Thinking about Rare Kidney Diseases

Thinking about rare kidney diseases.

A rare disease is defined by the federal government as any condition that affects fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. Rare diseases can be distinguished from neglected diseases, such as malaria, hookworm, or Chagas disease, in that neglected diseases receive less attention because although common they are uncommonly found in this country. As so defined, there are 6000 rare diseases ...

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

Rare inherited kidney diseases: challenges, opportunities, and perspectives.

At least 10% of adults and nearly all children who receive renal-replacement therapy have an inherited kidney disease. These patients rarely die when their disease progresses and can remain alive for many years because of advances in organ-replacement therapy. However, these disorders substantially decrease their quality of life and have a large effect on health-care systems. Since the kidneys ...