> Euler Had Facial Paralysis
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Leonhard_Euler_-_Jakob_Emanuel_Handmann_(Kunstmuseum_Basel).jpg
>
> I saw this image in a search result summary regarding a math topic.
> The person pictured has their face screwed up like me likely from severe
> damage to the facial nerves (Bell's Palsy), but they look very nice and
> bright.
> I haven't read about it. I've only seen the picture.
>
> There are so many things to say. It's very distracting when your facial
> muscles contract in the wrong way, primarily the eye strongly relies on these
> facial muscles to maintain its surface which produces very distracting
> constant pain and potential visual impairment when it can't do that -- but
> also the rest of the face does not expect to have its muscles over- or under-
> contracted and has strange things too.
>
> Over time, these experiences produce an imbalance in the mind from the
> strange sensations (and lack of sensations from numbness) in the face. For
> example if your nerves are miswired (from healing wrongly after damage), you
> may learn to think and move your body differently to avoid stimulating the
> contractions caused by the miswiring, especially if they are very painful.
> Your patterns can change significantly.
>
> What seemed firstmost notable is that Euler is one of the most world
> reknowned mathematicians over centuries, and that I personally find things
> like math to be an engaging activity because it can give me a strong focus
> away from my other experiences and dangers of the world. Euler would have had
> some kind of trauma not only because that's such a huge change to the face
> and one's life and appearance, but also because something happened to cause
> such damage to the face that Euler would have survived.
>
> There's so much that could be said, but that seemed interesting, that humans
> find a place to focus that works for them, and one of those places can be
> math. The patterns of math have almost nothing to do with anything in the
> human world. There's very little emotional content to stimulate psychological
> triggers or terrors.
>
> So, the impact of a severe injury on somebody like Euler or Hawking could
> produce a human being who has much more reason to engage the logical
> situations of the world. Humans are intellectual creatures.
>
> But it also seems unnatural. I see the natural intent of trauma and evolution
> to be to address the cause of the injury. As an evolved being, I expect
> everything bad that happens in the world to trend toward resolving the
> problems that caused it. That's how science says our bodies grew, our
> communities and cultures and hearts.
>
> Normally, in the wilderness, a creature with a severe injury has to survive.
> They stumble into other creatures that see them injured and are exposed to
> information about what can happen to creatures like it. They find workarounds
> to their problems amongst diverse other beings and show them information on
> how to cope with the problem. They demonstrate the impact of what is present
> in the larger world, in an environment where everybody is adapted to how
> things are, and has to respond when things are different. Like a buffer
> system that evolutionary systems evolve to create regions of steady growth
> around shocking newness.
>
> As a species that considers itself highly evolved, we expect to be _really
> really good_ at that buffer system, and we study problems in research
> meetings and talk about them and design things like prosthetics, laws, and
> diplomacy.
>
> If a highly-injured person focuses their life on math to cope, is this impact
> neutered? Does there become a benefit to a predator or danger harming the
> society, such that people cave away and pursue technological advancement,
> whereas that advancement can facilitate further hiding from the predators? It
> seems quite unlikely that, in the long term, cognitive and technological
> advancement would facilitate domestication under the hoof of a random danger.
> But that's what people like Euler, Hawking, or me, can appear at first glance
> to be providing.
>
> One view is that general advancement is a long term investment in having more
> tools for the species as a whole to handle dangers, eons down the line. But I
> think we're smarter than that.
>
> Another thing that struck me about the picture is how the painter made
> Euler's skin so bright and good-looking. My first suspect, given the pairing
> of this with the facial quirks, was that this was something painters of the
> time did -- found ways to hilight things about the subject that would be seen
> as good looking. Euler has his non-injured side facing the viewer -- this is
> a habit I seem to have developed too. I additionally have much more trouble
> shaving the other half of my face because I can't feel properly on it, and it
> has strange bumps, so it's very easy to cut myself especially if pursuing a
> very smooth shave.
>
> So, one of the things here is that humans are very social species [...
{We thought a little about this further and a next idea was that:
- mathematicians could be isolated from communities of people who survive
traumatic injury like theirs
- this could be why their genes settle on behaviors of long term technological
advancement; they don't have avenue to safer shorter term things
- pushing it away in disgust, or painting it over with bright colors, would
instead be indicative of the contrast between injury and wellness in the
mathematician's environment. most of their peers aren't injured.
- it's an interesting space in that most people who are injured are not
[genuises] because their communities spend their time handling their severe
challenges and trauma rather than studying [math].
- it also overlaps with posting pain to environments that don't have it (like
this list before it went silent) -- the buffer is missing. it can be received
as strong harm.
so an initial inference might be around value in finding communities that
overlap injury and challenges with advancement and success [i think there are
actually a lot of kinds of such communities
