Blinking Outside The Box

Hey there! Thanks for checking out my blog.

I'm Emily, and I'm a senior in high school at BASIS Scottsdale. For my AP Research project, I'm studying how spontaneous blink rate, the rate at which one blinks during a given time frame, impacts how people make decisions. 

I’ve been so fortunate to work with Dr. Bob Wilson at the University of Arizona. Over the summer, we were researching if soccer coaches in the English Premier League had a higher blink rate when their teams won a match. We hypothesized that dopamine activity would be higher if they won since dopamine is a neurotransmitter which helps to control the brain's reward and pleasure centers. 

Through plotting the differences in blink rate between winning and losing coaches as a function of the probability of any result, we found a highly significant correlation between the variables with p = 0.0001. There was a big positive prediction error for the winner and a big negative prediction from the loser, and when those two are subtracted, the number is positive. This was what we predicted, and validates our hypothesis that more dopamine means a higher blink rate! 

My research revolves around dopamine, the neurotransmitter mentioned above. There's a known correlate between dopamine and making "risky" decisions, which are decisions that have an uncertain outcome. There's also a correlation between dopamine and blink rate, and it is thought that the more dopamine one has, the more one blinks. My hypothesis is that the riskier decisions people take, the higher their blink rate will be.  

In order to test this, I met with 50 people and filmed them for two minutes before giving them a survey with nine questions which presented one definite outcome and one risky outcome. While they were filling out the surveys, I watched the videos and counted the number of times they blinked. I then counted the number of times they chose a risky outcome, and will correlate that with the number of times they blinked.

Counting blink rate is a non-invasive and inexpensive way to measure dopamine levels in someone's brain. This could be useful when examining people who have trouble with addiction, because if a physician can tell if someone is more impulsive, certain treatments would work better. On a larger scale, researching how dopamine influences how we make decisions is important because if scientists are able to understand this, it can help overcome ADHD, depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. 

There’s also a lot of fun stuff in the media surrounding blink rate. In the film Silence of the Lambs, the psychopathic cannibal Hannibal Lecter doesn’t blink. Some say that sociopaths and psychopaths don’t blink due to low brain activity. Who knows...follow my blog and maybe you can discover someone you know is a sociopath! (I’m kidding, really.)

Disclaimer: This blog will feature a lot of puns related to blinking. Thank you for your interest and I hope you follow my entries.

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