Why you don't notice your blinks | An intriguing story of scientific discovery
Think about it. Every time you blink, everything is supposed to go dark and you should notice an interruption in your vision. You blink 10-20x per minute meaning you spend up to 30 minutes of your day with your eyes closed. Yet in reality, you seem to have a constant stream of information and those blinks go completely unnoticed. What’s weird is that if I turned off the lights for the same duration as your blinks, about 100ms, you definitely do notice. This video is about the interesting story of how scientists solved the mystery behind the missing blink.
Based on research dating as far back as 1898, scientists came up with two theories on why we don’t notice blinks - both of which involve filling the missing scene with information from either before or after the blink. So in the first theory, we retain the memory of the image right before the blink and carry that through the duration of the blink. This is called memory maintenance. The second theory is that we backdate the image from after the blink so we sort of forget that our vision blacked out. This is called temporal antedating.
However, A series of creative experiments have cast doubt on these theories. So, then, why don't we notice our blinks?
If you have any questions that you’d like me to tackle in future videos, let me know in the comments!
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Who am I?
I'm a final year medical student from Australia. My mission is to answer interesting questions about the human body. If you have any questions you'd like me to tackle in future videos, feel free to leave a comment!
Tags: science videos, education, neuroscience, brain, eye, blinking, neurology, medical videos
