Worried you’ll blink and miss a crucial piece of the action? Then you can relax. While watching a film, we subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don’t miss anything important. And because we tend to watch films in a similar way, moviegoers often blink in unison, researchers find.

The flow of visual information to the brain is halted by up to 450 milliseconds with every blink, and we lose up to 6 seconds of information every minute, says Tamani Nakano at the University of Tokyo in Japan. This means moviegoers who sit through a 150-minute film have their eyes shut for up to 15 minutes.

Nakano and colleagues worked out how we cope with such extreme information loss. They monitored the eye blinks of volunteers as they watched a clip of a silent comedy with a strong narrative, or a movie of an aquarium with no narrative, or listened to an audio book with a narrative, but not a visual one.

Hidden pattern

Using the timing of those blinks as a reference, the researchers then played the volunteers the same clip again and measured whether the eye blinks occurred at the same time as the reference blinks.


For all three kinds of clip, there was a strong correlation between the timing of blinks in the repeat viewing and the reference blinks. That is because we blink so often that the chances of a repeat blink matching a reference one are high, says Nakano.

But after statistically filtering out that strong signal, the researchers found that between 23 and 31 per cent of blinks were synchronised when watching the silent movie, while the aquarium movie and the audio book had no such synchronisation. So for at least some of the time, individuals will blink in unison while watching the same film.

“This is the first study to demonstrate that blinks are excellently coordinated during video playback,” says Nakano.

Window on the mind

The synchronised blinks occurred at “non-critical” points during the silent movie – at the conclusion of an action sequence or when the main character had disappeared from view. “We all commonly find implicit breaks for blinking while viewing a video story,” Nakano says.

Geraint Rees at University College London thinks it is an interesting study. This synchronisation between individuals “implies that there’s something common to everyone that is triggering the blinks,” he says.

He points out that other studies have shown that brain activity across individuals can become synchronised when watching a movie. “The blinks may form one external manifestation of that, which may provide a window into understanding what people are thinking when they watch a movie.”

Journal reference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0828 (in press)