How does an eye work?
How does an eye work?
The human eye – and the human body in general, for that matter – is an incredibly complex system of amazingly unique and well engineered components, all designed to work with one another to produce the miracle that is our everyday lives and abilities.
The human eye is made up of literally dozens and dozens of different components (ranging from the iris and the lens to the cornea, ciliary body, central retinal vein, optical nerve, and so much more), all of which are working with one another to bring light into your body, fire it against specific nerves that connect with the human brain, and then register as images – constantly updating and shifting as long as we keep our eyes open.
If you thought that a camera was complex, imagine just how complex the human eye is – it does the exact same thing as a camera on a 24/7 basis (or at least as long as you have your eyes open) and it does so using 100% biological components!
To shed a little bit of extra light on the subject of how the human eye actually works to see thing, let's break down the fundamentals right now.
It's all about bringing light into your eye
Light rays (from the sun or any other source of light, for that matter) are going to enter into your eyeball through the cornea, essentially the "front door" of your eyeball. The cornea is shaped in a refractive manner, bending the light rays so that they can pass freely throughout the pupil in the centre of the iris of your eye, kind of working the way that the shutter on a camera does.
After passing through the iris and the cornea, the light rays are then going to bounce through the crystalline lenses inside the eyeball. This structure works to shorten and lengthen in width to better focus the light rays coming in (depending upon what you are focusing our eyes on), passing all of that light through a dense gel like substance that come to a focus on your retina.
The retina then "develops" these light rays and passes the images it captures along to your brain via your optical nerve. Your brain is able to interpret these electrical signals as the images that the retina has captured, and all of this continues to be updated on a consistent and regular basis so that you can see the world around you and shift your focus on the fly without any difficulty.