Posts by: Kyle Munkittrick
Carolyn Abraham pens an exhaustive and balanced article on embryo selection. If you are honest with yourself about trying to understand the situation new parents will be facing in the coming decades, you’ll read this article.
Sherry Turkle is awesome. A good buddy of mine, Tyler, sent me the link to David Zax’s interview with Turkle about her new book Alone Together thinking it would get my hackles up. Turkle is perhaps one of the most perceptive thinkers on technology and society. She is not eternal pessimist David Carr, nor is [...]
IQ is not the same throughout your life. Like physical fitness, the amount you workout, stay active, and push yourself alters your overall intelligence. Your brain gets better at thinking if you make it.
A higher IQ can get you more than admission to Mensa and bragging rights on online-dating sites. IQ, measured by [...]
Peg O’Conner in the New York Times relates her battle with alcoholism to Plato’s famous allegory. Addiction is the right word for those who return, who need, the Cave and the shadows on its wall to be their reality:
In various scenarios of addiction, the addicted person’s fixation on a shadow reality — one [...]
The Power of Placebo
By Kyle Munkittrick On January 8, 2012 · Leave a Comment · In Body, Drugs, Health Care, Medicine, Mind
Fertility, depression, Parkinson’s, fitness, hunger levels, pain, and asthma are a few of the things the inert wonder drug can help treat.
Why did the placebo work—even after patients were told they weren’t getting real medicine? Expectations play a role, Dr. Kaptchuk says. Even more likely is that patients were conditioned to a positive [...]
They are compliments. Consider the digital 3-D cadaver system being used by NYU Medical:
In the N.Y.U. lab, Chana Rich, a 21-year-old first-year student from Fairfield, Conn., dissected an older, female cadaver. But the dead woman had undergone a number of surgeries during her lifetime, and her body was now missing its appendix, spleen [...]
Ekso Bionics is a company to watch. Building exoskeletons for everyday use by paraplegics is their goal by 2014. Erika Strickland’s “Good-bye, Wheelchair, Hello Exoskeleton” highlights the progress of some of Ekso’s first patients and the potential in the near future:
[Eythor] Bender, Ekso Bionics’ CEO, is confident that controlling Eksos will come to [...]
What people are able to do with the Kinect and Wii continues to blow my mind. Nintendo and Microsoft would do the world a great service if they opened-up their tech to the mod community for non-profit purposes.
Eddy Nahmias explains why if you’re going to argue free will doesn’t exist, we better make damn sure we’re all talking about the same thing:
The sciences of the mind do give us good reasons to think that our minds are made of matter. But to conclude that consciousness or free will is thereby [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
