Wednesday Wisdom: The Fastest Muscles Are The Ones In The Eye

Wednesday Wisdom: The Fastest Muscles Are The Ones In The Eye

Did you know that the fastest muscles are the ones in the eye? Try blinking right now. Try seeing how many times you can blink in a few seconds. Blinking is easy to do, and it helps out body maintain eye health. Continue reading for more about blinking and our eyes!

Blinking

Our eyes blink around 15 times every minute, with our eyes shut for about 1/10th of a second. You may ask yourself why is that we blink? Blinking serves multifunctional purposes. Firstly, we blink to keep our eyes safe from the air. If we kept our eyes open for a prolonged period of time, our eyes would get dry, and irritable. Blinking also protects our eyes from getting dirt or dust in them. Sometimes when we have an irritant in our eye we shed tears to help flush the foreign object out.

Each time we blink, we spread a wet mucosal material across the eyeball. This keeps the eye working properly, and to not compromise function. We can also automatically shut our eyes when there are too much environmental light stimuli. This is why our eyes need to compromise from bright lights, including the sun, and why we shield our eyes if the sun gets in them.

Our brain needs to have a constant stream of vision. The breaks from our eyes with blinks causes a rest for our brain. The eye muscles help us to see by having the brain make visual corrections.

Final Thoughts

Did you know that the fastest muscles in our body happen to be the ones that control blinking and the shutting of our eyes? Do you have any other fun medical trivia you want to share? Comment below! If you like our soma trivia, you can view more of it, here.