Have you ever thought about how our brain influences our pattern of behavior?
In this seminar, you can find the answers.

Prof. Azuma, who leads a class of 23 students including four foreign students, specializes in attention and visuospatial working memory, a short term memory of location and positioning. A good example of when it is used is the card game, 'Concentration', where the players have to remember the position of the cards.

According to Prof. Azuma, the main theme of this seminar is to learn how our brain functions, and which part of the brain is associated with various cognitive and behavioral functions. One example that she gives is that, while both men and women activate the frontal and parietal regions of the brain for visuospatial working memory, men rely more on the parietal region (associated with visuospatial processing), whereas women tend to rely more on the frontal region (associated with verbal memory), which may reflect both the structural differences in the male/female brains, as well as the strategies employed by men and women.

An outstanding feature of Prof. Azuma's class is her ability to explain difficult concepts in an easy to understand manner. An example of this is her explanation of the cocktail party phenomenon, which she breaks down to our ability to follow only one conversation at a party even though a lot of people are talking simultaneously. This phenomenon can be replicated in a laboratory setting where a person wears headphones with two different messages playing into each ear. The person can repeat just one message and ignores the other. "In this seminar, the students will learn how we filter and process only the information necessary. Is it just based on physical characteristics like the tone of the voice you hear in speech, or are you actually processing the content of the message?" says Prof. Azuma.

Liyuan Li, a senior student from China who wants to become a banker in China. She will look to use what she has learned to understand investorpsychology.

"Like Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity, I want students to show an interest in and ask questions about things that they may normally take as a normal occurrence and pursue topics of interest critically. For this reason I let the students find their own topic of interest," Prof. Azuma adds. The students can choose various topics including cognitive neuroscience, i.e. brain science, and other subjects such as social psychology and color psychology, etc.

Liyuan Li, a senior student says, "I changed my theme several times before settling on 'procrastination and perfectionism'."
Yusuke Sasaki, a senior student first got interested in social psychology when he was studying in New York with a particular interest in why people react differently. Gradually he found social psychology to be too broad a topic to focus on, and now he has developed an interest in color psychology. "I wanted to research why women look most attractive in red."
Mr. Sasaki, who hopes to work at a beer company in the future, will look to apply what he has learned in this seminar to help understand customer psychology as a salesman.