Researchers explored a strong link between brain activity and eye blinking.
Eye blinking is something like breathing, which people do automatically, without giving it much thought.
While most scientific research on blinking has focused on eyesight, a new study from Concordia University explores a different connection.
Researchers found a strong link between brain activity and eye blinking.They revealed that blinking increases with increased cognitive demand or mental effort, such as during complex problem solving or multitasking.
The recent research explored how ‘eye blinking’ is a strong indicator of brain activity, and observed an extensive connection to understand cognitive processes.
The study included nearly 50 adult participants, and each person sat in a soundproof room and focused on a fixed cross displayed on a screen.
They listened to short spoken sentences through headphones while the level of background noise changed.
Moreover, the signal-to-noise ratio SNR ranged from very quiet to highly distracting frequencies.
All participants wore eye-tracking glasses that captured every blink and recorded exactly when each blink occurred.
Researchers divided each listening session into three phases; before the sentence played, while it was playing, and immediately afterward.
The blink rates dropped most noticeably during the sentences themselves, compared to the moments before and after.
People blink less when trying to understand speech in noise-polluted environments, and the effect stays the same in bright or dark rooms, clearly showing it’s driven by mental effort, not light.
Researchers realized that the decrease in blinking was strongest when background noise was loudest and speech was hardest to understand.
And the result turned out to be that blinking is a quiet marker of ‘focused listening.’
The reason behind that is when speech gets harder to understand, your brain quietly tells your eyes to stop blinking.
The less you blink, the harder your mind is working to tune out noise and focus on what matters.
Lead author of the study Penelope Coupal from the Laboratory for Hearing and Cognition said, “We wanted to know if blinking was impacted by environmental factors and how it related to executive function.”
The researchers wanted to explore whether “there is a strategic timing of a person’s blinks so they would not miss out on what is being said.”
The results showed that blinking does appear to be timed in a purposeful way.
“We don’t just blink randomly,” says Coupal. “In fact, we blink systematically less when salient information is presented.”
The research underlined that blinking is associated with natural breaks in concentration, or just after a task is completed, acting as a mental ‘reset’ or an indicator of a brief lapse in attention.
The study “Reduced Eye Blinking During Sentence Listening Reflects Increased Cognitive Load in Challenging Auditory Conditions” was published in the journal Trends in Hearing.
Furthermore, the research shows that spontaneous frequent blinking is also linked to dopamine levels in the brain, a neurotransmitter crucial for motor control, reward, and attention, and variations in the blink rate can reflect the health and function of dopamine pathways.
