Trivia in Ophthalmology

• The eye muscles are most active muscles in the whole body.
• The external muscles that move ht eyes are the strongest muscles in the human body for the job that they have to do. They are 100 times powerful than they need to be.
• Eyes are composed of more than two million working parts.
• The eye can process 36,000 bits of information every hour.
• A normal lifespan will bring you almost 24 millions images of the world around you.
• Eyes can instantaneously set in motion hundreds of muscles & organs in our body.
• A blink of an eye lasts about one tenth of a second.
• The average persons blink their eyes about 11,500 times per day and about 4.2 million times per years.
• Dacryphilia is the arousal from seeing tears in the eyes of a partner.
• Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you away from crying.
• Men can read smaller print than women, women can hear well.
• You can’t sneeze with your eyes open (you can try it!!)
• Everyone is colour blind at birth.
• The eye is the only part of the human body that can function at 100 % ability at any moment, day or night.
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes was an Ophthalmologist.
• Albert Einstein's eyes were removed by his ophthalmologist Dr. Henry Abrams during the autopsy in 1955 and stored. The eyes were put up for auction in 1994.
• The term "Uvea"was first used by Galen, a Roman physician to include both the choroid and the iris because they resemble a grape from which the stalk had been torn out leaving a hole in front, the hole being the pupil of the eye.
• Lewis Carroll had episodes of micropsia during his migraine attacks which made him to conceive the idea of Alice seeing things smaller than they were.
• Famous football player of Brazil Socrates was a qualified ophthalmologist.
• An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
• The giant squid has the biggest eye in this world. It weighs up to 2.5 tons and grows up to 55 feet long. Each eye is 1 foot or more in diameter.
• It’s physically impossible for pigs to look up in to the sky.
• The distance between an alligators eyes in inches, is directly proportional to the length of the alligator, in feet.
• Dogs only see shades of grey and most of them are short sighted.
• The common goldfish is the only animal that can see both infrared & ultraviolet light.
• A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
• Fish that live more than 800 meters below the ocean surface don’t have eyes
• Chameleons can move their eyes in two different directions at the same time.
• Owls have eyeball that are tubular in shape, because of this, they cannot move their eyes.
• Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
• Dolphins sleep with one eye open
• Owls are the only birds who can see the colour blue
• An eagle can see a rabbit about 1 mile or 1760 yards away.
• Crocodiles are blind in the water but very keen of sight in the air. They are  also color-blind
• Owls are the only bird that can see the color blue.
• Unlike all other insects, flies have five eyes. They have two large eyes and three smaller eyes between them
• Fish do not have eyelids. They do not require tears either, since their eyes are bathed by water, no special lubricant like tears is required
• The hawk has the sharpest eye. Its eye has two foveae and the maximum concentration of cones.
• Bulls are color blind.
• When a horned toad is angry, it squirts blood from its eyes.
• A scallop has 35 blue eyes
• Zebras can't see the color orange.

- compiled & published by Dr Dhaval Patel MD AIIMS