macular degeneration, macular, diagnosis The Cockeyed Optimist – My Macular Degeneration Journey/Journal

The Cockeyed Optimist

One of the books nephew #2 considered necessary for educating Aunt Susie was Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From. I listened to it and it came to mind today when someone insinuated I was perhaps naive to have such faith in stem cell research.

I will eternally be a cockeyed optimist but I don’t believe I am unrealistic. Johnson has a concept I call “you can’t get there from here” and he refers to as the adjacent possible. Have you ever wound your way through a large museum? You cannot get from the marine invertebrate section to the land vertebrate section. They don’t connect. However by traveling through marine vertebrates, you find your way. Same concept. We are not in the stem cell cure ‘room’ and we cannot get there from here. But if I can help the researchers get into the next room, maybe even the one next to the stem cell cure room, I want to help.

Truth of the matter is, astounding leaps and eureka moments are rare. It is important to support the people finding the slightly closer rooms, one room at a time.

A reason to be optimistic? The bigger the network the faster the innovation. The more people working on a project, the faster dead-end lines of inquiry are abandoned. One person’s findings spark an idea in someone else. We are climbing onto each other’s shoulders to reach higher and farther than any other time in history. Open exchange of ideas is spurring us ahead at an incredible rate.

Johnson even reports error is necessary for growth. This goes way back to genetic mutations. How boring the world would be if everyone were identical.

Variation through error allows for variations in thinking and even serendipitous events. Knowledge advances through errors almost just as much as it does through linear, accurate discoveries.

I appreciate people are concerned about me. I really do. I like when people want to protect me. It is a nice, warm fuzzy thing. But I am not going into this with crazy, pie-in-the-sky expectations.

My hope is to stop the progression of the disease in one eye. The phase 1 subjects got some acuity back because dying photoreceptors were revived. That would be nice.

After that I am on the 10 year plan. Vision in 10 years is my tentative goal. Might happen. Might not. I am cautiously optimistic.

Did I choose wrong with stem cells? No. There is another author my nephew recommended, Malcolm Gladwell. The book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell refers to a concept known as the adaptive unconscious. The adaptive unconscious makes decisions without conscious contemplation. It is knowing without knowing how you know. Some people call it intuition. Gladwell has discovered the collective unconscious is very frequently right. The adaptive unconscious was how I first came up with my plan.

Hold it to the scrutiny of the conscious? Of course! Looking at the pros and cons of everything – repeatedly as situations change – is necessary. After all, I am not naive ?.

Have a great day!

Love, the cockeyed optimist

Next: Independence

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