A human beingblinks 15 to 20 times per minute. Experts have always believed that these spontaneous blinks, which occur every few seconds, were solely intended to lubricate the cornea and prevent it from drying out. However,speed is greater than required for eye lubrication, according to a study published in the journalPNASand which the SINC agency echoes.
To find out the causes, Tamami Nakano and her colleagues from Osaka University (Japan), authors of the research, examined brain activity related to spontaneous blinking while participants watched recorded videos of the British series “Mr. Bean”, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. During the experiment, the participants spontaneously blinked an average of 17.4 times per minute (from 3.1 to 51.0) in front of the screen, especially at times when the plot was interrupted.
According to the authors, it follows from the results thatspontaneous blinking helps actively release attention. And that it plays a fundamental role in the balance between two large brain networks that anatomically support attention and that compete with each other: the dorsal network and the default neural network. “We observed that, when viewing videos, just after the blink, cortical activity momentarily decreased in the dorsal network,” says Nakano. However, activity increased in the default neural network, which is the one that remains active when the brain is at rest awake, that is, when the individual does not attend to the outside world, but is focused on his internal processes.
