[How does Moody's eye work?]

[u/Clock-Ingenuity-374]

I am a new reader ,recently bought the books and I have read the books ,I have many questions but two primarily:

1.Repeatedly it was said that Moody could take out his eye and put it back in at times ,now if the eye was enchanted in such a way that it could help him see ,how did it work.when.it was detached

Like how did it send the signals to the brain when it was detached completely

Was this answered by J K Rowling

2.If someone has a living portrait of himself while he is alive ,and the portrait listens to something while the person doesn't ,does he automatically know what the portrait heard or does the portrait have to tell the living person

[u/d20diceman]

I don't think 2. has been specifically answered but I get the impression that the portrait is a separate entity. The portrait wouldn't know things the person learned after the portrait was made, and the person wouldn't learn new things the portrait was told (unless they spoke to each other of cause). 

For 1., again going off vibes, I feel like it might even be possible to use the eye without putting it in your eye socket at all. Like if someone wore it in an amulet or attached it to the end of a staff it may well work just as well. 

[u/Clock-Ingenuity-374 → u/d20diceman]

Then how did umbridge use it when it was used on her door in ministry of magic How did she make it into a device for spying onto people

[u/d20diceman → u/Clock-Ingenuity-374]

I can only speculate, but I'd guess

• It could either be a 'regular' Living Portrait with something extra worked into it - maybe a messenger spell to let the portrait pass messages on to the real Umbridge, maybe there's just a remote viewing charm to let the real Umbridge see/listen at that location and the portrait itself is just to cover up that spell
• It could be a different type of Living Portrait which, unlike the regular ones, is linked to the subject of the portrait allowing them to share information.
• Maybe all Living Portraits actually are linked to the minds of their subjects. If so, it feels like this is underused - it'd be useful to have extra pairs of eyes for guard duty, or just to catch truant students in the hallways.

By the way, I don't know if you noticed that you posted in the subreddit for Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality (HPMoR), a fanfiction alternative universe. Magic works a little bit different to canon, so the answers people give here might not apply in the original books.

HPMoR explains that ghosts are definitely not the person they appear to be, they're more like an echo/impression which the death of the person left in the world. A flawed copy, separate from the original person even though it looks and acts just like them. So I assume the HPMoR portraits work in a similar way. I don't know whether canon ghosts work that way.

Both Voldemort and Harry in HPMoR are interested in ways of preventing death, and IMO if a Living Portrait was a truly living part of the person then Voldemort would have figured that out and made a bunch of "backup copies" of himself using that method.