It is our Treasure - Contributed by Gayathri Raman

Eye Facts
Some amazing facts about your eyes!

The Human Eye

ü  Your eyes are the most complex organs you possess except for your brain.

ü  Your eyes are composed of more than 2 million working parts

ü  The average person blinks 12 times per minute - about 10,000 blinks in an average day

ü  Your eyes can process 36,000 bits of information every hour.

ü  Only 1/6th of your eyeball is exposed to the outside world

ü  The external muscles that move the eyes are the strongest muscles in the human body for the job that they have to do. They are 100 times more powerful than they need to be.

ü  Colour blind people do see color but confuse certain colors in certain conditions.

ü  Red and Green are the most commonly confused colours among colour blind people.

ü  Colour blindness is 10 times more common in males than females

ü  The eye is the only part of the human body that can function at 100% ability at any moment, day or night, without rest.

ü  Your eyelids and  the external muscles of your eyes need rest, the lubrication of your eyes requires replenishment, but your eyes themselves never need rest.

ü  Your eyelashes have an average life span of 5 months.

ü  The eyeball of a human weighs approximately 28 grams.

ü  The eye of a human can distinguish 500 shades of the gray.

ü  People generally read 25% slower from a computer screen than from paper.

ü  Men are able to read fine print better than women can.

ü  The reason why your nose gets runny when you are crying is because the tears from the eyes drain into the nose.

ü  It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

ü  The space between your eyebrows is called the Glabella.

ü  Your eye will focus on about 50 things per second.

ü  Your retina contains 120 million rods for "night vision", and 8 million cones that are colour sensitive and work best under daylight conditions.

ü  Your Eyes contribute towards 85% of your total knowledge.

ü  About half of our brain is involved in the seeing process. Humans are very much visual animals.

ü  Under the right conditions, the human eye can see the light of a candle at a distance of 14 miles.

Your Eyes As You Grow

Ø   Your eyes begin to develop 2 weeks after conception

Ø   Your eyes are always the same size from birth, but your nose and ears never stop growing

Ø   The adult eyeball measures about 1 inch (2.5 cm) in diameter.

Ø   The older we are the less tears we produce.

Ø   Babies don’t produce tears in their eyes until they are one to three months old.

Ø   All babies are colour blind when they are born.

Ø   Your eyes will never wear out

Animal Eyes

Ø   The largest eyeball on the planet is 18 inches wide, about the size of a large watermelon and it belongs to The Giant Squid.

Ø   An ant has only two eyes. But each eye contains lots of smaller eyes. This is called a ‘compound eye’

Ø   Dogs can’t see the difference between the colours red and green.

Ø   A chameleon's eyes can look in different directions - at the same time!

Ø   The shark cornea has been used in eye surgery, since its cornea is similar to a human cornea.

Ø   An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Ø   Dolphins sleep with one eye open.

Ø   Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time.

Ø   Your cat's eyes offer her almost 285 degrees of sight in three dimensions. Ideal peripheral vision for hunting.

Ø   Cats do see in color, and can distinguish yellow, blue, and green hues. Their eyes are best, however, at detecting movement, and shades of gray.

And Finally.

Ø   Sailors once thought that wearing a gold earring would improve their eyesight.

Ø   The phrase, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was, "No eye gouging." Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be disqualified was to poke someone's eye out.

Ø   Modern cataract operations have been made possible thanks to the second world war. Sir Harold Ridley, who was an ophthalmic surgeon in London, found that pilots came back from their missions with little pieces of perspex in their eye(shattered screens of the planes they were flying in), to which the eye did not seem to "object": no inflammation of any significance was found in their eye. This material was modified and further developed into artificial lenses that are now used in cataract operations.

*** Gayathri Raman***