Retina retina. Inside To understand how your eyesight works, we need to examine the the eye, the retina acts like a"light collector, collecting light from the images we see. The retina has about 120 million tiny cells. If a person is looking at a bicycle, the retina processes these images. Tiny cones and rods inside the retina act as receptors for the light. The image of the bicycle is transmitted from simple light signals into electrical signals. These signals are passed on to the brain, letting us see the image as an object that we call a bicycle.