If you want to have steady vision, researchers from Singapore suggest blinking. A recent study shows that when we blink, our brain works extra hard to keep our vision steady.
Researchers from UC Berkeley, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore teamed up with researchers from Dartmouth College and Université Paris Descartes, and they found that blinking does more than lubricating the eyes. Every time we blink, our brain repositions our eyeballs to stay focused on what we're looking at, Daily Mail Online said.
'The Most Boring Experiment Ever'
According to News Medical, the study, which is also jokingly called as "the most boring experiment ever," was participated by a dozen healthy young adults. They were asked to sit in a dark room for long periods, staring at a dot. Infrared cameras tracked their eye movements and eye blinks in real time.
Lead author Dr Gerrit Maus, an assistant professor of psychology at Nanyang Technological University, said that our eye muscles are "quite sluggish and imprecise", so the brain needs to constantly adapt its motor signals to make sure our eyes are pointing where they're supposed to. "Our findings suggest that the brain gauges the difference in what we see before and after a blink, and commands the eye muscles to make the needed corrections," he said.
If We Didn't Possess This Mechanism, Our Surroundings Would Appear Erratic
Researchers said that if we didn't possess this powerful oculomotor mechanism, particularly when blinking, our surroundings would appear shadowy, erratic and jittery. Co-author David Whitney, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley, said that we perceive coherence and not transient blindness because the brain connects the dots for us. Patrick Cavanagh, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College, also a co-author, added that our brains do a lot of prediction to compensate for how we move around in the world.
