How Your Eyes Work

You turned to eyeglasses and contact lenses when life became blurry. When you visited your eye doctor, you probably heard about vision problems like nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism, but all that mattered was that you could see better when you left. So how do your eyes work, and what happens to your eyes when your vision becomes blurry?

Your eye works much like a camera. The light and images you see pass through the cornea and the lens at the front of your eye. They focus directly onto the retina, the nerve layer at the back of the eye, which then sends the image to the brain through the optic nerve.

Light rays must be bent, or refracted, by the cornea and the lens so they can focus on the retina. If you have a refractive error, the shape of your eye doesn't bend the light properly, giving you vision problems.

With the normal eye, the images you see focus directly onto the retina, at the back of the eye. Illustration below:

Below is an animation video of "How The Eye Works", provided by Alcon Laboratories, Inc.