Why time appears to go faster... when we blink

BLINK and you really will miss it, a study suggests.

It found our perception of time speeds up when we blink our eyes.

Mark Wexler, a vision researcher at Paris Descartes University, conducted two experiments that shed new light on blinking.

In the first, test subjects were asked to blink as the lights were turned off in a room. The researchers then turned the lights on again a few milliseconds after the participants opened their eyes.

Each subject was asked how long they thought the darkness had lasted.

In the second experiment, the subjects blinked while looking at an image of a square that quickly flashed up on a screen.

Mr Wexler said the results showed the participants ‘discounted’ blink time by 50 to 70 per cent, meaning their brains thought that it ran two to four times faster than it really did.

He added: ‘You can turn off the lights in the room for the same duration of a blink – a 15th of a second – while your eyes are open. It will seem very violent and very jarring.

‘This is what happens every couple of seconds in our waking lives – we also turn off the lights because we shut our eyelids – but we don’t have this jarring perception of our eyes being turned off.’

He said the research suggested the effect was less disturbing when blinking because of the time ‘distortion’.

Mr Wexler added it was like going to sleep when you ‘sometimes open your eyes and it feels like it’s been a few seconds but actually it’s been eight hours’.