Moviegoers in theaters tend to blink in unison!
We lose 6 seconds of visual information each minute from blinking. But don’t worry, you’re not actually missing out on that much. We subconsciously control the timing of blinks to make sure we don’t miss anything important. This is why when watching a film, moviegoers often blink in unison. Tamani Nakano at the University of Tokyo did an experiment on this phenomenon.
He monitored the eye blinks of volunteers as they watched a slip of a comedy with a strong narrative, or a movie of an aquarium with no narrative, or listened to an audiobook. As it can be expected, people’s blinks only synchronized while watching the comedy, and did so in such a way that they only missed some of the least important parts of the video.