• Question: why do people go blind???

    Asked by to Aimee, Chris, Dave, Greig, Laurence on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Aimee Hopper

      Aimee Hopper answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      It could be due to a number of things:
      1) it could be due to the rods and cones in the eye getting damaged somehow, and so stop working (such as burning them if you stare at the sun)
      2) the optic nerve could be damaged, so the signals can’t get passed from the eye to the brain to say you are “seeing” something
      3) the part of the brain that deals with sight (the visual cortex) could be damaged

      there may be other reasons too, but these are the ones that come to mind for me 🙂

    • Photo: Dave Jones

      Dave Jones answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Aimee has pretty much got them all, I think. Good job, Aimee. The only other thing I can think of is a problem with other parts of the eye. For example, the cornea (which is like the cover over the front part of your eye) can get damaged and that can stop you from being able to see. Old people sometimes suffer from problems with the cornea which they call cataracts – this is when gunk builds up inside the cornea and makes it go all cloudy, making their vision blurry and fuzzy. They can fix this with laser surgery, burning away the affected part, just leaving the good stuff behind. But there are other things that can affect the corner, like being hit hard and it getting torn or even dislodged. Gruesome!

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