If the eyes are the windows to our souls, are our pupils are the very gateway to our inner most thoughts? They allow others to see right inside us – good news if you’re an optician! The pupil is just a space, but the various structures inside the eye absorb light, so we see it as a velvet black circle, that reacts to pain, emotion, and more practically, light.
The pupil allows us to have comfortable vision on the brightest of days, as it constricts down and allows only the essential amount of light in. This prevents harmful UV from reaching the delicate tissues within the eye. It’s dangerous to wear tinted glasses that don’t give UV protection, because the dark tint will fool the pupil into not constricting, and UV will flood in.
The coloured part of our eye, the Iris, is a ring of smooth muscle that surrounds the pupil, doing the work in dilating and constricting. The sensory path of each iris is linked, so normally if one pupil is stimulated then both will react. At it’s smallest the pupil goes down to about 3 millimetres, at it’s largest up to 9mm. Pupil size alters with age as well as the constant changes mentioned above.
Control of pupil size and our response to seeing the change in others is all involuntary. Research has shown that we find faces with larger pupils more attractive, because looking at us with their dilated pupils we get the message that we’re attractive to them. If we see a downcast expression with small pupils we perceive it as a sad face, and our pupils constrict down too. All this going on without us really being aware of it!
The pupil is a miracle of engineering, and can flag up a warning sign of potential health problems. Pupils that don’t react together, or don’t react normally to light can be a sign of illness or disease, so always get it checked out.
