Know your brain. Make the world better.
Motoaki SUGIURA, MD PhD
Professor, Tohoku University
IDAC, Dept. Human Brain Science
IRIDeS, Cognitive Sciences Lab
CogNAC, Div. Research-Education Strategy
SARC, Div. Cognitive Neuroscience
Know your brain. Make the world better.
How is the ehumanf mind, behavior, and society realized in the brain? We are developing "human brain science" to unravel its secret. Utilizing function neuroimaging, physiological and behavioral measurements, and social surveys, we aim to become a "hub" that connects all disciplines related to humanity from basic to applied. We look forward to your participation.
Research theme
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The Self in the Brain
How is the ‘self’ born in the brain and how it affects our cognition, behavior, and social adaptation? We are trying to solve mysteries about various aspects of the self, such as physical,
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Where value comes from?
The brain integrates various sensory inputs and evaluates the item or environment by referring to knowledge and memory, but the process is still full of mysteries. Various behavioral experiments and n
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Language and communication
Humans create a society through communication, and language is its powerful tool to convey feelings and move people. Elucidation of the neural bases of these functions and their acquisition is expecte
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Disaster and the power to live
We are conducting various studies on human mind and behavior in disasters. In particular, we clarified 8 factors (leadership, problem solving, altruism, stubbornness, etiquette, emotion regulation, s
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Human brain science for the future
Super aging society, increasing disasters, and ‘smart’ society to come; how do these environmental and social changes affect our lives and values? From the perspective of cognition and bra
News
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202511.07EVENT
Farewell and Welcome Party
At noon on Friday, November 7, we held a farewell party for Dr. Liu Yu, who obtained his Ph.D. in Se
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202511.05RESEARCH
How Does the Infection Threat Change Our Social Orientation? (Publication)
Does the fear of infection fundamentally alter how people relate to others and to society? Di
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202510.29RESEARCH
The Difficulty of Moral Decision-Making (Paper Publication )
Why does deciding which life to save feel so difficult? We conducted a psychological experiment wher
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202510.28EVENT
sports competition (badminton)
We participated in a sports event (badminton) held by the Institute of Development, Aging, a
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202510.28EVENT
[Seminar] Gestures, Language & Brain Dynamics
How do gestures shape the way we understand and process language in the brain? This seminar invit
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202510.24RESEARCH
How the brain learns meaning-based grammatical rules (Publication)
How does the brain learn grammatical rules that are grounded in meaning rather than form? To addres
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202510.16EVENT
[Symposium] Understanding Mind and Society
With the rapid development of computational science and psychological theory, researchers now have a
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202510.11EVENT
Katahira Festival 2025: Showcasing Neuroscience through a VR Experience Booth
On Saturday, October 11, 2025, our Human Brain Science Division hosted a VR experience booth at Kata
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202510.10RESEARCH
Effects of Pain Catastrophizing on Pain-Related Resting-State Functional Connectivity(Poster Presentation at International Conference)
People experience pain in different ways. These differences are influenced not only by physical fact
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202510.02EVENT
yResearch Groupz The Horizon of Coexistence with Super-Intelligent A
Recent advances in AI intelligence have been remarkable, with the emergence of “general-purpos
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202509.22EVENT
Farewell Party and Celebration of Degree Conferment
On September 22, we held a celebration and farewell party in the lab’s dining room for the stu
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202509.18RESEARCH
The Effect of Social Pressure on Facial Emotion Recognition in Lonely People and Its Neural Mechanism (ICON2025 Poster Presentation)
The direction of the relation between facial emotion recognition and loneliness has been showed to b
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202509.17RESEARCH
Social and Embodied Language Learning (Symposium at International Conference)
I had the pleasure of co-organizing and presenting at a symposium at ICON 2025 – International
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202509.16RESEARCH
Distinct Neural Substrates of Visceral Expressions of Emotion (Poster Presentation at International Conference/Award-winning)
Using fMRI, this study investigated how the neural processing of visceral expressions of emotion (e.
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202509.16RESEARCH
Prosody Meets Context: fMRI Evidence of Intention Comprehension in Second Language Learners (Poster Presentation at International Conference)
In this experiment on second language (L2) intention comprehension, we examined how L2 learners proc
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202509.16RESEARCH
Neural mechanism of predictive sentence processing (Poster Presentation at the International Conference)
Using fMRI, we investigated brain activity during Korean sentence processing. The results revealed t
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Tohoku University Institure of Development,Aging and CanceriIDACj
International Center for Smart Ageing Research (map) 3F
Seiryo-cho 4-1, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8575, Japan