Eyes are one of the most complex organs of the human body. Despite modern technology, there is still much that we do not know about them. Below are some fun facts you may not know about your eyes:
- The average blink lasts for about 1/10th of a second.
- While it takes some time for most parts of your body to warm up to their full potential, your eyes work 24 hours a day.
- Eyes heal quickly. With proper care, it takes only about 48 hours to repair a minor corneal scratch.
- Seeing is such a big part of everyday life that it requires about half of the brain to get involved.
- Newborns don’t produce tears. They make crying sounds, but the tears don’t start flowing until they are about 4-13 weeks old.
- There are about 39 million people who are blind around the world and roughly six times that many have some kind of vision impairment.
- Doctors have yet to find a way to transplant an eyeball. The optic nerve that connects the eye to the brain is too sensitive to reconstruct successfully.
- The cells in the eyes come in different shapes. Rod-shaped cells allow you to see shapes, and cone-shaped cells allow you to see color.
- You blink about 17 times per minute, 14,280 times in a 14 hours day and 5.2 million times a year. You blink more when talking and a half less when watching films or reading books, a reason eyes become tired when watching movies and reading.
- Eyes are about 2.5 centimeters across and weigh about 7 grams.
- Some people are born with two differently colored eyes. This condition is heterochromia.
- 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.
- Each of your eyes has a small blind spot in the back of the retina where the optic nerve attaches. You don’t notice the hole in your vision because your eyes work together to fill in each other’s blind spot.
- Out of all the muscles in your body, the muscles that control your eyes are the most active. The muscles around the eye are the strongest muscles, which is 100 times stronger than the others in the body.
- 80% of eye problems worldwide are avoidable or curable.
- If you have blue eyes, you share a common ancestor with other blue-eyed person in the world. The first ever blue-eyed person lived sometime between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Human ancestor have brown eye until He or she was born with a gene which could not produce enough melanin to create brown eyes, resulting in a unique DNA sequence that was transmitted to every other blue-eyed person ever since.
- You cannot see the world as retinas do. Because your retinas actually perceive the outside world as upside-down – your brain flips the image for you, even when you wearing a pair of prism glasses.
- The shark cornea is used in human eye surgery as it is the most similar to the human cornea.
- Your nose gets runny when you cry as the tears drain into your nasal passages.
- One of the most common cosmetic injuries is poking the eyeball with a mascara wand.
- People generally read 25% slower on screen than on paper.
- Your eye can distinguish between 500 shades of grey.
- Babies are born colorblind. Men are much more likely to be colorblind than women.
- Retina scans are increasingly being used for security purpose. A fingerprint has only 40 unique characteristics, but an iris has 256.
- Pupils size can be changed constantly, especially the changes in emotions such as anger or excitement. Your pupils can expand as much as 45% while looking at someone you like.
- Eyes are the second most complex organ after the brain.
- Although the function of tears is to keep eyes clean, scientists don’t understand why we cry when we are upset.
- We often say “in the blink of an eye” because eyes are the fastest muscle in body, The duration of a blink is on average 100-150 milliseconds. It’s possible to blink 5 times in a single second.
- Our eye can distinguish about 10 million different colors, but ultraviolet and infrared light.
