Fun Facts

Vision and the human eye are some of the most amazing designs in all of creation!

  • The adult human eye is just slightly smaller than a ping-pong ball.
  • Human eyes start to develop 2 weeks after conception
  • After the brain, the eye is the most complex organ of the body.
  • The number one cause of blindness in the U.S. is diabetes.
  • The cornea is the only living tissue in the human body that doesn’t contain blood vessels.  The eye is an open window!
  • The average lifespan of an eyelash is 5 months.
  • To see, more than 2 million parts of the eye have to work together!
  • Each human eye does have a blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the eye. By design, those blind spots don’t match up between the two eyes so we don’t ever have a blind spot in our binocular vision.
  • The eyeball weighs approximately 1 ounce.
  • The most active muscles in the body are our eye muscles.
  • Under perfect conditions, the human eye can discern the light of a candle at a distance of 14 miles.
  • In the next 20 years, twice as many people will be blind as there are today.
  • Rods and cones of the retina change chemically based upon the light that hits them.  Based on that change, a nerve impulse is sent to the brain.  The brain then composes the impulses into light, shadow, form, and color to create an amazing 3-D image!
  • We can detect hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes by studying the blood vessels in the back of the eye.
  • 20/20 vision means the eye sees normally at 20 feet; 20/15 is better…the eye can see at 20 feet what another eye sees at 15 feet.
  • Eye color is determined by the amount of melanin in the outermost part of the iris; blue collagen is underneath.  A higher concentration of melanin will give one brown eyes; a lower amount will give one green or even blue eyes.