*blinking rapidly* Why blink we?
*eeeehadhgdadh*
We only blink for one-tenth of a second, but if you add up all those tenths, our eyes are
closed for 10 percent of all our waking hours; 10-20 blinks per minute on average!
And chances are you don't even notice when it happens…
Though, you might be thinking about it now.
The eyelid is some of the thinnest skin on the human body, at less than 1 millimeter
thick.
The act of blinking cleans and moisturizes the eye, everyone knows that, but that is
not all it does.
Over time, scientists realized we blink WAY more than we have to, and how we blink changes
depending on what activities we're participating in.
A study in the Annals of Neurology found babies blinked far less than adults, less than twice
every minute!
As babies age, they blink more peaking around 15 years old.
Why adults blink more, now that's the mind-blowing thing about blinks…
When reading, watching, or listening to something interesting, we naturally blink LESS -- three
to eight times a minute, or less than half of normal.
Often, we blink when we reach the end of a page or line of text, or other break in the
flow of information.
A study released in 2012 from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found
out why we blink in this weird way, and they believe the act of blinking helps us focus
our thoughts and keep attention.
It's a tiny rest period for your brain that you didn't even know you had.
Researchers had participants watch the British comedy "Mr. Bean" while in a functional magnetic
resonance imager.
// That is a sentence I never thought I'd utter.
// They used the fMRI to watch a live-view of the brain activity of the volunteers and
whenever a blink occurred, brain activity in certain regions spiked…
So, they added breaks in the video the length of a single blink to see if that ALSO spiked
the activity, and it didn't.
The area of the brain being activated, called the default mode network, told the researchers
the brain was briefly entering a period of wakeful rest and focusing internally and not
externally.
Blinking was doing way more than just refreshing the eyes, it seemed to be refreshing attention!
But, if all these blinks are happening, and every time I blink I get a spike in brain
activity and a millisecond of rest -- why don't I NOTICE?!
Because, like usual, your brain is lying to you.
Your unconscious brain doesn't tell your conscious brain that you're going through wakeful rest;
that way instead of the world plunging into momentary darkness every few seconds, you
experience an uninterrupted stream!
Yay for brains!
Do you want to know things about science?