Interesting Facts About Eye

30  Interesting Facts About Eye

  1-5 Interesting Facts About Eyes

1. Brown eyes are actually blue underneath the brown pigment and as a result there exists a laser procedure to turn brown eyes blue permanently. 

2. Octopus eyes do not have a blind spot and they evolved separately from vertebrate eyes, an example of convergent evolution. 

3. 10,000 years ago, everyone’s eyes were brown until someone living by the Black Sea developed a genetic mutation that made their eyes blue 

4. The mysterious squiggly things floating in our eyes are called “floaters”. They are shadows cast on our retina by small strands of protein inside our eyes. 

5. If you pour cold water into a person’s ear, their eyes will move in direction of the opposite ear, if you pour warm water into their ear, their eyes will move towards that same ear. This is used to test for brain damage and is called ‘caloric stimulation’.

6-10 Interesting Facts About Eyes

6. If you have only one red eye in a flash photograph, there is a chance that you have eye cancer (only if both eyes are looking directly at the camera). Fortunately, it has a 95% cure rate. 

7. Schizophrenia can be diagnosed with 98.3% accuracy using a simple eye test that tracks eye movement abnormalities.

8. A British officer in Egypt during WW1, wearing a monocle was confronted on the parade ground by lines of Australians with pennies in their eyes. He threw his monocle up in the air, caught it in his eye, then turned to the parade and roared, ‘All right, you bastards, let’s see you do that. 

9. Humans and dogs are the only species known to seek visual cues from another individual’s eyes, and dogs only do this when interacting with humans. 

10. About 2% women have a rare genetic mutation that enables them in having an extra retinal cone in their eyes. This allows them to see 100 million colors. 

11-15 Interesting Facts About Eyes

11. Johnny Depp is blind in his left eye and near sighted in his right. 

12. There exists a case of conjoined twin girls from Canada, who are connected at the thalamus and can hear each other’s thoughts and see through each other’s eyes 

13. The human eye can only make smooth (non-saccadic) motions if it’s actually tracking a moving object. 

14. An American POW in Vietnam repeatedly blinked his eyes in Morse Code during a televised interview, spelling out the word, “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” to signal US military how POWs were being treated. 

15. The stories of Cyclops possibly had their origins from the natives of Mediterranean islands, who found the prehistoric remains of extinct Dwarf Elephants, whose skulls were only twice the size of humans and whose central nasal cavity was easily mistaken for a central eye socket. 

16-20 Interesting Facts About Eyes

16. Astronauts can’t cry in space due to the absence of gravity. Tears just collect in little balls and sting your eyes. 

17. Pirates used eye patches to quickly adjust their eyes from above to below deck, having one eye trained for the bright light, and the other for dim light below deck. 

18. An atomic bomb cameraman ripped his safety goggles a split second before the bomb exploded. Everyone was supposed to wear special glasses to block the intense light emitted by what was anticipated to be a six-megaton explosion. Those glasses failed. His reaction was to block his eyes with his right forearm and crook of his elbow. “I saw the blood running through my arm,” he said. This frightened him, so he dropped his arm. That revealed an even more chilling sight. He said “The man standing in front of me was a complete skeleton.” 

19. The flashes of color you see in your eye after you rub them is called phosphene.

20. There are colors that are too complex for the human eye called “Impossible Colors.” 

21-25 Interesting Facts About Eyes

21. If you tape two halves of a ping pong ball to your eyes, and stare at a red light while listening to the radio tuned to static, you can have complex and vivid hallucinations. This is called the Ganzfeld Procedure. 

22. We see the colors that we do because it’s the only spectrum of light that passes through water, the area where eyes first evolved. There hasn’t been any evolutionary reason on land to see any broader spectrum. 

23. Astronauts on the Apollo missions reported seeing flashes and streaks of light when they closed their eyes. This was later confirmed to be caused by cosmic radiation bombarding their retinas while outside of the Earth’s magnetosphere. 

24. Occasionally, people who have aphakia(a condition where eyes lack a lens), have reported seeing Ultra-Violet spectrum of the light. 

25. Bees have hair on their eyes. They are used to determine wind direction and flight speed. 

26-30 Interesting Facts About Eyes

26. 65-85% of all white cats born with blue eyes are deaf. 

27. A fireman’s eyes at the Chernobyl disaster were said to have turned from brown to blue because of the intensity of the radiation he received and he died two weeks later due to radiation poisoning. 

28. As a way to detect nighttime predators, many species of animals (ducks, dolphins, iguanas) will sleep with one eye open. One hemisphere of their brain is asleep while the other one is awake. 

29. Nearly 100% of those older than 60 years of age are diagnosed with herpes of the eye at autopsy. 

30. The pupil of your eye expands as much as 45% when you look at someone you love