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It is my pleasure to present you with our first edition of The Neuroethics Blog reader. This reader includes some of the most popular posts on the site and highlights our junior talent. While the blog showcases cutting-edge debates in neuroethics, it also serves as a mechanism for mentoring junior scholars and students and providing them with exciting opportunities to have their pieces featured alongside established scholars in the field. In addition, the blog allows for community building, inviting scholars from multiple disciplines to participate. Our contributors have included individuals at various levels of education from fields such as law, neuroscience, engineering, psychology, English, medicine, philosophy, women’s studies, and religion, to name a few. Each blog post is a collaborative process, read and edited numerous times by the editorial leadership in partnership with the author. We aim to continue to mentor and deliver quality posts that serve to cultivate not only our ne...

When I first learned about misophonia , it was described as a severe annoyance by certain specific sounds, most commonly bodily sounds such as chewing, breathing and slurping, or repetitive sounds such as ceiling fans, beeping, etc.  A quick Wikipedia search described it as, “a form of decreased sound tolerance… believed to be a neurological disorder characterized by negative experiences resulting only from specific sounds, whether loud or soft.” Immediately, I had a number of questions: if misophonia is just a hatred of certain sounds that leads to annoyance or anger, how is this classified as a neurological disorder?  Wouldn’t everyone have this disorder to some degree?  Everyone has their pet peeves as far as sound goes; I cannot stand the sound of people chewing, and while it is sometimes very irritating, I would by no means say that I have a neurological disorder. The Wikipedia entry stated, “Intense anxiety and avoidant behavior may develop, which can lead to decre...