More to blinking than meets the eye

The new study, published in the journal Current Biology, revealed that blinking is the brain’s attpt at repositioning the eyeballs to realign the muscles needed to retain focus and clarity of vision more quickly.Assistant Professor Gerrit Maus, lead author of the study, explained that, “when our eyeballs roll back in their sockets during a blink, they don’t always return to the same spot when we reopen our eyes. This misalignment prompts the brain to activate the eye muscles to realign our vision.”{{quote-A:R-W:450-I:2-Q: If we didn’t possess this powerful oculomotor mechanism, particularly when blinking, our surroundings would appear shadowy, erratic and jittery, -WHO:Assistant Professor Gerrit Maus, lead author of the study}}Maus pointed out that the brain compensates for the eye muscles in adapting to motor signals when a person is trying to gaze at an object or space. The brain, after gauging distance and object focus, rapidly commands the eye muscles to make the necessary corrections by blinking.“If we didn’t possess this powerful oculomotor mechanism, particularly when blinking, our surroundings would appear shadowy, erratic and jittery,” Maus also said.The research involved 12 adult volunteers who sat in a dark room for a period of time while they focused their gaze on a dot on a screen. Infrared cameras tracked eye movents and blinking in real-time.Every time the volunteers blinked, researchers moved the dot a centimetre to the right, causing the brain’s oculomotor syst to detect the movent and reposition the line of vision on the dot.After multiple blink-and-dot movents, the eyes always adjusted during every blink and automatically focused on the spot where it was predicted to move next.“Even though participants did not consciously register that the dot had moved, their brains did, ” Maus explained. “These findings add to our understanding of how the brain constantly adapts to changes, commanding our muscles to correct for errors in our bodies’ own hardware.”