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Hans Neleman / Getty Images Stock
Blink. Blink blink blink.
Every minute, we blink our eyes 15 to 20 times. But we only need to blink two to four times a minute for adequate lubrication. So what's happening when we blink those other times? (Blink blink blink.)
“Many people have extensively investigated the eye movement, but most of them did not care about the eye blink,” writes Tamami Nakano, as associate professor at Osaka University in Japan, in an email. “The reason why we generate blinks so frequently has been unknown.” Even scientists assumed we only blinked to lubricate our eyes.
To understand why humans blink so much, Nakano and her colleagues asked 20 undergraduate students to watch “Mr. Bean” videos for 30 minutes while in an fMRI. (The students watched the popular British comedy because it's easy to follow without sound.) The researchers counted the blinks by measuring pupil size with near-infrared light; when someone blinks, pupil size is zero.
Nakano and her colleagues found that when we blink while paying attention to a task, we’re resetting our brain. Think of it like rebooting your computer.
When we engage in a task, such watching a movie, our brain's attention networks are triggered. Researchers once believed that as we performed an activity, our default network of the brain (which works during downtime and is responsible for those self-reflective thoughts about what we had for breakfast or when we might go to the grocery store) lessens its activity. Researchers including Dr. Marcus Raichle, professor of radiology and neurology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the editor of this paper, found that when doing tasks our brains switched from default mode network to the areas of the brain responsible for the activity, in a see-saw-like manner.
Tamami’s study finds that a blink switches the brain from the dorsal attention network, which helps someone attentively watch a “Mr. Bean” episode, to the default mode network, showing that the default mode network might play more active roles in various tasks than previously understood. This only occurs when we unconsciously blink; we can’t force our brain to switch networks by blinking.
“This blinking might occur at predictable points in a story, so does this say something about the way the brain is engaging a story or movie?” Raichie wonders.
He adds: “I think [the paper] provokes you to think a little bit.”
And it increases what experts know about blinking and the default mode network.
“The present study indicates that even while we pay attention to the external world, the shift from the external attentional brain network to the internal processing brain network (default mode network) dramatically occurs every time we blink,” Tamami says. “I think that blink is closely related to resetting of the brain network and chunking the flow of visual information for memory.”
The paper appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Leave a Comment:
bullcrap
Ageed, put a fan in front of their face as they watch Mr. Bean and see how many blinks happen then.
Obviously NOT bullcrap if you read, and actually comprehend, the story. This phenomenon was directly measured using functional MRI. In other words, the researchers were able to actually watch the switching happen. Hard to argue with direct observation.
The question now is one of what it means.
It means the fan was on high and the brain was getting irritated in having to blink so often.
I did blink when I went to the grocery store and saw how many snow birds were in the grocery store--long live our southern heritage--long live the rebel flag--and our southern cause
Alan: The researchers also found that there were a number of people unable to blink often enough to engage their brain. Due to southern exposure.
Is this the new nomenclature for "consciousness"?
Anyway, it is an interesting observation that may lead to valuable insight into the brains processing algorithms. Vision takes a lot of resources, especially for high level interpretation. Interrupting the video feed could free up neural resources needed to process a different "thread".
dan42 -- our indigenous 'consciousness' has net yet been located in the brain. It remains a mystery.
Annie -- Yes, perhaps the greatest mystery of all. I was poking fun at their attempts to use computer science allegories to re-define aspects of it with the term "default mode network".
After over 30 years programming computers and designing networks and reading speculative articles about it, I find myself less confident than ever that we will understand how the brain creates the basic sense of consciousness. It is something that we probably share with many if not all the other animals, but we have no clue as to how it could be created in a machine. We may someday be able to create a machine that simulates it so that you or I would think it was there, but how do you make a machine actually feel it?
Still, I applaud their attempts to investigate what may ultimately be unknowable.
As an agnostic, I am cautious to invoke spirituality, but there may be an as yet unknown universal force involved.
This small somewhat unprofessional clinical trial opens the door to closing our eyelids and its impact with our brains. Most people know that meditation relaxes us. If a person is upset....closing the eyelids seems to quickly relax us. If one needs to sleep....closing the eyes is effective.
People naturally know much more about this topic than they realize.
Please do not use the profane language
Don't blink..... blink & you're dead.
Did anyone else find themselves blinking more than usual while reading this article or was I just more aware of my blinking?
Kind of explains the crazy in the eye religious types. They never blink.
DATE: 1861----According to my familey records--Dennis Cason blinked when he saw northern soliders on horses riding in Hardee County---Strange they never arrived at their destination