Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Seeing Through Front Sight Formation

By Ida Dorsey


It is questionable whether anyone with good eyesight can even imagine their life without it. A visual guide through the world, these front sight organs are one of the most important, if not the most important on the human body. The amazing formation mechanisms of the eye enable animals to perceive their surroundings in the way best suited for them.

It is thought that eyes were an evolutionary characteristic of the primal animals that evolved during the Cambrian explosion. A few million years after, eyes are today the most unifying characteristic of all animals, which serves to prove their utility. However, this organ of the utmost importance is incredibly sensitive and it susceptible to many kinds of damage.

Eyes in all animals differ in the way they are protected. In humans, this protection is threefold: firstly, the eyelids protect and water the eye. Secondly, the soft eyeball is situated in a resistant shell made of bone. Thirdly, a membrane surrounds it to protect it from outside influences. It is only natural that the human body has evolved to preserve the eye as much as possible. Therefore, people should also take extra care of their eyes so as not to lose the wonderful possibilities of eyesight.

Explaining the basic working principle of the eye is simple, despite this, human beings are yet to create a device that even comes close to matching the eye's function. This is because the light is not simply a light detector, but does what it does through a complex interaction with the brain. In fact, it would take a powerful super computer to model the visual cortex on it's own.

One of the most surprising things you would find if you were to do a survey of sight and sight organs among all the animals is the range of eyes that are out there. There are believed to be more than 10 distinct kinds of eyes existing in nature currently, some having evolved independently of each other. This goes back to the earlier point about the evolutionary utility of sight.

Human eyes can detect color, depth and direction to a reasonable degree, but there are birds that can see in UV. There are also microorganisms that have eyes that do nothing but distinguish light from dark. The mantis shrimp has hyper-spectral vision and probably possesses the most complex color vision system among all animals.

The human eye can easily be compared to a telescope, camera, microscope or other devices that use light focusing. Light first enters the iris, and is immediately focused onto a small patch of light-sensitive cells at the back. The cells transform the photons into neural signals. In order the change the quantity of light entering the eye, the iris changes size.

The previously described phenomenon is just one part of eyesight. While that one is relatively simple, it is what follows that baffles scientists till this day and yet has no explanation. How is it that the eye communicates with the brain in order to create an image from light-focused photons? Even if there is still no clear answer to this, one thing is well known: a world without sight would be a world without light, and to preserve the gift of eyesight, one must take extensive care of their eyes.




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