While most of us appreciate and are somewhat in awe of just how incredible the eye is, it’s fair to say that as with most parts of the body, we don’t tend to sit down and think about how they work. It’s fair to say that we take them for granted: once they work we can see and that’s really all we need to know.

But because we’re all a lot more curious about a whole range of topics than we sometimes even realise ourselves, we thought you’d be interested in to read our top 20 facts about the eye!

Think of it this way: you’ll learn some incredible new facts and you’ll be able to go off an tell your friends who will in turn think you’re really clever!

1. The average blink lasts for 1/10 second and you blink approximately 12 times every minute.
2. If the human eye was a digital camera it would have 576 megapixels!
3. Newborn babies don’t have tears – they make a crying noise (you may have noticed!) but actual tears only flow from somewhere between 4-12 weeks old.
4. Yes start to develop two weeks after you re conceived!
5. The eye is composed of more than 2m working parts
6. 80% of our memories are determined by what we see (which means that people who are blind can still see their dreams provided they weren’t born blind!)
7. We spend about 10% of our waking hours with our eyes closed, blinking.
8. Your eyes can get sunburned
9. Bees have 5 eyes
10. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open
11. Night vision goggles are green because the human eye differentiates more shades of green than any other colour
12. Blue eyes exist under all brown eyes, while only 2% of people have green eyes, making green the rarest eye colour
13. Some people really are born with two different coloured eyes. The condition is called heterochromia.
14. Approx 39m people around the world are blind
15. An iris has 256 unique characteristics, compared with a finger print which has 40. This is the reason retina scanning is increasingly being used for security purposes.