Okay, kind of a dumb question, but I dont mean why do people get upset, I mean why do tears come out of their eyes? what possible purpose does it serve? Tear ducts are designed to clean your eyes arent they? and what about all that wailing and sniffing and stuff?
A design flaw maybe? Darwin figured that we involuntarily tighten the muscles around our eyes when we’re upset or angry in order to protect the eyes by compressing the engorged blood vessels. The result of the pressure around the eye from the tightening of the muscles is tears, which in themselves seem to have no purpose. The tears that spring to your eyes if you sneeze, or laugh hard, or look into a bright light, seem to be from the same involuntary protective contraction of the eyes, and the water squishes out. The weird thing, though, is that the tears we cry when we’re sad have, for some bizarre reason, more protien in them than tears from other exertion or irritation. WTF?
because it hurts sniff
And on a related note, why is that when we cry when we are sad, we usually have to blow our nose as well? Why does fluid start coming out there as well?
My wife warned my daughter that she could make her father cry. The four-year-old already understood that men have a higher tear threshold, saying:
“No, dads don’t have tears.”
Besides tears streaming down your face, tear fluid is also drained by 2 ducts in the inner corner (by the nose) of your eyes.
These ducts lead to a tear sac, which further drains into the upper part of the nose.
So when you cry, excess fluid ends up going through this course, and you get the sniffles. And it’s harder to keep this fluid from running because it’s so watery. Snot, being rather gummy, is easier to sniff back into your nasal cavities.
AWB is right, but why do we screw up our eyes? also, im pretty sure that the tear ducts start to produce more tears as well.
With sunlight - why do you sneeze if you go into bright sunlight? I heard somewhere it had something to do with ultra violet light but im not sure