It can be difficult to understand common conditions and diseases affecting the eye without a basic comprehension of how it works.

The human eye is an extraordinary structure. From the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep, your eyes work hard to take in information about your surroundings and communicate with your brain so it can interpret what you see.

In this post, the team at Clarity Eye Group takes a deeper look at the basic anatomy of the eye.

Understanding the Different Parts of Your Eye

One of the simplest ways to understand how the eye works is to compare it to a camera.

The cornea is the clear, dome-shaped covering or “window” of the front of the eye. Light enters the cornea and passes through the pupil, an opening in the colored part of the eye known as the iris. (If you have brown eyes, that means your irises are brown.) Like the aperture of a camera, the pupil changes size to control the amount of light that enters the eye. It dilates, or gets wider, to let in more light, and constricts to let in less light.

Behind the iris sits the transparent lens of the eye. Just like the lens of a camera, the lens shifts to focus on objects at different distances. The lens flexes forward to focus on nearby objects and relaxes to focus on faraway objects.

Incoming light travels through the cornea and lens toward the back of the eye, where it hits the retina. A clear, gel-like substance called vitreous humor fills the space between the lens and the retina. The retina, a thin layer of light-sensitive tissue lining the inner back wall of the eye, is similar to the film of a camera.

The central portion of the retina is known as the macula, and it is responsible for clear central and detail vision. The retina is nourished by the retinal pigment epithelium, a pigment cell layer that attaches to a layer of blood vessels called the choroid.

The retinal cells collect incoming images and convert them to electrical impulses. Those impulses are sent to the brain through the optic nerve, a bundle of approximately 1 million nerve fibers. When the impulses get to the visual center in the brain, they are deciphered and translated to the images we see.

Contact Our Eye Experts

If you have questions about how the parts of your eye work together, or if you are experiencing troubling visual symptoms, Clarity Eye Group is here for you. Give us a call or send us an email today.