Here are some fun facts and lots of reasons to be thankful for your sight.
- 1. At the back of your eyes the retina are made up of at least 120 million cells which are extremely sensitive to light. Of those millions of cells, between 6 and 7 million of them are “cones,” which allow you to see colour and details of the world around you. The other 110 plus million cells are called “rods,” which help you to see better in the dark and distinguish between black and white.
- 2. On average, you blink around 17 times per minute, 28,800 times per day, and 5.2 million times per year, and it’s been found that a person blinks more when we chat away! The old saying, “In the blink of an eye” came about because the muscle which allows you to blink is the fastest muscle in the body. A blink typically lasts 100-150 milliseconds, and this action plays a vital role in keeping your eyes moist and debris-free.
- 3. The lens in your eyes, which focuses on the object you’re looking at, is faster than any man-made camera on earth, and have the best “auto-correct” function around. They are made up of more than 2 million working parts that function in unison to create vision.
- 4. Interesting fact about our Eye colour is that it is controlled by the level of melanin in your iris. Brown eyes have more melanin (a dark pigment) in the iris, and blue eyes have less melanin which allows blue collagen to show through. Fun fact, if you have blue eyes then you share a common ancestor with every other blue-eyed person in the world. It’s believed that the first person ever to have blue eyes lived somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, all people had brown eyes!
Re:Vision are focused on making excellence in eye care accessible to everyone who needs it, so for more information on pterygium and cataracts please visit the website at https://www.revision.nz .
