How can our eyes tell the difference between a close object and a far object
In: Biology
1. You have two eyes that are slightly apart from one another. Anything you look at will be in a slightly different position relative to everything else for the one eye than for the other. This is called *parallax* and it allows the eyes and relevant brain parts to automatically estimate distance with no other information.
2. You have a mega smart human-brain that remembers about how big common things like human beings and cars and houses are, so you can estimate their distance by apparent size alone.
3. Mega smart human-brain can also remember the geography of places you’ve been to several times and use this as a metric to gauge distance between the people and things that are in those places.
None of these techniques is flawless because light doesn’t always travel in a straight line, leading to bizarre optical illusions like mirages, but there’s no feasible improvement that could be made to address that.
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