|
Look around. What do you see? No matter where you are, you're taking in a ton of visual information. You see objects, people, structures, and detail. It is all arranged before you in three dimensions and at varying depths. You can see more colors than you can name. You can focus on things at different distances, and you can understand much about your environment without moving from your seat. This is possible due to the miraculous power of the human eye. When you think about it, it's hard to fathom just how our eyes register visual information, process it, and communicate it to our brains. Let's demystify this process so that next time you see the optometrist, you'll understand more about those funky posters and models in the waiting room. Let There Be Light Everything you see is visible because it reflects light. Imagine admiring a bouquet of flowers. Before you really "see" the flowers, they are a collection of many, many rays of light, all rushing toward you. When these rays reach you, your eyes process them and arrange them into specific shapes and colors: green stems, green leaves, pink carnations, golden sunflowers, painted vase. Your eyes have built the bouquet out of the raw material of light rays! Photographing the World An optometrist might explain the eye as a camera that photographs the world around it. Cameras expose film to light, allowing the image composed by those rays to be written onto the film and preserved there. In the same way, your eye gathers all the light reflected from your environment into a single, precisely composed image. Instead of film, your eye writes this onto a series of visual receptors. To continue this metaphor, the cornea, pupil, and lens of your eye work collectively like the camera. These are the outer components of your eye. They refract and flip the image that enters and send it off to the retina. The retina is our film. It contains special cells called photoreceptors, which accept the prepared image and convey it to the brain. In this way, the film is "developed" into a photo we can analyze and admire. Networking with the Brain Photoreceptors latch onto other cells, which latch onto other cells, forming a chain that reaches toward the brain. Think of people in a line passing a secret from one person to the next: photoreceptors form the same kind of line, and the secret being passed is the visual information that we've been following from the get-go. Our receptors pass this along until they start to get a reaction from neurons, or brain cells. Here, the process becomes a mystery again: somehow, neurons work their magic to process the info that the eye prepared into the phenomenon of perception. Miraculously, this biological assembly line has created sight, and it all happened in no time. The eye truly is an incredible feat of biology. Next time you go to an optometrist, admire a landscape, or even just glance around your workplace, stop to consider the elegant process that makes it all possible. Looking for more for more information you can learn from your optometrist? Somerville residents can learn more by visiting http://www.branchburgeye.com/services.html.
Related Articles -
optometrist, somerville,
|
