The human eye is somewhat like a camera, inasmuch as you don't want to drop yours and break it. But more relevantly, the human eye is like a camera in that it also has a focal length. But whereas cameras, while sometimes being quite expensive and complicated, are engineered devices made out of mostly static parts, the human eye is made out of countless tiny cells, controlled by delicate muscles, and is always in the process of adjusting itself to conditions around it. And the eye's output is constantly sorted out by the entire physical and metaphysical machinery of the visual processing system in the brain.
I described that entire metaphor briefly, because while the entire subject of human visual focal length is perhaps fascinating on its own, but it literally and metaphorically ties in with the idea of the focal length of human thinking. While your eyes can focus at variable lengths, your mind is usually focused about thirty feet in front of you, although this can vary widely. Along with a focal length in space, people also have a focal length in time. Most people focus on events in the past few minutes to past few hours, with things closer or further away from that somewhat blurring.
This is all pretty obvious.
The interesting thing about focal length is when it changes, and trying to understand or remember states when our mental (and sometimes physical) focal length was at a different length than it normally is. Intoxicated people, whether on alcohol or something more exotic, have a very altered focal length, usually foreshortened, but sometimes lengthened. Children have a focal length that is much closer to what is in front of them, both in time and space. It is often hard to remember just how odd and distant the world outside our familiar homes were as children.
And, when you are depressed, say so depressed that you've been trying to write a basic write-up all day long and all your sentences come out jumbled and clumsy, well, your focal length is about six inches in front of your eyes, and even that is really too much.
The idea behind focal length as it relates to thought processes is fairly obvious, but some of the things that can be done with the concept are quite important, as I will be describing in my writings once I return to thinking, at least on a theoretical level, that life is not a long walk into despair.