Startling

Blinking may reveal more than you think

This might startle you, but you blink a lot more than you think you do. Every time some external stimulus enters your awareness-even if you're not fully aware of it-the muscles in your cheeks twitch, causing your eyes to blink for a twentieth of a second, give or take an infinitesimal fraction.

Terry Blumenthal

To scientists like Terry Blumenthal, this so-called startle reflex can be a dead giveaway for a range of maladies and emotional aberrations — from attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and schizophrenia, to racist and sociopathic attitudes. He believes its use as a diagnostic tool could reveal mental illness and nervous system irregularities sooner — as early as the fetal stage — and with better precision, facilitating more effective interventions.

Blumenthal, a professor of psychology who is in his twentieth year at Wake Forest, has gained an international reputation as one of the world's leading authorities on startle reflex. A frequent speaker, instructor, and symposium participant on the subject worldwide, he has collaborated on various startle research projects with scientists in far-flung locations-currently, California and Switzerland.

One of Blumenthal's areas of inquiry centers on attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Much in the news, and on the rise diagnostically, in recent years, ADD is a disability by which sufferers have difficulty focusing. It is associated most often with children and adolescents, who can be severely challenged socially and scholastically if they are afflicted with it.

"The human brain is being constantly bombarded by external stimuli," says Blumenthal, a rotund, gregarious fellow with a booming voice and a hearty laugh. "When we have to focus on something, we must ignore everything else — all the distractions, major and minor, that compete for our attention. We call this gating, or inhibiting.

"[ADD sufferers] lack this inhibiting ability," he continues. "It's not that they can't pay attention; it's that they cannot not pay attention. People with gating deficiencies typically have nervous systems that are different than ours, and in such cases, drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall are administered. They are stimulants, which might seem counterintuitive, but they work by activating the brain's inhibitory or filtering mechanisms. When these drugs kick in, it's like a miracle — like hitting the pause button on your remote control. All of a sudden, [the ADD sufferer] can think before he talks or acts."

The brain stem, the most basic and instinctual component of our neurological apparatus, is the point through which all external stimuli pass before entering the central nervous system. By the time a sound emerges from the brain stem and moves on to the brain proper, all its physical properties — origin, volume, duration, proximity, direction, etc. — have been identified. The eye blink is an unconscious, primordial defensive reaction transmitted through hard wiring from the brain stem. If an automobile backfires, you've already blinked before you're even aware that a sound occurred.

By measuring eye blinks and cheek muscle twitching, startle researchers like Blumenthal can tell how much is going on in the brain stem. The greater the blinking and twitching, the more external stimuli the subject is attending to, and therefore the less inhibiting that's going on. Blumenthal says application of startle research has shown promise in aiding the diagnosis and consequent treatment of a range of psychological and behavioral abnormalities, including schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, and Tourette's Syndrome and, at the other end of the spectrum, the various expressions of autism.

But Blumenthal isn't focused on abnormalities alone. He thinks unconscious emotions might be understood better with startle research. "We've noted that the blink tends to be larger when looking at an unpleasant picture than when looking at a pleasant picture," he says. "This might be applied, for example, to various scenarios in the workplace to uncover hidden attitudes or suppressed emotions." He plans to begin a study sometime during the coming year using startle to measure attitudes toward people of other races.

Blumenthal and collaborator Hartmut Schaechinger also will be participating in a Swiss project aimed at identifying precursors of mental illness in infants with startle measurement.

— David Fyten
Office of Creative Services

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