*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?
