- The eyes are the second most complex organ in the body, after the brain.
- Sight is such a demanding activity that it involves almost half the brain to accomplish.
- Eyes start to develop two weeks after conception.
- Newborns don’t produce tears. They may cry, but tears don’t start flowing until somewhere between 4 and 13 weeks old.
- 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 the other’s blind spot.
- The cells in your eyes come in various shapes. Rod-shaped cells allow you to see shapes, and cone-shaped cells allow you to see color.
- Of all the muscles in your body, the muscles that control your eyes are the most active.
- Eyelashes having a life span of about 5 months, after which time, they fall out. If you added the length of all those eyelashes together, it would be over 98 feet.
- You blink about 12 times every minute.
- The eye is located in a hollow eye socket so they are protected. Furthermore, eyebrows prevent sweat from dripping into the eyes and eyelashes help keep dirt out.
- Eyeballs do not grow. They stay the same size from birth to death. Whereas the nose and ears continue to grow throughout one’s life.
- Your eyes are about 1 inch across and weigh about 0.25 ounces.
- The eye is composed of more than 2 million working parts.
- About 80% of our memories are determined by what we see.
- Only 1/6 of the human eyeball is exposed.
- The Cornea is the only tissue in the body that doesn’t have blood.
- An eye cannot currently be transplanted. More than 1 million nerve fibers connect each eye to the brain and currently doctors are not able to reconstruct those connections.
- Eyes heal quickly. With proper care, it takes only about 48 hours to repair a minor corneal scratch.
- Humans and dogs are the only species known to seek visual cues from another individual’s eyes, and dogs only do this when interacting with humans.
- A fingerprint has 40 unique characteristics, but an iris has 256, one reason why retinal scans are increasingly being used for security purposes.
- People who are blind can see in their dreams, if they weren’t born blind.
- “Red eye” occurs in photos because light from the flash bounces off the back of the eye. The choroid is located behind the retina and is rich in blood vessels, which make it appear red on film.
- Some people are born with two differently colored eyes. This condition is known as ‘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.
- About 80% of what we learn is through our eyes.
