Radiolab - Blink

Episode Date: October 6, 2009

We ask a question we thought was a no-brainer in this podcast: why do we blink?

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From W. N. Y.

C. See? Yes. And NPR. Let's just do it. You're going to do it? Okay. Just freaking do it.

Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Robert Krelwich. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. The podcast. Our today's topic is, well, you know what? Something you just did. I didn't. I had my eyes closed the whole time.

Oh, you gave it away. You know what I'm about to say. Pretend you don't know what I'm saying. Today's topic is something you just did, actually. What? Yeah, you did it again. There. And there.

I don't know what it is. Something with my fingernails? No. No. And there. Something what? Tell me. Okay, you blinked.

Oh. It's about, do you ever wonder? I know this about blinks. This is interesting. What? When you blink, you should, if you really understand what's going on, sense a little bit of darkness. Because after all, your eyes are closed for an instant of time. But you don't.

Because your mind erases the darkness of the blink. So you can blink away, but the world will seem seamless and blinkless to you, even though your observers will see you blinking. You will not feel the blink inside. Do you ever wonder what is the actual purpose of the blink? To wet in your eyeball, I assume. Well, that's what they tell you in ninth grade. But actually, you would think if that is the case, that on really humid days or, let's say, in the sauna, you would blink less because it's very humid in there. You don't have to wet your own balls.

On very dry days, I would blink more. Yeah, they've actually done studies where they put people in saunas and they've measured the rate of their blinks and it doesn't change. Oh. So there's something else going on. Some other reason for the blink. And so that's what we want to explore in this podcast. Why do we blink? the answers are completely fascinating.

Who are you going to ask this question to? A great scientist, a blinkologist. You will meet a blinkologist shortly, but first I want to take you to a guy who, well, he's a blinkologist of a different sort, let's say. He doesn't really study blinks per se, but he sort of stumbled into it. My name is Walter Merch.

I'm a film editor, and I've been working both as a film editor and as a sound mixer since the late 1960s. Walter Merch has edited some amazing things. Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Cold Mountain. He's really one of the great editors in modern cinema. Oh, well, thank you. And he's also a great thinker about editing.

Thank you. And he tells the following story about a discovery that he made while working on one of his early films. Well, this was many years ago when I was editing Francis Coppola's The Conversation. Which, by the way, is another great, great movie. Which was, I think, 1972, 1973. And in the movie, Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert, who spends the whole movie essentially trying to decode this one conversation that he's recorded.

So Walter Murch is there. He's in the editing suite. He's trying to put it all together. And I was working late at night all by myself. On this old editing machine, making the tape go... Making it go backwards and forwards. Stop. Oh, look, that's terrible. Cut. Have dead on a park bench.

Stop. And I was editing the scene. when Gene Hackman is assembling the tapes that he's listening to in his laboratory. It's a bit of a meta moment actually because on screen Gene Hackman is editing tape and in his room Walter Merch is editing tape of Gene Hackman editing tape. A lot of fun you are. Now every scene in a movie, even simple scenes require tons of cuts. Because as a viewer, you're constantly being bounced around from one camera angle to the next and to the next. And though it seems like what you're watching is a continuous performance from the actor,

it's actually been cobbled together by the editor from dozens of takes. So Walter March is doing this. He's editing this scene, cut by laborious cut. And it's important to understand. He's making every cut by feel. What I will do is run the film at full speed and try to feel the rhythm. almost musical way. Right when he's ready, he'll...

There! Hit the cut button and then rewind, run the film again, and cut. And if I've hit that cut button on the same frame twice in a row, that tells me that I'm probably where I should be. So he is editing this scene together. Takes many days, he says, and somewhere along the way he begins to get this. creeping sense. You know, when you're in a room and maybe there's a leak outside and there's a little drip, drip, drip going on,

I began to get the sense that there was some collaboration going on between myself and in this case, Gene Hackman. Because he would find, he says, that every time he made a cut, he would see that on the screen... Gene Hackman would have blinked. You mean your cuts? kept falling smack in the middle of his blinks? Yeah. Wow. And I thought, well, this is peculiar.

Am I responding to him blinking? It didn't seem like that it was possible. And yet the alignment was consistent. So Walter Merch developed a theory that maybe blinking has very little to do with moisture or any of that. Maybe it's a kind of hidden punctuation to thought or storytelling. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. Now this is a very cool idea, but it's just an idea.

And we wanted to know if there's anything to this, scientifically. Can you do me a favor to introduce yourselves? Yes, yes. Tamami first. But then we found out about these two Japanese researchers. Introduce me? Who are nice enough to Skype with us. My name is Tamami Nakano. I research in the cognitive neuroscience.

My name is Shigeru Kitazawa, and she was... student of mine. Okay, Tamami is going to talk. Blink is very common phenomenon, but the purpose of blink is mystery. The reason we had called Tamami and Shiguru

is because they had just completed an experiment which they hoped would solve this mystery of blinking. What they did was they got a bunch of subjects together and they hooked each person up to a kind of gizmo. We put two electrodes, one above and one below the eye. And when we blink, we can record very strong electrical signal.

And we can later analyze automatically when the subject blinked. This is actually what it sounds like when a person blinks. Once they had everybody hooked up, they played them a movie. In each person, I present a movie for three times. Which movie did you use, by the way? Mr. Bean, British comedy. Okay? Mr. Bean, if you don't know the movie, I didn't.

It's kind of like a farce. So that Mr. Bean is, I select the Mr. Bean because the story is easily understand without sound. The reason she took out the sound was for, well, it's actually not that interesting, why she took out the sound. What they did was they watched people watching movies, recorded their beliefs, recorded their blinks each time they watched. And what they found was really weird. First thing they noticed.

Within each person, they blink at the same time point in the movie. Meaning people when they watch the movie many times tend to always blink in the same spots. But weirder than that. Also, the timing of blink occurred at the same time between people. They found that a large percentage of their... subjects actually fell in sync. They began to blink at the exact same moment in the movie. How often did synchronization occur between people?

Uh, uh, according to our analysis, one third of blinks contributed to synchronization. Just to appreciate that, I mean, imagine you're sitting in a movie theater with 200 other people, it's dark, The movie starts, action gets on the way, and you're just there watching. And with each unconscious blink that you make, 70 people make that blink right with you. Like all these little butterfly wings fluttering at the same time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow. And so the question was why? Why does this happen? And they analyzed their data with that question in mind.

What they found is that what seems to be happening is that people, as they watch the movie, get in sync with the story. They intuit the narrative flow, sort of peaks in the valleys of the tail, and they're able to align their blinks so that they fall right in the gaps. Those little microbeats where nothing happens. Yes, we found that link synchronization occurred

at the conclusion of action by the actor, by Mr. Bean. She gave a bunch of examples. One example is the empty street. There's a moment in the film, she says, where all you see is this empty street for just a few frames, just a beat. In that moment, everybody blinks. Or, you know, when Mr. Bean walks into a room closes the door, right as the door finishes closing, everybody blinks. So these sound like rest stops. If they were the New Jersey turnpike, this would be where you'd go in to get your coffee.

Exactly. Say if it's an eyeball, you just blink. One reason is that we don't want to miss very important. important point in the story. Tamami's hypothesis is that, you see, blinking is related to the punctuation, our ways of thinking. Maybe there is some kind of synchronization of the thinking of the editor or filmmaker that might, you see, make us blink at the same time. But still there's a why question here, because why would we even need to do that? the blink and no one knows.

But it may be that we blink at all because we can only process life in chunks. Brink might be chunk, make a chunking of the flow of information for effective processing, information processing or effective memorizing. In computer terms, it's like that moment when we saved a disk. There's enough information, in our buffer, so to speak, and now we think, I've got to remember this.

And that's at that moment that we blink. That's what Walter Merch thinks, but who knows? So it's pop in a new tape every time you blink. Yeah. Because I notice that culturally, when you feel that you're done, you know enough, changes over time. Like, my daughter will watch a Carrie Grant movie,

and the character played by Carrie Grant will be in bed, throw off the covers, put his feet on the floor, get up and then walk to the door. The whole thing. And she's thinking like, come on, come on. She wants it to chunk and go, chunk and go. And so I don't know if she's blinking madly to this thing, but she's clearly frustrated because she knows.

Yeah. I'm not sure that the chunking isn't an artifact of how you see. Yeah, when you're alive, really. When you're alive, yeah. I wonder if the blink rates have changed over generations. I'm sure they have. How would you even measure that? I guess you'd have to start now and just kind of measure into the future.

And as a side note, they measured the time that we blink, the sort of cumulative time that we would blink, say, through a two-hour movie. Yeah. Each blink is somewhere around, what is it, like two-hundredths of a second. So that means that every minute we're losing about six seconds to darkness. Every 60 seconds? This is an average, of course. Wow.

So in a two-hour movie, you're missing total 15 seconds. minutes. Well, so in an 80-year life, you're missing two years. Two years of darkness. Which, thanks to your lovely brain, you're totally unaware of missing. Thank you, Brad. Thank you, Brad. I'm Chad Uphamrod.

And I'm Robert Coleridge. Radio Love is supported in part by the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation Public Broadcasting. And one other. You have one other. The biggest one of them all. the National Science Foundation. Yes. Before we close, I just want to thank Tim Howard for production help on this podcast.

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