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)

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。.

「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。.

Master Sorai's Responsals was to eighteenth-century Japan what The Prince was to Renaissance Italy. Like Machiavelli, Ogyu Sorai was a humanist scholar who served a prince and drew on his experiences as a house philosopher and on his vast knowledge of history and political affairs in his work. In 1720, when he began to write the letters that comprise this text, the Tokugawa regime was more than a hundred years old and beset with grave administrative and fiscal problems, about which (...) Sorai had much to say.Samuel Yamashita's impressive translation of this work offers modern readers a rare glimpse of the prevailing political discourse of the day and the specific concepts that rulers had at their disposal as they struggled to manage their domains, find talented men for their bureaucracies, create new sources of revenue, and keep their subjects well fed and happy.Sorai himself, of course, is a presence in the text. He is by tunes earnest, frank, impatient, utterly confident, and occasionally condescending. Unlike his Renaissance counterpart, he is something of an optimist: he was convinced that the introduction of archaic Chinese culture and institutions to Japan would solve its myriad problems.Well-versed in Chinese history, philosophy, religion, medicine, and belles lettres, Sorai holds forth on everything from archaic Chinese divination to Sung poetry and prose. He offers advice on how to become a Confucian gentleman, how to learn to read classical Chinese, and which books to read and which to avoid. He even discusses his belief in a sentient, Chinese-style "heaven," a topic not well understood by modern scholars. Long regarded as one of Sorai's best works, Master Sorai's Reponsals bristles with the sharp and clear opinions of the most influential thinker of Tokugawa Japan. (shrink)

Two experiments examined false recall for lists of semantically and phonologically associated words as a function of presentation duration. Veridical recall increased with long exposure durations for all lists. For semantically associated lists, false recall increased from 20–250 ms, then decreased. There was a high level of false recall with 20 ms durations for phonologically associated lists , which declined as duration increased. In Experiment 2, for lists presented at 20 and 50 ms rates, false recall given zero correct recall (...) was observed frequently, suggesting that conscious recollection of studied words was not necessary for phonological false memory. Differences between phonologically and semantically associated lists were consistent with a feature integration model based on automatic initial processing of phonetic features of words. (shrink)

The book explores the ways in which Jean Jacques Rousseau envisaged time as a diagnostic tool for understanding the state of society and the predicaments of modernity. Central to his conceptualization of both nature and history, time also plays a unique role in Rousseau's literary and aesthetic explorations of selfhood and effect. The book brings into dialogue specialists from education, political theory, literature and cultural studies with the aim to underscoring Rousseau's contributions to themes that preoccupy us today such as (...) the appreciation of slow time, the uncounted time of women's lives and temporal challenges related to politics and economy. (shrink)

We have developed a broadcasting agent system, public opinion channel (POC) caster, which generates understandable conversational form from text-based documents. The POC caster circulates the opinions of community members by using conversational form in a broadcasting system on the Internet. We evaluated its transformation rules in two experiments. In experiment 1, we examined our transformation rules for conversational form in relation to sentence length. Twenty-four participants listened to two types of sentence (long sentences and short sentences) with conversational form or (...) with single speech. In experiment 2, we investigated the relationship between conversational form and the user’s knowledge level. Forty-two participants (21 with a high knowledge level and 21 with a low knowledge level) were selected for a knowledge task and listened to two kinds of sentence (sentences about a well-known topic or sentences about an unfamiliar topic). Our results indicate that the conversational form aided comprehension, especially for long sentences and when users had little knowledge about the topic. We explore possible explanations and implications of these results with regard to human cognition and text comprehension. (shrink)

Master Sorai's Responsals was to eighteenth-century Japan what The Prince was to Renaissance Italy. Like Machiavelli, Ogyu Sorai was a humanist scholar who served a prince and drew on his experiences as a house philosopher and on his vast knowledge of history and political affairs in his work. In 1720, when he began to write the letters that comprise this text, the Tokugawa regime was more than a hundred years old and beset with grave administrative and fiscal problems, about which (...) Sorai had much to say.Samuel Yamashita's impressive translation of this work offers modern readers a rare glimpse of the prevailing political discourse of the day and the specific concepts that rulers had at their disposal as they struggled to manage their domains, find talented men for their bureaucracies, create new sources of revenue, and keep their subjects well fed and happy.Sorai himself, of course, is a presence in the text. He is by tunes earnest, frank, impatient, utterly confident, and occasionally condescending. Unlike his Renaissance counterpart, he is something of an optimist: he was convinced that the introduction of archaic Chinese culture and institutions to Japan would solve its myriad problems.Well-versed in Chinese history, philosophy, religion, medicine, and belles lettres, Sorai holds forth on everything from archaic Chinese divination to Sung poetry and prose. He offers advice on how to become a Confucian gentleman, how to learn to read classical Chinese, and which books to read and which to avoid. He even discusses his belief in a sentient, Chinese-style "heaven," a topic not well understood by modern scholars. Long regarded as one of Sorai's best works, Master Sorai's Reponsals bristles with the sharp and clear opinions of the most influential thinker of Tokugawa Japan. (shrink)

Rousseau a bien compris, mieux que ses contemporains peut-être, le paradoxe de la communication propre aux Lumières, prises entre le développement du savoir et la constitution d'une opinion publique. Avec l'accélération de la circulation des discours et des écrits, comment parler et agir philosophiquement sans se perdre? Comment concilier la culture du secret, issue de la tradition littéraire du libertinage érudit, et la publicité, qui ouvre de plus en plus grands les horizons de la sphère publique? Masano Yamashita examine (...) ici l'articulation entre les stratégies rhétoriques de l'adresse au lecteur chez Rousseau et sa conception proprement philosophique de la communication. Elle met en lumière l'originalité et la lucidité de Rousseau face aux difficultés liées à cette société de l'information d'Ancien Régime. Rousseau cherche les conditions de possibilité d'une parole émancipée et pleinement publique. Au moyen d'une philosophie incarnée mettant en scène une figure de lecteur, il met à l'épreuve l'idée d'un sujet universel, la constitution d'un espace public, le sens de l'exercice de la philosophie, les enjeux politiques et éthiques des actes de discours. La réception des textes et le rapport au public constituent ainsi pour Rousseau un enjeu philosophique. Entre exigence de transparence et désir d'expérimenter les diverses facettes du moi public, se dessine la conception originale que Rousseau se fait de l'homme des Lumières. Masano Yamashita montre que la réflexion de Rousseau sur les manières de vivre dans un espace public, social comme littéraire, débouche sur une véritable vie philosophique. (shrink)