We're looking at death all wrong. Here's why.

Can a shift in the way we treat death and dying improve our lives while we're still here?

  • These days, for the most part, the concept of death is consumed by health care and medicine.
  • However, as humans we need to view death as more than just a medical event. It takes into account our psychology, spirituality, philosophy, social worlds, and personal lives.
  • This reconsideration should also apply to the way we treat people who are dying. Life is in the senses, not just our physical capabilities.
Keep reading
death life human body emotions health disability health care senses

Is cursive writing important to child development?

Legislators push to keep cursive in their schools' curricula, but experts seem split as to whether it's necessary.

Tracy Burns checks her third grade student Nikolai Wilkins' cursive writing during class. (Photo: Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
  • Ohio has joined many other states in reestablishing cursive in their schools' curricula.
  • Research shows the value handwriting has for developing children's fine motor skills and a connection between words and memory.
  • But experts seem split on whether it's a question of print vs. cursive, or cognitive fluency vs. disconnect.
Keep reading
language mind youth children communication disability parenting learning writing

​How AI is learning to convert brain signals into speech

The first steps toward developing tools that could help disabled people regain the power to speak.

Pixabay
  • The technique involves training neural networks to associate patterns of brain activity with human speech.
  • Several research teams have managed to get neural networks to "speak" intelligible words.
  • Although similar technology might someday help disabled people regain the power to speak, decoding imagined speech is still far off.
Keep reading
innovation medical research disability machine learning ai brain

What I learned about disability and infanticide from Peter Singer

In the 1970s, the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer began to argue that it is ethical to give parents the option to euthanise infants with disabilities.

Peter Singer at the Effective Altruism Global conference in Melbourne 15 August 2015.

In the 1970s, the Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, perhaps best-known for his book Animal Liberation (1975), began to argue that it is ethical to give parents the option (in consultation with doctors) to euthanise infants with disabilities. He mostly, but not exclusively, discussed severe forms of disabilities such as spina bifida or anencephaly. In Practical Ethics (1979), Singer explains that the value of a life should be based on traits such as rationality, autonomy and self-consciousness. ‘Defective infants lack these characteristics,’ he wrote. ‘Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings.’

Keep reading
bioethics infanticide peter singer euthanasia ethnocide disability suffering utilitarianism

The Most Debilitating Disease in the World Isn't Just in Your Head

For the first time, the World Health Organization has declared a new mental illness to be the leading cause of disability around the world.

 

Depression. Photo Diego Fornero [flickr.com/destino2003]

Keep reading
depression disability mental health World Health Organization stigma help health budget developing world urban areas