Don’t think about this too hard, it’ll just give you a headache. Don’t blink while you read, either. That will also give you a headache. Scientists say the brain doesn’t really understand blinking, so it ignores it, protecting itself from thinking that you’re going blind. Anybody have any aspirin?
When we blink, the brain not only ignores it, but parts of it actually shut down temporarily. It does this so that it doesn’t think the world is going dark every time it happens.
You blink, by the way, around 15 times a minute for between 100-150 milliseconds at a time, for a grand total of 9 days a year. The primary function of blinking is to keep the eyes from drying out, but the brain doesn’t really want to know about it.
“We would immediately notice if the outside world suddenly went dark, especially if it was happening every few seconds. But we are rarely aware of our blinks, even though they cause a similar reduction in the amount of light entering the eye, and this gives us an uninterrupted view of the world,” said Davina Bristow, of the Institute of Neurology at University College London, who led the study on blinking.
Funded by Wellcome Trust, the study found that blinking suppresses brain activity in the visual cortex and the parietal and prefrontal areas, which are associated with consciousness of visual events and objects in the outside world.
Researchers tested blinking by designing a special fiber-optic light-producing apparatus that was placed in the mouths of volunteers. Wearing light-proof goggles and lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner, the instrument lit up the eyeballs through the roof of the mouth. This allowed light on the retinas to remain constant even during blinks.
I told you not to think about this too hard, didn’t I?
After the entire top half of the head was lit up, scientists studied the effects of blinking on brain activity independently of the effect of eyelid closure on light entering the eye.
In a nutshell, scientists decided after reviewing the data that the brain misses the blinking event altogether so it wouldn’t be confused about rapidly recurrent and flickering darkness.
Now clear your mind and forget I ever told you this.
