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posted by janrinok on Thursday January 26 2017, @10:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the someone's-eyes-are-open dept.

Every few seconds, our eyelids automatically shutter and our eyeballs roll back in their sockets. So why doesn't blinking plunge us into intermittent darkness and light?

New research led by UC Berkeley shows that the brain works extra hard to stabilize our vision despite our fluttering eyes.

[...] In a study published today in the online edition of the journal Current Biology, they found that when we blink, our brain repositions our eyeballs so we can stay focused on what we're viewing.

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, said study lead author Gerrit Maus, an assistant professor of psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Target Displacements during Eye Blinks Trigger Automatic Recalibration of Gaze Direction. Current Biology, 2017; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.12.029


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  • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday January 26 2017, @10:53PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 26 2017, @10:53PM (#459193) Journal

    When our eyeballs roll back in their sockets during a blink

    Either I have been blinking "wrong" for about five decades, or my eyes are way more precise with motion control than the average UC Berkeley researcher's eyes.

    My blinks generally happen quickly ("in the blink of an eye", you might say), failing to give my eyes time to roll randomly around. Is that not what I am supposed to be doing?

    Sure, I can close my eyes and rest them for a few moments (orders of magnitude longer than a blink) with a little eye motion involved, but during blinking, I mean, really, who has time to move their eyes around?

    There's an interesting bit in TFA about the actual research involved,

    Study participants sat in a dark room for long periods staring at a dot on a screen while infrared cameras tracked their eye movements and eye blinks in real time. Every time they blinked, the dot was moved one centimeter to the right. While participants failed to notice the subtle shift, the brain’s oculomotor system registered the movement and learned to reposition the line of vision squarely on the dot. After 30 or so blink-synchronized dot movements, participants’ eyes adjusted during each blink and shifted automatically to the spot where they predicted the dot to be.

    But that does not seem to explain TFA's leading sentence...

    Every few seconds, our eyelids automatically shutter and our eyeballs roll back in their sockets.

    Every few seconds our eyeballs roll back in their sockets? Seriously?

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  • (Score: 1) by charon on Friday January 27 2017, @03:49AM

    by charon (5660) on Friday January 27 2017, @03:49AM (#459296) Journal
    I felt this was odd too. But it occurred to me that of course I can't see myself blink, and I've never paid such close attention to someone else blinking. It's certainly possible that it happens so quickly that the brain edits it out, like it does every other saccade.
  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Friday January 27 2017, @09:38AM

    by driverless (4770) on Friday January 27 2017, @09:38AM (#459395)

    Every few seconds our eyeballs roll back in their sockets? Seriously?

    Your eyes are constantly moving, google "saccade". You don't realise it because your brain makes up stuff to cover up the movements, google "confabulation across saccades". This causes various weird effects, e.g. google "chronostasis". I'm being lazy there and substituting Google for typing up a ton of stuff...

    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday January 27 2017, @12:53PM

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 27 2017, @12:53PM (#459429) Journal

      Your eyes are constantly moving

      I don't question this at all. It's "Your eyes are constantly rolling back in their sockets" which seems to imply a greater degree of movement than actually occurs.

      There's a video/animation recording of someone blinking in TFA, and sure, her eyes technically do not remain literally fixed with micron precision, but neither do they constantly roll back in their sockets from what I can tell.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @01:49PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @01:49PM (#459444)

        I've before watched myself blink in the mirror and taken video, my eyes sure as hell do not "roll back inside their sockets every time I blink." Your eyes more around a lot but they don't move THAT fast.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2017, @06:44PM (#459625)

    The eyes move around during a blink to get better lubricated. The whole point of blinking is to lubricate the eyes.

  • (Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday January 27 2017, @06:57PM

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Friday January 27 2017, @06:57PM (#459635) Homepage

    Either I have been blinking "wrong" for about five decades, or my eyes are way more precise

    No, you only think they are, which is the point. Although I do wonder if they're not drawing enough of a distinction between your regular blinky-blink and a good solid bliiiink.

    Regardless, your brain does a scary amount of processing to fool you into not noticing things.

    Have you ever shifted your eyes over to a clock and caught the second hand lingering, as if it had gone "tick tock tiiiiick tock"? That's because your brain shut down your visual perception while your eyes were moving to stop you getting dizzy. Then it retroactively fills in your perception, so you think you've been looking at the clock since the beginning of the eye movement.

    There's another good one involving a button and a light. Push the button, light lights up. Do it again. And again. But in this experiment, there's a bit of electronics which is gradually delaying the lighting of the light. Your brain starts to compensate, based on what it expects to see - so much so that when, after a while, the delay is suddenly removed, you'd swear the light came on before you pushed the button.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk
    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Friday January 27 2017, @07:07PM

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 27 2017, @07:07PM (#459649) Journal

      Either I have been blinking "wrong" for about five decades, or my eyes are way more precise

      No, you only think they are, which is the point. Although I do wonder if they're not drawing enough of a distinction between your regular blinky-blink and a good solid bliiiink.

      As I understand it, they are talking about the blink that happens every few seconds. That's the blinky-blink, not the good solid bliiiink.

      Regardless, your brain does a scary amount of processing to fool you into not noticing things.

      A true and otherwise fascinating statement that does not in any way support the idea that your eyes roll back into your head every few seconds, which is one of the dumbest things I've heard this week.

      Have you ever shifted your eyes over to a clock... second hand...brain fills in...retroactive vision adjustment...

      This is very, very neat, but doesn't do much for the idea that my eyes roll around like certain folks are claiming. The woman blinking in TFA is demonstrating what my eyes do as well. Her eyes do not have a bad case of the roll-back-into-her-head disease, and neither do mine.

      There's another good one involving a button and a light.

      I am sure there is, but what has it to do with the idea that everyone's eyes roll back into their heads every few seconds? I get, and am amazed by, the awesome visual processing that the brain does to deliver smooth real-life-definition video.

      I just don't think that everyone's eyes move more than a millimeter or so during the typical blink every few seconds.

      If I am missing the point, and am making rather a fool of myself, I genuinely would love to understand the fact.