You know the eyesight intro course you can subscribe to from all over the site? Well, I did something pretty stupid with it when I set it up. How stupid?
I set the “reply-to” e-mail address as my main e-mail.
My reasoning at the time? I didn’t want to blast out e-mails in a one way type of dialog. I wanted readers to be able to hit reply, tell me whatever was on their minds, and for me to actually receive all those e-mails. Made sense to me to do it that way, and for the five to ten e-mail sign-ups a day, you figure no big deal.
But now there are often hundreds of readers requesting the intro course, in a single day.
And as you might figure with that number as perspective, I end up getting more than just a few reply-to e-mails. I get a lot of e-mails from that one teeny tiny “setup mistake”.
Still, I haven’t changed the course e-mail address.
I like getting the e-mails. It feels like a bit of a pulse of what’s on readers minds, what sorts of people read the e-mails, and the various strange and interesting commentary that comes of it. I have an admin minion to monitor my e-mail and deal with obvious issues, but even he has been instructed to just let all the course replies comes straight through.
Here’s one I received today:
Is it too late to endeavor on this program?
At age 68 its a crap shoot.
Nice one.
I don’t get around to answering every single e-mail I get, though I try. I haven’t answered that one yet, since that particular sender also barraged me with a half dozen other one line e-mails in a few hour period.
But it warrants comment, maybe more so here than in an e-mailed reply.
Here’s how I’d rephrase the question:
How old do you want to be before you … give up?
Because that’s how you know when it’s too late (for you).
When do you give up on caring about your body and working to keep it functioning properly? Sure, maybe there is that time when you say, hey, close enough. Let’s ride this crap heap to the junk yard, full speed ahead. Maybe there’s a time you just load up on pizza, cigarettes and Coke, and decide that you’re done worrying about any of it.
Anytime before that time, it’s never a crapshoot to start treating your eyes better.
Remember dynamic visual acuity, from yesterday? In it we talk about another metric by which eyesight can be measured, hint at sex differences, and mention that I have quite a few offline, real world students. More than just some of them are not spring chickens!
And more than a few of them can see better than almost any teenager you’re going to meet in Hong Kong today. A quick word from Experimental Gerontology, in “Age related changes in visual acuity“:
Longitudinal visual acuity assessments of men, and cross-sectional assessments of men and women in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging are presented. The longitudinal data relate presenting far, uncorrected far, presenting near and uncorrected near visual acuities to age. The cross-sectional data relate presenting far acuity to age. The prevalence of cataract, glaucoma and retinal pathologies are reported for the longitudinal sample at the time of their last vision test. The effect of visual pathologies in general, and cataract in particular, upon presenting far visual acuity was examined. Older persons who were free from specific visual pathologies exhibited an age-related decline in presenting far acuity as did those with documented visual pathologies. Despite the demonstrated loss in acuity with age, the majority of persons maintain at least fair acuity (2040 or better) into their 80’s.
Whoever tells you that you can’t have pretty excellent vision all the way to picking out your casket and headstone, either doesn’t know otherwise, or is trying to sell you glasses.
Yes, the lens hardens with age. Yes, risk of cataracts and glaucoma (and with that, lowered retinal illumination, which is a major contributing cause to age related reduced visual acuity). Yes, many things with age. But crapshoot? Hardly.
Instead and totally to the contrary, maintaining your vision with age is fairly key to the rest of your cognitive functions:
It has recently been suggested that a large proportion of the age-related influences on many measures of cognitive functioning is mediated through a single common factor. This hypothesis has been supported by the discovery that much of the age-related variance in different cognitive measures is shared, and is not distinct or independent. These earlier results were replicated in this project, and it was also discovered that measures of corrected visual acuity and processing speed share a very large proportion of the age-related variance in measures of working memory, associative learning, and concept identification. The apparent implication is that the common factor that appears to contribute to age-related differences in many cognitive measures is quite broad and may reflect a relatively general reduction in central nervous system functioning.
From “Interrelations of Age, Visual Acuity, and Cognitive Functioning“.
That’s actually a teaser of not just a juicy bit of research, but a whole category of eyesight health and maintaining overall well being with advancing age. I could fill a year of daily blog posts on that subject alone. Short version? Let your eyesight go, and your whole reality goes dim with it.
I have had students in their literal 90’s start a whole new adventure, and have nothing short of stunning recoveries of wide ranging cognitive function, by just digging into their eyesight health. Improved physical coordination, slurred speech completely gone, better posture, I’ve seen all that and more. Improving your eyesight can seem like a veritable fountain of youth to those who observe your progress. Is that all attributable to eyesight alone? Or perhaps it is having something to work on every day, embarking on an adventure, reclaiming control over ones health. Or maybe it’s a bit of everything.
All that talk about old age and eyesight. What’s the take-away?
What I’m saying, not even important. Make up your own mind, do your own research. Remember that I do make money from this site, and from telling you to go fix your eyes. So don’t just listen to me. But do follow those links, fire up scholar.google.com and use the keywords you find in these articles to see what’s real and what’s worth your time.
Cheers,
-Jake
