Eye – Second Timers – V5

THE AMAZING LENS: There is no muscle in the lens. It is a completely passive object. It’s like a frisbee that is stretched by something called the suspensory ligament. The lens is aerobic… which means that it doesn’t use oxygen.

THE AMAZING LENS: The lens of your eye lies just behind your iris. This dime-sized clear lens helps you to focus on all the little details in the world around you. The lens can be stretched or relaxed to just the right thickness to focus on different objects in less than a tenth of a second!

THE AMAZING LENS: To keep the lens transparent, the lens cells do not have nuclei. After these cells are made, their nucleus is ejected, making the cells anucleated just like red blood cells. Instead of a nucleus, every cell in the lens has over 100 million crystal clear proteins packed in called ascorbic acid proteins. These give the lens the exact refraction it needs.  If you were to count these protein molecules your body makes in all your lens cells at the rate of 1 per second, it would take you over a million years!

THE AMAZING LENS: Lens cells are hooked together with dozens of button-type attachments on the edges of each cell. Why? This is so they don’t pull apart when they are stretched. If the cells were yanked apart, the lens would become a jumbled mass of disorganized cells and you’d never be able to focus on anything.

PRECISION EYE: There are 6 muscles that control the eye.  Those muscles are the most precise muscles in the body.  When you focus on something, these muscles are aiming something called the fovea which is the width of a pencil lead. There’s a million cone cells packed in the tiny fovea and the fovea of each eye is what you focus with. You have to have your eyes exactly in synchrony with each other or you’ll have double vision.

PRECISION EYE: There are six different muscles that control the movement of the eye. There is even a muscle with an ingenious pulley system that moves the eye directions that would impossible for the other 5 muscles to accomplish.

PRECISION EYE: The muscles in each eye work in perfect coordination with each other. If one eye tracked as little as 1/100 inch off from the other, you would see double images all the time!

PRECISION EYE:  You can whip your eyes around lightning fast and they perfectly coordinate with each other! The movement of your eye is the most precise movement in the body. This is all thanks to the high number of nerves that control the muscles. 

PRECISION EYE:  For other muscles in your body, there is an average of one nerve connection for every two thousand muscle cells. In your eye, however, there is one nerve connection for every two muscle cells.

PRECISION EYE:  Many birds stabilize their heads in one position as their body moves. This keeps their eyes in one place so they can track with each other. This enables birds to precisely focus on objects at a great distances with both eyes without blurring the images.