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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202510.24RESEARCH
How the brain learns meaning-based grammatical rules (Publication)
We have published our new study in Brain and Language, which is the first to examine the neural mech
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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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202509.16RESEARCH
Do you feel pain after being rejected? (Poster Presentation at the International Conference)
Social rejection is not only emotionally painful but also activates some of the same brain regions a
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202509.12RESEARCH
Second Language Speech and Text Integration Mechanism (Poster Presentation at the international conference)
In collaboration with Professor Mayumi Kajiura at Nagoya City University, we conducted an fMRI study
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202509.07RESEARCH
The Effect of Social Pressure on Facial Emotion Recognition in Lonely People and Its Neural Mechanism (Japanese Psychological Association Poster Presentation)
Lonely people perceive the social world as threatening and avoid social interactions due to biased c
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202509.07RESEARCH
The Influence of Personality Traits and Optimism on Experimental Pain: fMRI Study(Poster Presentation)
Personality traits are known to influence pain perception. Some studies suggest that individuals wi
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202509.07RESEARCH
Insights of four key dialogue modes in daily communication and their neural bases(Poster Presentation)
We defined “Dialogue Modes” (DMs) as patterns of enjoyable daily conversations driven by
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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