Today's Straits Times newspaper has a seemingly large ad from a purveyor of lasik surgery.

It has this eye catching caption:

Do you know that the eye is the second most complex organ after the brain, and  it has 2 million parts?

I fully concur, although I recall comedian Woody Allen has had always thought otherwise.

Information experts as well as brain scientists have come to the conclusion that as much as 90% of all the information we learned in a life time comes through our eye balls via visual cues.

In tactical or operational terms, our eye balls gather visual images and pass them to the appropriate brain centres for processing and synthesis. 

[In a normal life-span, your eye balls will bring you almost 24 billion visual images of the world around you.]

In this respect, our eyes balls provide the basic foundation for our long term intellectual development through observing, reading, thinking and writing.

These facts explain how critically important are our eye balls. For this reason, I always have a soft spot for blind people.

In reality, our eyes are actual extensions of our brain.

I have read that about 40% of our brain cells are accounted for by our eye balls, which in turn utilize 65% of all the pathways to our brain.

Therefore, it is imperative for us to take good care of our eye balls by maintaining them in peak condition at all times.

Just think about this phenomenon.

Our fore-fathers were hunters/gatherers. They always had opportunities to look long distances, across the horizon, to look out for food as well as predators. To put it in another way, our eyes were originally adapted for distant viewing.

Also, our bodies were designed to move, not sit.

Today, most of us - I reckon no less than two-thirds of the population - are forced to look short distances, arising from the necessity of working within the confines of a work station in the office.

Worst still, physical stresses that were once borne by our body's large muscles are now concentrated on some of our smallest - in the hands!

On the other hand, our eye balls are only 35cm from the computer screen.

Just imagine the kind of visual pressures on our two small eye balls.

In fact, our eyes are often the first part of our body to register fatigue even when the cause may be postural.

That's why it is very important for us, especially after working long hours on the computer, to do regular eye aerobics. [Please refer to my Next Post]

To ameliorate work stresses on your poor eye balls, it will be helpful if you can occasionally look up from the computer screen to view across the room at some distant objects.

Alternatively, go and stand at the windows to look outside, for a few minutes, at some natural greenery or distant objects.

The eyes you have will be yours forever — treat them right, and they'll never be out of sight!