In a society with a decreasing and aging population, what significance do scientific attitudes have for living life better and what effect can they have on society? Dr Kenichiro Mogi of Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., who is known for his study on human awareness and explains philosophical subjects in his various books and media in a way that's easy to understand, talked to us about "science in life."

Science is in every phase of life

 What I felt in England （Note 1） was that there was something like a "scientific spirit" in that country, which is essential to better living in every facet of life. English people hate to be considered as being assertive without any support by facts. They have a thoroughgoing spirit of the idea that "facts are telling." I think that scientific attitude in a broad sense has made England and America big powers in the world.

 In Japan, we tend to consider science in a narrow sense, but I think that in the current era science relates to everything, not just as an idea but whether or not there is empirical data in every aspect of daily life, such as the relationships in a family or how to bring up children. Nowadays, anything and everything in the world are considered to be science. The representative science magazines "Nature" and "Science" are proactive in publishing such topics, and it is considered to be admirable to think of something as an object of science that was not thought to be an object of science in the past. For example, the first thesis of small world network theory （Note 2） that is now a focus of interest, analyzed co-star relations in Hollywood movies as an example, and was published in "Nature."

Note 1：
 Studied in Cambridge University from 1995 to 1997.
Note 2：
 The "small world" phenomenon is an "It's a small world!" kind of idea. It is the hypothesis that everyone in the world can be reached by following a chain of social acquaintances. The small world network is a model to explain this phenomenon by network theory, and "Nature" published the first thesis in 1998. If you track down the movie co-stars of Kevin Bacon, an actor, you can reach all the movie actors and actresses in Hollywood within six steps.

Grabbing chances in the economy quickly by adopting a flexible attitude about "science"

 Currently, neuroeconomics is experiencing a big boom in the U.S. In this sense, America moves quickly but Japan does not. Neuroeconomics is the science of studying, from brain mechanisms, how a man judges and acts when an uncertain situation exists. For example, there are Internet auction systems where a person puts something he/she doesn't need up for auction on the Internet to call for bids. It is a rapidly growing market and one major company is said to already have a market size equivalent to one-tenth of that of all convenience stores. How a brain copes with uncertainty is connected with the system design for this bidding. Furthermore, brain science is related with finance engineering, stock markets, foreign exchange markets, and company strategies for investments and mergers. When considering the recent rapid growth of Internet search businesses, I think Japan may become a more interesting country if we can produce more human resources in neuromarketing, a field of neuroeconomics, to make new companies. This may be needed in the global competition era.

 As you can imagine from the term "political science," the territory of "science" in the English language is wider than "science" in Japanese. Science, in English, makes a paradigm of systematic thinking for a certain target of research by keeping logical consistency and collecting proof. I think it will be a big challenge to make such a broad science concept take root in Japan.

Breakthroughs in science may be realized by explaining science in ways that the general public can understand

 To explain science for the general public to understand is "enlightenment" in Japan, and is considered to be an activity of lower rank than real science. However, I have recently considered that this is not true. Like Darwin in the past and Dawkins of today （Note 3）, the books that first class scientists wrote for the general public brought about scientific breakthroughs in the world at the same time. This is true especially for brain science. Brain science is a big science now. In a variety of brain science fields, individual researchers perform research on the respective functions and structures, but the brain cannot be understood by viewing just a part. To explain the brain to the general public in a way that is easy to understand, various kinds of knowledge must be put together. When performing research on consciousness or on what human intellect is, putting various kinds of knowledge together leads to breakthroughs. In other words, explaining science from an integrated viewpoint and bringing about new interdisciplinary breakthroughs by combining different areas are the same thing. Doing a new thing is an "Egg of Columbus" （an extremely simple solution to a difficult problem, that is hard to find, but once known, looks trivial and even obvious） and it's not difficult once you hit on an idea. Rather, the later you come, the more difficult it becomes. A person who is given the Nobel Prize is the first person who did something, and it cannot be done without comprehensive thinking to create an interdisciplinary bridge. I think there is a problem of specialization caused by withdrawing into one's own academic field.

Note 3：
 Richard Dawkins （1941-）: British ethologist, known for the selfish gene theory which holds that natural selection acts through differential survival of competing genes.