"Detective! Night Scoop" (ABC TV, Friday 11:17pm) is a popular variety show where "detectives" tackle the most bizarre requests and worries sent in by viewers. On May 2nd, detective Maeda Ken investigated "I invented a new kind of brain training!" Deputy Director Takeyama Takanori, Secretary Masuda Saori, and Advisor Hano Akira appeared.
The request came from a man (45) from Osaka Prefecture. When asked, "What's the number before '7'?" he was able to answer "6" right away. But what if he was asked, "What's the number before 'me' in hiragana?" Would he be able to answer "mu" right away? With numbers he can immediately tell what the number before is, but with letters he has to trace the alphabet from the beginning: "ma → mi → mu → me... so the number before is 'mu'," and he can't answer right away.
If a method to easily derive the "previous character" like numbers could be found, it could be a major discovery. Is there a way to instantly find the "previous character"? The client asked for an investigation. The client, who is curious about many things, explained his opinion that "especially when looking up a word in a dictionary, saying the whole line is a waste of time," and said he wanted the previous character to appear within two seconds at the latest.
He thinks of a way to do this together with the head of an announcement school, a language expert, but even though he tries to learn the alphabet backwards and use the click input method on a smartphone, it's not a panacea. So he brings in a university professor of theoretical linguistics to help him. He puts into practice a method based on the professor's theory... Could this be the discovery of a new way to prevent dementia?
