5 Fascinating Facts About Your Eyes

One undeniable benefit of this new technological world is the accessibility of information, both in terms of professional job roles and personal matters and as such, you no longer need to commit to an annual subscription to an encyclopedia to learn about your body.

Your eyes are perhaps the most complicated and interesting organ of all and here are five fascinating facts all about them. 

1. Your Eyes Are Made Mostly of Jelly 

First and foremost, one of the most interesting facts relating to these small, but incredibly complicated, organs is that around eighty percent of each eye consists of hard fluid, akin to jelly. 

This jelly sits squarely between the retina of the eye and the lens and is both colorless and clear, with the technical name for this jelly being Vitreous Humor. 

2. Cataracts Are Not Always Age-Related

Even though you are far more likely to develop cataracts in one or both of your eyes as an older person, they can also develop due to other factors, one of the primary being the onset of Type 2 diabetes.

Innovative and impressively effective eye surgery such as LASIK cost considerably less than you might imagine, so if you either already have the beginning formations of cataracts, or else develop them in the future, do bear this in mind. 

3. Everyone Has a Blind Spot

You may be one of those people who proudly tell anyone who will listen that you have 20/20 vision and that your peripheral vision is second to none.

Now, as accurate as this may be, you may be surprised to learn that you still have a blind spot. Admittedly, this tiny blind spot is almost unperceivable, but is most definitely there. Located according to the position of your optic disk (which is where the blood vessels attach to your eye and the optic nerve leaves it) this small blind spot is automatically ignored by the brain, which impressively fills in the necessary required information. 

4. Red Eye Is Not the Fault of the Camera

Everyone has been in the situation where you spend a great deal of time organizing your friend to pose for a beautiful and sentimental photograph and meticulously position everyone so they are visible, only to find that one or more of you have ‘red eyes’ in the resulting picture.

Far from simply being a camera or smartphone error, the red eye is actually the blood vessels in that person's eyes being reflected into the camera. 

5. Fingerprints Are Not Your Only Personal Identifier 

Admittedly, it would take an exceedingly modern criminal to leave behind a print of their iris at a crime scene, but the fact remains that the iris of a person’s eye is even more of an accurate indicator as to the identity of an individual. 

Your fingerprints have approximately forty unique identifiers, whereas the iris of the average human eye contains a staggering two hundred and sixty, making them the ultimate way to identify someone.