About two years ago I decided to close my social media accounts. It was a kind of naive shield to protect myself from everything that I thought affected me. When I disconnected, I felt that some vices are not cured, but are supplanted by others and not necessarily better ones.

I don't know if it was a consequence or a coincidence, but after a while I started to look up and observe the people around me, I still wanted to feel that connection. That made me think about how tangible the lack of tangibility becomes, of being able to see, feel, touch, smell and appreciate, but for real. We are immersed in the habit of looking down in search for digital dopamine, often with the need to share what we are not sharing.

That behavior made me very curious and led me to discover Parinaud's syndrome, a paralysis of vertical upward gaze, which can be the consequence of a tumor of the pineal gland (pinealoma), which presses on an area of the brain that controls the vertical gaze, or as a result of a cerebrovascular accident (stroke). People with Parinaud’s syndrome tend to look down. They have their eyelids pulled back and their pupils dilated.

Parinaud's syndrome inspired this book, perhaps to essentially give you back all those looks you missed, even assuming that now you're going to see them looking down too.