How do we see things?

Look around the room. You can see toys, walls, maybe a window. But how does the world get inside your eyes so you can see it?

Light bounces everywhere

Seeing starts with light. Light pours out from the sun or a lamp, then bounces off everything around you — your hand, the table, the cat. Some of that bouncing light shoots straight into your eyes.

If a room is pitch dark with no light at all, you cannot see a thing. No light means no seeing!

A tiny picture inside the eye

The front of your eye works like a little lens, just like in a camera. It bends the light coming in and sharpens it into a clear, tiny picture. That picture lands on the back of your eye, on a special screen called the retina.

Here is the funny part: the little picture lands there upside down!

Your brain flips it

The retina turns the picture into messages and sends them zooming to your brain. Your clever brain reads the messages and flips the picture the right way up. Only then do you “see” — so really, you see with your brain as much as with your eyes.

Wonder fact: You have a tiny blind spot in each eye where you cannot see at all. You never notice it, because your brain quietly fills in the missing bit!