Eye Facts… Did you know?

Amazing Human Eye Facts

1. The Human Eye has more than 2 million working parts.
2. The Human Iris has 256 unique characteristics compared to a fingerprint which has 40.
3. Approximately 50% of your brain is dedicated to vision and seeing the world around you.
4. The Human Eye starts to develop only 2 weeks after conception.
5. Humans can see more shades of grey than any other colour.
6. On average, you blink 4,200,000 times in 1 year.
7. Your eyes can get sunburnt.
8. Your retinas contain 7 million cone-shaped cells (allow you see colour and fine detail) and 100 million rod-shaped cells (allow you to see shapes, light and dark, and detect movement).
9. 80% of what we learn is through what we see.
10. 80% of vision problems around the world are avoidable or even curable.
11. The world’s most common eye colour is brown.
12. Only 1-2% of the entire Human population has green eyes.
13. People with blue eyes share a common ancestor with every other blue-eyed person. Blue eyes are the result of a genetic mutation which occurred around 6,000-10,000 years ago.
14. The average life span of a single eyelash is around 5 months.
15. Our retinas see the world around us upside down.
16. Your blind spot is where the optic nerve inserts into each eyeball.
17. Your optic nerve sends these upside-down images from your eyes to your brain. Your brain flips these images the right way up, fuses them together, and overlaps the image from each of your eyes so that you don’t notice each eye’s blind spot.
18. The Human eye sees only 3 colours: red, green, and blue. All other colours are a combination of red, green and blue.
19. The muscles in your eyes are the most active of all the muscles in your body and have been measured to be 100x stronger than they need to be to perform.
20. The focussing muscles of your eyes move 100,000 times every day. You would have to walk 80km every day for your leg muscles to do the same amount of work.
21. People generally read 25 times slower from a screen than they would from paper.
22. The Human eye is the 2^nd most complex organ we have, our brain is the most complex.
23. Carrots don’t make you see better. This lie was created by the British during World War 2 to cover up the cutting-edge RADAR technology they’d invented – RADAR helped their pilots to spot their enemies at night. To cover up the fact they had invented RADAR technology the British claimed their pilots had a high-carrot diet that improved their night vision!
24. If your eye was a camera it would have a resolution equal to 576 megapixels – so with your two eyes combined that’s a whopping resolution of 1152 megapixels….so that’s why my iPhone pic of the Moon looks rubbish compared to what my eyes see!
25. So how far can the Human eye see? In complete darkness over a flat surface of the Earth, the Human eye is so sensitive it can see the flickering flame of a candle up to 48km away!!

  Pretty impressive stuff don’t you think?! Adam Maher @ The Eye Place