The Human Eye

The Human Eye

The second most complicated organ in our body, (the brain takes first) the eye is to be thanked for over 85% of what we experience every day and work tirelessly and without rest their entire lives. (external muscles  need rest though, and lubricant must be replenished. The eye, itself, however, needs no rest.) 



We use our eyes almost constantly every day, (aside from the average of 10 000 blinks a day and sleeping) and yet we barely ever think about the fact we're using them. We're far too engrossed by the 36,000 bits of information we are receiving every hour, and the around 50 things a second our eyes focus on for us to think about the processes that the images we see have to go through.

We actually see everything upside-down, but our wonderful brain flips it the 'right' way up for us, not to mention fading the two different images (one from each eye) that its given together! But that's the brain, and another topic.

Colours

With around 120 million rods for “night vision”, and 8 million cones that are colour sensitive (and work best in light) be are able to distinguish between over 500 shades of grey, and see over 2.7 million different colours.



However, not everyone has this privilege. Roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women are affected by at least some form of colour-blindness.
There are quite a few variations of this, though! It's not just black and white!
The most common type of colour-blindness is the 'red-green' type called deuteranopia, however, very rarely, There are people which are really suffering from complete color blindness, which is called achromatopsia or monochromacy.

Other little facts

Only 1/6 of our eye is actually 'exposed'. However, humans are still the only animal which has the 'whites' of our eyes showing. 

See? No eye-whiteness!

Another misconception is that there is only one colour-gene coding for our eyes.
Actually, there are three!
We've got an allele for a colour in our inner ring, centre, and outer rings of the iris.
This is why you'll occasionally meet people with multi-coloured eyes, as opposed to just monochromatic all the way!




But, overall, the human eye is a ridiculously powerful, awesome, and pretty organ! Humans have been and still are obsessed with them! (Seriously, just google-image 'eye' and you'll get thousands of photos, (photoshopped and real!) images of them.)
If you can see, (with the aid of glasses or not!) be happy that you have such a complex organ functioning in your body! ^-^

Dragina, Awaaaayyy!~