The Blink of the Brain

The great film editor Walter Murch pointed out that the only reason movie editing works is because our brains are quite used to seeing the world chopped up into discontinuous visual clips.  The equivalent of a “cut” happens, Murch observed, every time our eyes blink, which happens every few seconds.  We don’t notice the discontinuities in a film from two scenes spliced together anymore than we notice them when we blink. Now it turns out that Murch’s observation may be truer at a deeper level in the brain than previously supposed — the human brain itself appears to blink — regardless of whether the eyes are open or closed.  UW Psychology Ph.D. student Jason Samaha made this novel discovery recently and spoke with Brian Standing in the WORT studio.