Blinking
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Don't blink! You'll miss something!
Remember drive-in movies? The parking, the slushies, and the passionate ... synchronized blinking?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Meet Tamami Nakano, from the University of Tokyo. She knows that when people read, they tend to blink at punctuation marks.
But what do eyes do during visual stories - like movies?
She filmed volunteers as they viewed a three-minute segment of "Mr. Bean Gets Out of a Parking Garage," over and over again. Which is possibly considered fun in Japan.
And what she found was, the subjects' blinks were not random.
Viewers who batted their eyelids, say, 12 seconds into the video, blinked at second 12 every single viewing.
Even weirder, the entire group shared a full third of the blinks. Their blinks were in sync!
But why?
Turns out, 100 percent of the coordinated blinking occurred in scenes lacking new action and/or human characters.
Translation? We try to limit optical downtime to a story's less important moments, to lower the chance we'll miss something vital.
Like when Mr. Bean is cooking and gets a turkey stuck on his head! How did that happen? Oh, Mr. Bean!
The Loh Down on Science, online, at lohdown.org. Produced by 89.3 KPCC and the California Institute of Technology, and made possible by TIAA-CREF.
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