Outreach Lecture at Yonago Higashi High School

On December 22, 2025, I visited Tottori Prefectural Yonago Higashi High School to deliver an outreach lecture for first-year students in the Life Science Course. The talk was titled “What is the basic blueprint of animal brains? Opening future science through sensing, thinking, and moving.” Using planarians—small but remarkably informative organisms—we explored how living animals select actions and organize behavior.

The session combined a short lecture with hands-on activities. Many students were familiar with planarians by name, but for a large number of them it was their first time to actually see, handle, and experiment with the animals. Their curiosity and candid reactions felt quite different from those I usually encounter at the university, and that freshness made the visit especially enjoyable and memorable.