• Question: do your eyes pop out when you sneeze with them open, if so why?

    Asked by x-x-LILSKI-x-x to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 20 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 20 Jun 2015:

      No. Your eyes aren’t connected to your nose, so there’s no way of transferring the force of the sneeze to your eyeballs. Even if there was, your eyeballs are very securely attached, so they wouldn’t come out. So don’t worry, if you ever do sneeze with your eyes open, you’ll be ok!

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 21 Jun 2015:

      Your eyes definitely won’t pop out when you sneeze but there are one or two people who have such an unusual skull/eye lid structure that they can actually ‘pop out’ their eyes when they want to (probably using the muscles around the eyes to push the eye lids back). You can see it here if you’re not squeamish:

      As you can see, it’s not dangerous though – the guy’s eyes work just fine, he can just move them past his eye lids.

Comments