific cases. Given these results and the history of healthcare ethics education in Japan—which has been implemented mostly for healthcare providers—we conclude that it is important for academic societies that offer healthcare ethics education to healthcare providers and regional core hospitals with ethics support resources to collaborate to provide ethics consultation services in the community. (shrink)

This article presents an ethnographical and historical analysis of the mode of being that is constituted when people use neurofeedback for self-improvement. I analyse how human brainwaves have been associated with the psyche since their first demonstration by the psychiatrist Hans Berger, how they were connected to personality types by the cybernetician Grey Walter, and made trainable by the psychologists Joe Kamiya and Barry Sterman. I compare these cases with the reports of contemporary neurofeedback practitioners and users, and demonstrate (...) that working on the self by working on the brain constitutes a complicated relationship between the brain and the self. Moreover, I demonstrate that combinations of brains and selves, material and spiritual ideas, and biological and social explanations are not confusions due to the ignorance of neurofeedback users, but amalgamations that emerged in the work and ideas of early scientists. (shrink)

Nearly all research in neurofeedback since the 1960s has focused on training voluntary control over EEG constructs. By contrast, EEG state discrimination training focuses on awareness of subjective correlates of EEG states. This study presents the first successful replication of EEG alpha state discrimination first reported by Kamiya . A 150-s baseline was recorded in 106 participants. During the task, low triggered a prompt. Participants indicated “high” or “low” with a keypress response and received immediate feedback. Seventy-five percent of (...) participants achieved significant discrimination within nine sessions, with a significant learning curve effect. Performance was significantly related to physical properties of the EEG signal, including magnitude, duration, and absolute vs. relative amplitude. These results are consistent with a conceptualization of EEG state discrimination as a sensory modality, although it is also intricately related to voluntary control of these states. (shrink)