Researchers investigated a strong link between brain activity and eye blinking.
Blinking is like breathing, which people do automatically, without thinking much about it.
While most scientific research on blinking has focused on vision, a new study from Concordia University examines a different connection.
Researchers found a strong link between brain activity and blinking. They revealed that blinking increases as cognitive load or mental effort increases, such as during complex problem solving or multitasking.
The recent study explored how ‘blinking’ is a strong indicator of brain activity, and observed an extensive connection to understand cognitive processes.
The study involved 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.
Furthermore, the signal-to-noise ratio SNR ranged from very quiet to very distracting frequencies.
All participants wore eye-tracking glasses that recorded each blink and recorded exactly when each blink occurred.
Researchers divided each listening session into three phases; before the sentence was played, while it was being played, and immediately afterward.
The blink rate decreased most noticeably during the sentences themselves, compared to the moments before and after.
People blink less when trying to understand speech in noisy environments, and the effect remains the same in light or dark rooms, clearly showing that this is caused by mental effort and not light.
Researchers realized that the decrease in blinking was greatest when the background noise was loudest and speech was most difficult to understand.
And the result turned out that blinking is a silent indicator of ‘focused listening’.
The reason behind this is that when speech becomes harder to understand, your brain silently tells your eyes to stop blinking.
The less you blink, the harder your mind works to block out noise and focus on what’s important.
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Lead author of the study Penelope Coupal from the Laboratory of Hearing and Cognition said: “We wanted to know whether blinking was influenced by environmental factors and how this related to executive function.”
The researchers wanted to investigate whether “there is a strategic timing for a person’s blinking so that he or she would not miss what is being said.”
The results showed that blinking appears to be timed in a purposeful manner.
“We don’t just blink randomly,” Coupal says. “In fact, we systematically blink less when salient information is presented.”
The research highlighted that blinking is associated with natural breaks in concentration, or just after a task is completed, and that it acts as a mental ‘reset’ or an indicator of a brief break in attention.
The study “Reduced eye blinking while listening to sentences reflects increased cognitive load under challenging auditory conditions” was published in the magazine Trends in hearing.
Furthermore, the research shows that spontaneous frequent blinking is also linked to brain dopamine levels, a neurotransmitter crucial for motor control, reward and attention, and that variations in blink frequency may reflect the health and function of dopamine pathways.
