The Human Eye — Structure

Think of your eye as a camera that never stops recording. Light first passes through the cornea, a clear curved window at the front — this is where most of the bending (refraction) of light actually happens, before the lens even gets involved.

Behind the cornea sits the iris, the coloured ring of muscle you see in the mirror. It controls the size of the pupil, the black hole in the middle, deciding how much light is allowed in — just like the aperture of a camera.

The eye lens sits right behind the pupil. It's soft and flexible, and its only job is fine-tuning — squeezing or relaxing to focus objects at different distances onto the retina, a light-sensitive screen at the very back of the eye.

The retina is packed with millions of light-sensitive cells. When light hits them, they fire electrical signals down the optic nerve straight to the brain — which is where the image is actually 'seen'. Your eye captures light; your brain does the seeing.