Why we blink together
At university I did a thesis on how people react to movies (part of which went into a chapter I co-wrote with Julian Friedman for his book How to Make Money Scriptwriting). Turns out, if we empathise with a character on screen, we mimic what they’re doing with small (undetectable) muscle movements – if they’re running, our legs twitch, etc.
What’s even more fascinating is how we SEE the movie. When we blink, we lose up to 10% of our viewing time. So it’s really important that we time those blinks to moments when we won’t miss anything too important happening on the screen. And that means that in an average movie (or YouTube clip), most of us will blink at the same time.
Synchronized blinking, in short.
A recent study discovered that it’s not always when expected (i.e. a scene break), but at points where something has completed, or the main character is off the screen for a moment. So the result of a natural moment of low interest, when our brain calculates it can give the eyes a break.
Part of that seems obvious to me (our eyes would dry out if we waited for scene endings), but the fact that almost everyone anticipates the same best place to blink is pretty interesting.
Watching where people blink could be a pretty strong indicator of interest not just in movies, but in video ads (if we blink when they show the brand, opportunity lost), in top-level sports (especially fast-moving sports like table tennis) in warfare (when do fighter pilots blink?), and so on.
Blinking useful.
