• Question: how many times on average do humans blink a day?

    Asked by oliviaeganx to Damien, Suzi, Tim on 23 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Suzi Gage

      Suzi Gage answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hi @oliviaeganx
      I didn’t know this so I’ve had a quick internet search.
      The general consensus seems to be that we blink 10 to 15 times a minute. So if we say that’s 12.5 times a minute, there are 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, so 1440 minutes in a day. 1440×12.5=18000.

      So we probably blink about 18 thousand times per day!

      Cool huh?

    • Photo: Tim Fosker

      Tim Fosker answered on 23 Jun 2011:

      Hi @oliviaeganx

      I didn’t know that! I’m glad Suzi found it out. I do know that the muscles that control eye blinks produce much larger electrical activity than the brain and I see a lot of eye blink activity when I am measuring children’s brain activity. In fact eye-blink activity is so big it often makes it hard to see the brain activity. Luckily the power changes that occur when you blink are very similar every time, so we can use a mathematical model to work out what the brain activity is like during the blinks. With 10 to 15 blinks a minute I wouldn’t be able to measure much ‘brain’ activity at all if I couldn’t use a mathematical model to remove the blinks.

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