We blink so often in order to restart the brain

The man blinks for 1 minute on average 15 to 20 times. It is believed that Morgan - a mechanism necessary to moisten the cornea. However, the cornea does not need such a frequent moisture - for normal operation fairly average blinks seven. So people spend blinking to 10% of waking hours.



Neuroscientists from the University of Osaka, Japan under the leadership of Tamami Nakano suggested that such frequent blinking can be explained by the fact that the brain requires some sort of "reset" - so the brain is easier to switch from one subject to another, "dropping the" current state.

The fact that people blink in an entirely certain moments - for example, during pauses in speech or speaker after the proposal during the reading, in other words, blinking occurs in between meaningful, "logically complete" events. Blinking helps to "reset" the current state of attention in the neural network located in the parietal lobe of the brain responsible for recognizing objects and to switch attention from one object to another, sometimes less significant.

The assumption was able to verify experimentally: a group of volunteers watched a comedy show "Mr. Bean", but scientists at the time were watching the activity of neural networks with the help of a computer tomograph. When, during a scene people blinked their brains for a few moments into a "passive mode", and the activity of neural networks while dramatically decreasing - scanner recorded a decrease in blood flow to the parietal part of the brain during blinking.

The reasons why the attention to reset the brain uses just such a way remain unclear. Researchers will continue to study this issue and plan to put a number of other experiments to find out the answer.

via factroom.ru