Light is photons so how do those photons hitting our eyes let us know what things look like.
In: 0
The photons strike cells at the back of your eye, called photoreceptors (literally light-receivers). These cells have special proteins in them that bend in a certain way when struck by light. The protein bends to “strike a button” that creates an electrical signal that travels back to your brain, where your brain interprets it as a specific color in a specific location.
Your eyes have a lens at the front that focuses light and receptors at the back that produce electrical impulses when they get hit by light at the correct frequency range Those electrical impulses are sent to your brain that interpret their duration, quantity, intensity, redundant information from each eye and other parameters as sight.
Same way your ears have a piece that vibrate when hit by sound (an air vibration at a certain frequency range) and produce electrical impulses that your brain interpret as hearing
And your tongue and nose have chemical receptors that produce electrical impulses and your brain… Well you get it.
We have cells in our eyes that can “feel” the light they are called cones, there are 3 kinds and they allow us to see in color, we also have other cells called rods that are more sensitive to brightness but not color
The photons enter our eye, and hit the retina on the back of our eye. The rods, and cones in our retina detect the light, and convert it to electrical impulses that can be understood by our brain. Our brain does a whole lot of very complicated processing of these signals, but the ELI5 version is that we see because our brain understands these electrical impulses, and translates them into the images that we actually “see”.
Latest Answers