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Our eyes are one of the most complex and interesting parts of the human body. We rely heavily on them every day, not giving much thought to them until something is wrong. How much do you actually know about them and how they work? You might be surprised to learn that your eyes are incredibly powerful, and there’s a lot to discover about them.
Do you know why you have two eyes? Or why some people are color-blind? Find these answers and much more in the following gallery. Click on!
The six muscles in each of your eyes move faster than any other muscles in your body. Known as the extra ocular muscles, they're located around the eyeball and inside the eye socket.
You've probably heard that eyes don't grow. But in reality, your eyes grow considerably in your first two years of life. They reach full size by adulthood.
Your retina has seven million cone cells that help you see colors. Then you also have 100 million rod cells to help you see in the dark.
Primitive life-forms didn’t have eyeballs like humans and many animals do today. Instead, single-celled organisms had patches of photoreceptor proteins that could detect light.
Your cone cells detect either red, green, or blue. Your brain combines them to show you all the other remaining colors of the rainbow.
Rods don't help with color vision, which is why at night we see everything in a gray scale. They also contain a pigment that's sensitive to green light.
Men are more likely than women to be color-blind. This happens when one of the three kinds of cone cells that detect color is missing.
Smoking and secondhand smoke increase your risk for age-related vision loss. Also, cataracts tend to develop faster in people who smoke.
Newborns have blurry vision for the first four months, which develops over time. It also takes the same amount of time for a baby to fully see colors and distant objects.
Thanks to eyebrows and eyelashes, the eyes are well protected. Eyebrows prevent sweat from reaching your eyes, while eyelashes help keep dirt out of them.
Our eyes are about one inch (2.54 cm) across and weigh about 0.25 ounce (seven grams). There's no significant difference between sexes and age groups in terms of eye size.
When the lenses in your eyes focus an image on your retina, it’s upside down and backward. What happens is that your brain actually reorients and right-sizes the image for you.
Having two eyes helps with depth perception. Your brain calculates distances by comparing the distinct images from each eye. People who lose sight in one eye have a declined ability to track moving objects, judge distances, and perceive depth.
It’s estimated that 70-79% of people have brown eyes, while 8-10% have blue eyes, and only about 2% have green. Brown eyes are more common in warmer climates because excess melanin protects the eyes from sunlight.
Even if no one in the past few generations of your family had blue or green eyes, these recessive traits can still appear in later generations. Also, research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor from 6,000-10,000 years ago.
With only 2% of the world's population having green eyes, it's the rarest eye color. Just like blue eyes, green eyes are a genetic mutation that results from low levels of melanin.
The reason why you can see is that your eyes capture light like a camera. It then sends the data back to your brain, where the pictures 'develop.'
The cornea is the only tissue in the human body that doesn't contain blood vessels. In fact, there's a serious eye condition called interstitial keratitis that causes the growth of blood vessels in the cornea. It must be treated immediately.
If our brains detect something dangerous coming toward us, we automatically close our eyes to protect them from harm.
To make up for these blind spot gaps, our brain uses stimuli from our other eye to figure out what we’re missing.
Known as heterochromia, it's when a person has differently colored eyes or eyes that have more than one color. It's caused by genes passed down from your parents or by something that happened when your eyes were forming.
Eyes are the second most complex organs after the brain. Eyeballs have over two million working parts, and more than one million nerve fibers that connect each one to the brain.
While it's possible, it's not recommended to do so. By automatically shutting the eyelids when a sneeze occurs, more bacteria can be prevented from entering and aggravating the eyes.
Ommetaphobia describes an extreme fear of eyes. And like other phobias, this type of fear can be strong enough to interfere with your daily life and social activities.
With proper care, it takes only about 48 hours to repair a minor corneal scratch. Fast healing happens because the cells on the outside of the eye are living cells, unlike the dead cells that make up your skin.
On average, you will blink approximately 4.2 million times in a single year. That's about 12,000 times per day!
During an eye exam, health conditions like diabetes can be detected. Also, if the optometrist takes a retinal photograph, signs of high blood pressure can be seen in red areas of hemorrhaging in the eyes.
Tears are rare at the beginning and the end of life. Newborns can’t produce tears for about six weeks. Also, the older you get, the fewer tears you produce.
If one of our eyes was a digital camera, it would have 576 megapixels. In comparison, some of the best cameras in the world have only around 50 megapixels.
Sources: (Cleveland Clinic) (ADV Vision)
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Our eyes are one of the most complex and interesting parts of the human body. We rely heavily on them every day, not giving much thought to them until something is wrong. How much do you actually know about them and how they work? You might be surprised to learn that your eyes are incredibly powerful, and there’s a lot to discover about them.
Do you know why you have two eyes? Or why some people are color-blind? Find these answers and much more in the following gallery. Click on!