About Presbyopia

What you see depends on your distance to the subject. Walk away from your screen and look again. Hybrid image CC-BY-SA from Pablo Carlos Budassi, based on the concept by Aude Oliva. You might have seen this Marilyn Monroe / Albert Einstein hybrid.

A subsection launched in November 2022, to offer residual interdisciplinary research questions on some of the themes covered in the main newsletter. (Here’s its own About page).

Why Presbyopia? Of course I looked down a list of eye disorders to compliment Scotoma. Partly because when I chose that name I hesitated about leaving the impression that disorders are primarily disabilities that need correction.

When I was younger, I felt ‘differently abled’ was a gratuitous, patronizing euphemism. Not because I object to all PC language policing. But if the message is that there’s nothing wrong with disability and the goal is wider acceptance, why not just be factual? Then I learned that some blind people navigate perfectly well by echolocation. Others can aid the seeing in low visibility conditions. Suddenly, ‘differently abled’ seems right on the money!

Anyway. Presbyopia is when in middle age, the lens gets less flexible and the muscles in your eye that focus it are worse for wear. And you get used to seeing things at a distance, sometimes literally ‘taking a step back’.

Elite Scotoma covers lapses in journalistic argumentation. But sometimes, it is not how pundits argue a case and whether they account for all known attendant facts. Sometimes, it is about what questions they did not ask. And sometimes, it is about questions that they would like to have and give us the answer to, but scientists and academics haven’t yet answered.

The most common reason for the gap is the super-specialization in science. Experts know more and more about less and less. It takes a generalist to see how reporting and truth-seeking in one area relates to questions from another disciplines.

These often become apparent when you take a step back.

Presbyopia does that. Zooms out to see the broader picture straddling disparate domains, and formulates new research questions to bridge the gaps.