Blinking to the Beat

Explore

Bcreating connections is a natural reflex. We blink in response to surprising stimuli, such as bright lights, loud noises, or objects approaching our eyes. We also blink to keep our eyes moist. Adult humans blink 10 to 20 times per minute, with each blink washing our eyes clean of fresh tears. Thanks to our natural wipers, our eyes stay lubricated, clean and protected from blows. But new research suggests that we also blink as part of our brain measuring time.

Cognitive scientists Yi Du and co-authors from the Chinese Academy of Sciences experimented with 123 young people to study the association of blinking with music as they listened to chorales by Johann Sebastian Bach. The researchers intentionally chose non-musicians who were less likely to have deliberately cultivated musical rhythm. By observing behavior, tracking their eyes, and recording neural responses via EEGs, the researchers found that participants spontaneously blinked in time with the musical beats. They published their findings yesterday in PLoS Biology.

Just in case the blinking was activated by listening to familiar music, the researchers played Bach chorales backwards in some trials to eliminate song recognition. The results were the same; the blinks of the eyes followed the rhythm of the music. “We found that people’s spontaneous eye blinks align with the musical rhythm, even without being asked to move, revealing a hidden connection between hearing music and the oculomotor system,” Du said in a statement.

Read more: »When you listen to music, you are never alone»

The EEGs recorded by Du and colleagues showed the participants’ brain waves synchronizing with their eyelids blinking and beating. They suggested that this auditory-motor synchronization occurs unconsciously when we hear music with a constant tempo (so don’t expect to blink to the beat of free jazz, for example). The researchers were able to disrupt this eye-brain synchronization by giving participants a simple, unrelated task to complete while they listened to music. The distraction of a red dot appearing on a screen was enough to end the locked blink.

Eye blinking now joins the ranks of finger tapping and head nodding as a motor behavior that naturally keeps the rhythm going, except we’re not as aware of our blinking. Researchers hypothesize that this is an involuntary response that may stem from a primitive rhythm-processing instinct rooted in our evolution. “As someone who studies rhythm and prediction, I was struck by the fact that the eyes follow the rhythm of the ears: it is an elegant, everyday signature of the brain’s synchronization mechanisms,” Du added.

Life can change in the blink of an eye, or those blinks can simply follow the rhythms of life.

Enjoy Nautilus? Subscribe for free to our newsletter.

Main image: Yuxi Gao

• Devin Reese

  Published on November 19, 2025

  Devin Reese is the editor-in-chief of Natural history and a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.