You're listening to Bold Proof Radio with Dave Asprey.

Today's cool fact of the day is that DaVinci may have had an artistic edge because of

an eye disorder.

Visual neuroscientists at the City University of London examined six pieces of art, including

his vertruvian man piece, and five of the pieces depict an eye misalignment that would be

consistent with an disorder called exotropia that interferes with your ability to see in three

dimensions.

They're theorizing that DaVinci may have had this, which causes one eye to turn slightly

outward, and it's one of a bunch of different eye disorders collectively called stribusmas.

And today that affects about 4% of people in the US, and they give you special glasses,

eye patches or surgery.

And researchers calculated the differences in eye alignment using the same sort of measurements

that an optometrist does when tailoring a pair of glasses.

And most of the portraits showed eyes misaligned, but the vertruvian man by DaVinci did not

have that.

So they think he may have had intermittent exotropia, which means that it may have just happened

some of the time, and maybe he could even control it.

It's also known that many artists shut one eye when viewing their subjects to more easily

translate the details into two dimensions.

And if you had this intermittent exotropia, you could easily switch from 3D to 2D and back

again with ease, which would be a visual superpower, which is kind of cool.

In my own life, I actually didn't know this, but I would do that.

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