The Science of Staring

The Science of Staring: Your mother always told you it's not polite to stare - and yet we do. Why is starring a part of who we are? Why do subway staring contests occur and can we actually feel people's eyes crawling over our bodies? All of this and more shall be discussed.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're walking to stuff to go
in your mind. My name is Robert Lamp. I'm Julie Douglass. Julie,
have you engaged in a good staring contest? Reson? I'm
trying to do it with you right now. Don't blink.
I didn't. Don't kind of like narrow my eyes. Maybe

(00:25):
I used see the things you never know when you
go sometimes, I guess, so, yeah, but yeah, this is
something that I used to engage in with my brother
all the time. Yeah, did you Did you tend to win?
Or is it a stalemate? Did you just both stare
at each other un till your eyeballs dried up? And
he's pretty competitive, so I probably just got tired of
it after a while and blinked just to end it.
Staring is weird. It is a strange thing. I feel

(00:48):
like we've touched this before. But like, the more you
stare at somebody, the weirder it becomes, the weirder their
face becomes, and they start looking like just alien monster creatures,
you know, just because you you begin to to take
sort of the default version of what they look like,
and and and deconstruct it. Well, remember when we were
looking at the Bloody Mary studies about staring into the

(01:09):
mirror and if you stare hard enough and long enough,
your brain starts to freak out. And because it's just
staring at that one bit and starting to sort of say, Okay,
I'm gonna start throwing all sorts of weird images in here.
So hopefully you're not sitting in front of someone and
staring at them so intently that that's happening. But you're right,
it does kind of cause you to to sort of

(01:33):
reconfigure everything. Yeah. Now, I will say in in these
podcast recording sessions, I tend to make more eye contact
with you than I make with most people because we
are directly across from each other, and if I'm not
looking at the my notes are staring off into the
whole distance. Uh, then I'm having to engage with you
because this is kind of a conversation performance that we
do here. It's true, and you know, we're taking visual

(01:55):
cues off of each other too, like hey, wrap it up,
or hey, yeah that's really interesting. More and more so, Yeah,
steering obviously is something that we do as humans for
a variety of reasons, and yet it's a bit of
a mystery, right Yeah. And then there's there're whole these
whole elements too of uh you know, personal space and

(02:15):
the cheesemo. Um. A friend of mine was sent me
some sort of Facebook correspondence because he is friends with
all the people who went to high school with UM,
follows them on Facebook. So they'll inevitably say just weird
and stupid things or things that just don't really sink
with your own personal worldview, including like one dude who
lifts a lot and maybe doesn't do a lot of lifts,

(02:36):
lifts weights, lifts, you know, hits the gym and then
he starts off on this whole diet tribe that that
kind of breaks the world down into into those who
lift and those that don't, or those that lift a
lot and those that don't lift as much. And and
it was about like making eye contact with individuals on
the train or on the street, and how every and
and implying that every incident of this with men making

(02:58):
eye tak contact with each that it is a stare
down to see who is the alpha a k who
lives the most. Okay, well, that's very interesting for two reasons.
One is, and this is auncdotal, of course, but when
I've been at gym's before, I have noticed that people
who are lifting are always staring at themselves, like really,
like you noticed this, and they don't break in the mirror.

(03:20):
In the mirror, they're like staring almost like the person
in the mirror is the aggressor. Okay. So the second
thing about that, like they're like they're in an ape
that doesn't realize that the ape in the in the
mirror is their own reflections, right, that keeps staring at me?
Can't they see me with all my weight? But I
have noticed that over and over again. And David Turberg

(03:42):
at all of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands,
and uh in some other researchers, they wanted to see
if this is really true that we stare for dominance,
that this is really automatic for humans. So they devised
a test in which participants were presented different colored ovals
and different colored dots. Seems pretty straightforward, right, What they

(04:05):
were advised to do is to try to popping up
on the screen in front of you. Yeah, those those
ovals are popping up on the screen. They're the same
color as the dots, and they're saying, hey, just visually
matched that oval to the dot when it comes up.
But they're sneaky the researchers, because a split second before
the oval appears, a face of the same color appeared

(04:25):
with either angry, happy, or neutral expression. Okay, So what
they were doing is they were testing to see how
long it took for people to look away from faces
with different emotions, and they compared this data with a
questionnaire that the participants completed that measured how dominant they
were in social situations. So if you had some of
the weightlifters here, no doubt they would rate, you know,

(04:48):
pretty high on social dominance. So the results were that
people who are more motivated to be dominant were slower
to look away from angry faces, and then people who
were motivated to seek rewar gazed at the happy faces longer. So,
in other words, the assumptions were right here is that
there is a bit of face or eyes staring in

(05:10):
terms of dominance and trying to say this is this
is a space that I'm occupying and I'm dominating right now.
It's weird because on one level I totally buy that,
but on the other It's like I think about, like
being on the train and if someone is like staring
at me with crazy eyes, I'm going to look away
because it just doesn't make like why would I. Why

(05:32):
would I engage that person? Like? Why would I? It's like,
all right, you're an alpha. It's great that you know
you're covering your own vomit. But your alpha, So I'm
gonna let you. But that's the extreme extreme, right, that's
the crazy eyes. What if someone is just like, what
if there's another you, Robert who just happens to be
across from you staring at you? Well, I I would
not stare back. Probably. I mean, do I know this

(05:54):
other me? Or do I say, oh, that's me, that's
my topplicating You don't know you. I don't me. You're
a stranger, okay, just another person of my general making model. Yes,
well no, I wouldn't want to really make eye contact
with him. Why would I do that? Okay, So I
can't believe I'm admitting this. But there's a seven year

(06:15):
old in my neighborhood. He was kind of a toughie,
and he's always kind of saying like awful things to people.
And I mean he's seven, right, so you don't take
him that seriously. But I have to say that I
was backing out of my driveway not too long ago.
Then he was. He was like trash talking, and I
knew he was trashing for backing out of your driveway.

(06:37):
I don't know this kid, I'm telling you anyway, So
I backed at the car and then you know, I
was parallel with him. He's on his bike, and I
sat there and I stared. I did the stair thing,
and I didn't even know at the time that that
was what I was doing. But I wasn't going to
roll down the window. So young man, don't trash talk, right,
But you know, I just sat there and gave him
the what I now understand was the dominant stare huh.

(07:00):
And we sat there and it was finally him who
broke it. But that was my way of saying, step off, kid,
I'm just trying to get to work. See now, I
find that if i'm if I'm at the train and
there's somebody like that, not a seven year old kid
that's threatening me. Yeah. And by the way, I know
how lame it is to do a stare off with
a seven year old. I get it. But now you
had to put your foot down. I think you did

(07:21):
the right thing here. But but I find that there's
someone that's being a little starry or being a little
kind of like, you know, tough guy in the train.
Like my gut instinct, if I'm thinking about it, if
I'm engaging in it and letting my ego engage in
in this kind of thing, which is probably a bad
idea to begin with, my response will be to not

(07:41):
acknowledge them at all, to sort of like stare straight
past them or through them. Um so is it so?
In my own mind, I'm thinking, I'm not engaging with you,
so you can't possibly be the alpha in this situation
because I can't even see you. You're so non alpha.
I like that. I like that. It's like, there's nound
really stupid. When I actually take it out into language,

(08:02):
it makes sense. I mean, it's all pretty stupid because
it's like the idea of like dudes on a train
having to establish a hierarchy of who's tough and who isn't,
and who lifts and who lifts more. I mean, it's
it's utterly ridiculous, and and I want and I my
instinct is to just throw it all out and say
that it's all just a bunch of molarchy. But I
do have to acknowledge there's these social dynamics exist. They do,

(08:24):
and staring is a really big way to try to
ferret out the emotional states of others anyway, right, because
if you were on the train you saw crazy eyes,
you have readed your days because you knew that was
no good. You're not gonna lock eyes. That's not good
news for you. They're going to think I want to
talk exactly, and you don't want to talk um. In
the article why we stare even when we don't want
to buy Dan Muslaf writing for Wired, she says that

(08:47):
humans are highly social animals, and rather than remaining among
our family or heard from birth to death, we venture
out and we have to do this in a safe way.
So we have evolved a rough screening process with this stare.
And she says that you know you're sweeping. Stare is
giving you all sorts of data that gets processed in
your magdala. Now, this is the area of the burning

(09:08):
that is associated with emotions and judgment, and so that's
how you deem if a person is safe or if
they're dodgy, and you've got that split second reassembly of
their face. By the way, while you're doing this um
in your mind's eye, and when you're reassembling that person's face,
you're looking for things like does this person look familiar
to me? Does this person have an emotion of sadness, happiness? Anger? Yeah?

(09:32):
Do they do? They look like they're a part of
my group? They look like that they are merely out
in my group now because they're lost. Do they look
like they have some sort of malicious intent? And yeah,
we do all of this without even really thinking about it. Uh.
In fact, we we often do this kind of thing
and then feel bad about it. You know. If you'll
you'll be like, how, who's that shady guy walking down
my street? And then a part of you like, no, no, uh,

(09:54):
he probably has a legitimate reason to be here. He
might be a missionary or a salesman. Don't jump to conclusions.
But they're still that part of your brain that instantly
passes judgment, right, And in the article, it's that that
whole part of like why we stay even we don't
want to. We're doing this too again, as you say,
like fare it out, like is this person here for
harm or good or what's going on us? Or are Yeah,

(10:17):
and and they were saying in the article, or Dan
Muslaf was saying that if the person deviates greatly from
the norm, for for instance, if the person had a
face transplant, right, that's probably about as much as you
can debat it from the norm. Then then your stare
really gets locked down because now your brain is again
reassembling the face, trying to make sense of it and

(10:40):
knowing that it doesn't make sense, so it's trying to
fill in those gaps, and you're going to stay a
longer and longer and longer. Yeah, it's I mean, when
you encounter any level of disfigurement or even just like
mild not even disfigure but even like mild a symmetry,
well not even not mild a symmetry, but say, um,
a symmetry that you haven't seen before, because you certainly
easily get used to a symmetry in any individual's face

(11:03):
or like like one eyes looking off a little bit
to the side, but the first time you encounter it
can be a little a little off putting. But if
it's something severe, if you get into that weird space, again,
where every instinct in your body is to look and
analyze and forget what's going on. But then you feel
just increasingly bad about doing it because we've all been
told from an early age, because in an early age,
we don't know, and that that's when we do things

(11:25):
like stare at a diminutively sized individual in a grocery
store and point at them and ask our mother what
they are. My sister did that. Um, that's when we
we don't really understand the social constraints we have to
work with, and we're told above all else, do not
point at people who are different, do not stare at
people who are different. Uh, But we have that strong
instinct to do so. Right. Largely humans are not meaning jerks.

(11:46):
They're just trying to figure out the discrepancies. Yeah. Like
I was in a nursing home once visiting my grandmother
and there was an individual there that and I was
again I didn't want to stare, So I don't even
really have a clear version of their vision of what
this person looked like in my mind because I didn't
go back for more details because it felt wrong. But
I remember their face was like just a black hole.

(12:09):
And I'm not even sure how that worked kind of
physical level, but it it was that it was it
was weird because there was the pole to stare and
it was a very strong poll uh that that I
just had to really push it down with all the
social rules that were in place, and you do you
have to tell your brain to shut that off, right, um.
And this is something we do all the time, right,
because we don't want to make others feel uncomfortable with

(12:31):
our stairs. Yeah. Well, another aspect of the whole others
in us safe and risk all. You know, disease factors
into that as well. Does this person look like they
are healthy? And if they are not healthy, then how
does that factor into my acceptance of their um, their
their presence within the boundaries of my group? Right, there's
your amygdala at work trying to make all right. So

(12:52):
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will get into uh, not only the idea of
us staring at other people, but the thing that individuals
are staring at us. All right, we are back in

(13:12):
Robert Lamb. Have you ever had the sense that someone
was staring at you? He turned around and and lo
and behold, that person was staring at you. I do
get the feeling that people are staring at me sometimes,
but again, since I tend to be more passive, my
reaction is to not engage them and to continue looking
at my book or out the window or if I

(13:34):
but but if I can, then I might try to
check a reflection to see if I'm being stared at
to confirm okay. But then there are alway those those
moments too. What do you look up from whatever you're
doing and someone's eyes dart away from you, and then
instantly you you think, oh, they were staring at me. Yeah,
And I have to say I've felt that way before,
or like you felt like someone was staring at you
happened and behold they were. And this is called the

(13:56):
psychic staring effect. It's that idea that you can really
sense this, that this might be, you know, another one
of our senses that we have um or the converse
of this is that you yourself could stare so intensely
at someone else that you could cause them to turn
around and look at you, like a cartoon effect for
the eyeballs, like come out of the head um and

(14:17):
elongate and actually hit something that they're looking at. Yes, yeah, yeah,
and it happens all the time, right yeah. Yeah. Um. Now,
according to skeptic Um, the first scientific studies of what
is called PSC were reported in by British psychologist Edward B. Titchener.
He was interested to know if this was a thing,
because it feels real when when you're experiencing it, it

(14:40):
feels like you're actually sensing someone stairs. Yeah. But now,
all of the studies he did, they were all negative. So, um,
we don't know how many subjects were involved or how
actually the studies were conducted, but we do know that
his findings at least were negative. But along comes someone
called Rupert Sheldrick, and he's done several informal and formal

(15:03):
studies that show that PSC is real ish. Um, you
know his studies would bear that out. Now, others who
have tried to replicate the studies get negative results. Um.
And when they replicate his studies, by the way, they're
they're using random process and other strict controls that he
has been criticized for not using. Well that's a red

(15:26):
flag right there, right, So yeah, it's always a red
flag if you can't replicate the results over and over
and right. Um, So I would say, at best, the
jury is still out. At worst, it does seem like
this is something that is it's not a thing with
a capital ty. Yeah, it's researching the material. I really
had to fall into the suspicion that it is not

(15:48):
a thing, that it's merely um, a combination of two things. Really.
First of all, it's it's about superstition and uh. And
then the other side of it is that, of course
it is a it's a false positive. Okay. This goes
into the whole idea of error management theory, which we've
we've touched on before in discussing belief in the supernatural,
belief in lucky charms, uh, various things that are not real.

(16:11):
So when it comes to cognition, we have two types
of errors cognition and dealing with situations of uncertainty. You
can make a type one era, a false positive, in
which we decide that a risk or benefit exists when
it does not. Okay. So we make a type one
error when we think that there's a savor tooth tiger
behind us and then they're not there. Okay. Then there's

(16:33):
a type two error, a false negative, and this entails
failing to notice a risk or benefit that exists. So
this is when we think there might be a savor
tooth tiger, but we don't act on it, and then
we're eating, so we made a We're like, oh, I
don't think there's anything there, and then we're consumed. So
it's better to think that there might be that savoth.
You can argue the nature selects for those who jump

(16:54):
to conclusions, because if I react every time like there's
a savor tooth tiger tiger, then it more likely that
I will react correctly when the savory tooth tiger actually
comes for me. And likewise, if I always assume there's
no savor tooth tiger on the other side of the
high grasses, then I have increased odds of winding up
in a savor tooths belly. Okay, So that falls in

(17:15):
line perfectly with a study in Current Biology by the
University of Sydney called humans have an expectation that gaze
is directed for them. I think the title because if
someone's looking at me, they might have some some ill intentions.
So it's the same thing. Yeah, So the idea is
that we always think that people are staring at us,

(17:35):
so or we always expect that they are. So if
you feel like there's a sense like, oh, someone's staring
at me right now, you may look around quickly and
just assume that person is staring at you. So the
researchers say that this is largely protective, as you say,
and that many primates, a direct gaze is threatening or aggressive,
and you'd want to make sure that you didn't miss this, right,

(17:57):
you'd want to know if someone was trying to threaten you.
So what they did, of course, is they took some
participants with computer generated faces in front of them, and
then they made it difficult for the observer for the
participants by obscuring the direction of the gaze by rotating
the heads slightly from previous positions, and they asked the
participants to judge the relative gaze directions. Overwhelmingly, uh, when

(18:23):
they were in these uncertain positions, people will more likely
to judge that even this computer generated face was staring
directly at them. So, you know, just a tiniest little
bit of the gaze change, they think, oh, it's still
looking at me, even when it wasn't. So that's why
the researchers say this is something that perhaps we're just

(18:44):
hardwired to believe that people are staring at us. So
if you I'm sure you've seen this in the notice
this in the train before. If someone is sitting across
from you with sunglasses on, don't you for a while think,
I know you're staring at me, staring at me? What
are you thinking? Are are And then you realize suddenly, okay,
they have sunglasses on. They could be asleep right now.
It's true. Yeah, but I but I often find myself

(19:07):
in the past. I don't really wear sunglasses much in
the train anymore, but I have worn sunglasses on the
train and have thought to myself, I have free reign.
I can stare at whoever and wherever I want to.
And so I'll stare at this person or I'll stare
at that person. You know. Um, so I I know
if I'm doing it, other people are doing it. So
it's just the wild West open there. But isn't it

(19:27):
just because you don't have that data, your mind goes
a little bit crazy and you just assume that again,
I'm going to make that U I'm gonna make that
type one error. I'm just gonna assume that they're looking
at me and then take either the you know, take
it either as a compliment or a threat. There you go.
So the next stage of this research is to try
to figure out if this bias, this cognitive cognitive bias

(19:47):
really is learned orientate and what it might tell us
about other mental conditions, because it's shown that people who
have autism are less able to tell whether someone is
actually looking at them or is there ring at them,
and then people with social anxiety, on the other hand,
have a higher tendency to think that they are under
the stare of others more often. So it's interesting bit

(20:10):
of research there see what they tease out on them.
Cool and like I said, I feel like it has
a direct correlation with a lot of the research that
we've looked at in the past about superstitious beliefs in
the idea that a lucky charm works, et cetera. Right,
we do it because it makes sense for us to
go ahead and believe that this is the case. Now,
we've talked a lot about staring and faces. Uh, people

(20:33):
are are looking at my face, I'm looking at other
people's faces. But there's another type of staring that goes goes,
goes around, and that of course is staring at body. Parts. Yeah,
and this is where we get into objectification. Right, You're
not just staring at someone, You're staring at some aspect
of that person. We have mentioned this study before, but
Sarah your face, she's an assistant professor and lead author

(20:56):
of the study Seeing Women as Objects said, we introduced
and tested the sexual body part recognition bias hypothesis that
women versus men's bodies would be reduced to their sexual
body parts in the minds of perceivers. And this is
called global processing of data data rather than locals. So
in other words, what they did is they they took

(21:18):
images of clothes men and women, and they put them
in front of two hundred and twenty seven people, equally
men and women, and they were shown a sequence of
images before two images settled on their screen. One was
of the original image and the other showed the groin area,
the groin age, if the groinage, and men and women
were more likely to recognize body parts when shown images

(21:39):
of women. Okay, again, this is that that global and
then both were more likely to recognize the whole image
when shown pictures of men. What does this say? It
so that we look at men as complete people, whereas
women we look at them in just parts and men
and women. So we use global processing with men and

(22:00):
we use a local processing with women, Okay, and then
not to say that we cannot look at women with
global processing. And in fact, I would challenge anyone out
I mean, especially the men out there, that if you
find yourself using local processing, uh, you know, just sort
of without thinking about it, like oh, I'm looking at
that person's but like it at least, like turn on

(22:20):
global processing for a minute and think, oh, I wonder
what his or her hopes and dreams are. Well, what
I think is interesting about that is that both men
and women women do it. So if I'm on the
train and another woman comes on, if I'm not conscious
of it, most likely I'm maybe looking at this person
in parts as well and not thinking like what's she
going to have for dinner tonight, but more like, look

(22:40):
at those elbows. Those are some sharp elbows. I bet
they could really deliver a lot of paint. Um, yes,
something like that. But it made me think about Marina Uppermomitch. Okay,
So she is a performance artists. We've talked about her before, fascinating.
She has an exhibit, or had an exhibit called the
Artist is Present, and it was a retrospective of her

(23:02):
work over the past forty years, and she has done
a lot with objectification. In fact, in one of her
performance pieces, I believe, she was naked and she had
a bunch of objects around her. It was like a feather,
and then there was also a gun. Was it loaded,
I can't even remember that detail. I can't remember if
it was loaded either, But there was a knife, There
was all sorts of things. There was a flower, and

(23:23):
she allowed the audience to choose what they might do
with those objects, and she said it was awful that
that overwhelmingly after a period of time passed and one
person did something that was sort of out of the
norm with one of those objects, other people felt normalized
by it. And she had, you know, knives held up
to her. She did have one person wielding the gun,

(23:46):
and um, so it was really an exploration of like
how easy it is to objectify someone, particularly a woman.
So this, uh, this exhibit that she had The Artist
is Present is really sort of away the opposite of that,
a way to sort of take that objectification turn it

(24:06):
around on its head. And she would sit across from
someone at a table and that and that way, the
audience member was just one person just sitting across from her,
and she would stare at them for ten minutes and
they at her. And that way, they had to look
at her fully as a human being, and she had
to look at them fully as a human thing. And

(24:26):
what's it's you know, it seems pretty like, okay, well,
what are you talking about? Why is that? Are just
two people sitting across from each other. But it turns
out this is a really powerful experience because, as we
discussed in our podcast on performance art, you very seldom
sit across from someone and look in their eyes for
ten minutes straight, even your loved ones. And so people

(24:46):
just started crying and felt overwhelming and like they were
just in love with her. That was some of the things, uh,
some of the things that were said that she saw
them finally as a person um and here she is
a stranger to them, you know. And again, that's one
of the things that makes podcasting so weird, because we're
in here for like an hour and there's an absurd
amount of eye contact going on. Yeah, but I mean

(25:09):
for ten minutes, you and I don't just sit there
and stare at each other. Well that would be that
would be weird and arguably it would be a real
pain to listen to. Well, what I think is interesting
about what Abramovich was doing is that And I don't
know if she was aware that she was gaming people
in a way, but um, she was sort of manipulating

(25:29):
their feelings. And she did have an accomplice come behind
and take their wallet about five minutes. Then there was
they funded the whole thing. Well, you know, I gotta
get creative in the arts, uh. And Jake Kellerman's paper
Looking and Loving the Effects of Mutual Gaze on Feelings
of Romantic love, researchers took seventy two unacquainted undergraduate students,

(25:50):
split them into male female parents, and then they studied
the effects that two minutes, just two minutes of uninterrupted
mutual eye contact had on their feelings toward one another.
And they found that if the two strangers gazed into
each other's eyes for those two minutes, they later reported
that they had increased feelings of affection or even passionate
love towards that person. Now they did this, um and

(26:14):
in other ways where they weren't asked to actually like
actively steer into each other's eyes, but just be with
each other for two minutes. They were free to look
at the person's hands or so on and so forth.
And in that case they did not report those feelings.
But there's something about connecting staring into the eyes for
that long, uninterrupted that causes those feelings. And so I

(26:35):
wasn't too shocked when, um, when I began to think
about some of the things that popped up from Abrabois performance,
like there's a website called Marina made Me Cry or
Marina Abraboma which made me cry, um, Because that's the
the sort of deep held feelings that are in there
that when you connect with a person on that level

(26:55):
that come out. It reminds me to the study of
the two documentary to excellent documentary films, um Baraka and
Sam Sara, but by the same filmmakers. Have you seen
either of those? I assume you've seen you have seen,
and I've seen Baraca, but that was a long time ago,
and I wasn't so about it, and and then you
were terribly mortified by that. Well, Um, as you'll remember

(27:18):
in both of these films, and this is not a
technique that's limited just to Sam Sara and Baraca. But
they'll have these scenes where they'll be an individual from
a different culture and they'll just be standing there, uh,
filmed staring at you. So in a sense, you're you're
forced to make eye contact with this individual and connect
with this this uh, this subject of this uh, this

(27:38):
portrait not only as a subject, isn't as an object,
but as a person. And it it's really emotionally evocative,
right again, because now you're you're considering them as the whole. Yeah,
because you're you're you're watching them breathe and you're you're
you're staring into their eyes. I'm saying you exist, I exist. Yeah,

(27:59):
And then someone next to you in the theater says,
cut it out. Quit talking to the screen, Quit telling
the screen it exists. We're trying to watch a movie here.
But going back to the old staring contest, and I
wasn't really prepared for the staring contest. I'm not trying
to get out of losing it, but I've kind of
forgot what the rules were, because apparently the rule is
not that you lose by looking away, but you lose

(28:21):
by blinking alone, which seems kind of silly. Yeah, but
that's the dominance factor, right, like, I will not blink
and and I will be so intense and aggressive that
I will win this. I totally I need to have
a rematch with my brother, clearly, maybe you can do
it over Skype or something. Yeah, I think we're going
to FaceTime maybe. Um. So, of course, blinking, though, is inevitable,

(28:45):
and we do it something like fifteen to twenty times
a minute. Well, we have to lubricates the cornea, and
if you're not blinking enough, it's it's not good for
the eye, right, and it's dislodging little bits of dirt
and dust that get in there. But this is a
really interesting revelation that has recently come out in paper
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(29:05):
Researchers found that people tend to blink at predictable moments,
and they blink a lot more than they need to.
So you don't need to blink fifteen to twenty times
a minute just to lubricate your eyeball or dislodge something.
So you've got these predictable moments that you blink at.
So if you're reading, you tend to blink at the
end of each sentence. If you're listening to someone speak,

(29:27):
you may blink when the speaker pauses between statements. And
if a group of people are all watching the same video,
everyone tends to blink at the same time when the
action briefly lags. I was trying to remain conscious of
my blinking just now, and I did find that I
would blink whenever you would have a stop in the sentence.
I know. Actually I wish that we had had given

(29:48):
everybody a tip off before I read that to see
if they were doing the same thing. But maybe you
guys out there are being aware of that as well. Well.
As I say this, think about when you when you
blink towards Brill and the slivey toads, did Guay and
Gimble in the way, when did you blink? You know?
I think it might have matched up. So there's more

(30:10):
to it, though. This is the really cool thing, and
it's uh blinking, It turns out is a way that
we get a quick refresher for our brains. Yeah, and
since we're resetting the visuals that we're taking in, which
I find find really interesting. It's it's like I'm looking
at a painting and then I blink and then maybe

(30:30):
I'm looking to a new part of the painting and
I'm seeing it a new Each time we blink, we're
kind of re establishing the scenario for the brain. In
a sense, we're kind of updating the the the image
like a like a security camera that doesn't have a
constant stream but merely updates every it's refreshing and refocusing.
And of course someone tested this out to Mommy Nicano

(30:51):
along with other researchers, scan the brains of ten volunteers
in an f m R I machine while they watched Okay,
check this out, Mr Bean. Why Mr Bean, I do
not know, but they watched the show Mr Bean why
they were being scanned, And it turns out when the
volunteers blink, the activity correlated with increased blood flow to
the default mode network, which we know is the seat

(31:13):
of midline chatter in our brain, but also is associated
with a state of rest, or rather wakeful rest. So
the Mr Bean show also contained momentary blackouts, so those
were built into the shows and volunteers would see nothing
in these blackouts actually lasted for the same amount of
time that a blink does, and what they found is

(31:36):
that the brain did not respond in the same way,
and that that area that's were related to the default
mode network was not activated. And that leads to this
conclusion that blinking is something that is that's much more
than just a temporary blackout um that that it is
serving a purpose to refocus our efforts and our thoughts.

(31:58):
So in a sense, if we're engaging in some sort
of like alpha mare stare down and we're not blinking,
what we're saying is, yeah, I don't need to reset this.
I see everything I need to see right here. I
don't need any new information. That's right. That's right, Better
step off, that's right. I'm the zen master of all
stimuli coming in right now, going rods, some rods. So
take that in with you next time you you're on

(32:20):
the train, you're at the mall, you're pulling out of
your driveway, and there's somebody that needs a serious stare down. Um,
now you know a little more about why you feel
this compulsion to either engage with the staring or to
run from it, or or indeed why the blinking occurs,
because you're you're updating the information that is before you,

(32:40):
and probably that person isn't staring at you, but it's
good for you to be aware of your surroundings. Right, Yeah,
calm down a little bit. You're probably not being stared
at unless you know there is something like stuck to
the back of your shirt or something, and in case
in that case, maybe somebody will say something or toilet
paper trailing down from your pants, But don't worry about that.
It's just random stuff of life. A little ninnis all right. Well,

(33:01):
on that note, we're gonna go ahead and um and
call it a day on this podcast. The robot is
on vacation, so we hope that he's having a great time.
Where did you go, Abiza? Yeah? Wow, Well he loves
he loves the music scene there. He does volleyball, so
those are his passions, so we hope he's living it up. Um.
In the meantime, if you wanted to touch base with

(33:23):
us about staring, about blinking, we would love to hear
from you. What is your weird social dynamic with individuals
uh in regard to staring? And what is is there
any truth to this whole? Like is the world really
about duds who lift and doos who don't lift? And
then what is it like? What's it like? As a
woman to engage in this uh, in this world of staring,
in this world of justification, and the seeing of individuals

(33:45):
as uh as a pile of parts rather than a whole.
All of that's fair game. You can find us in
the usual places our main homepage, Stuff to Alow your
Mind dot com, Facebook, and Tumbler where we were Stuff
to Ablow your Mind, Twitter where we are blow the Mind,
and YouTube where we are mind stuff. And if you
are a lifter and you refute my anecdote about this
aggressive staring into the mirror sent me straight, let me know.

(34:08):
Let us know your feelings by dropping a line at
Blood of the Mind at discovery dot com for more
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