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You’ve heard of synchronized¹ swimming. But what about synchronized blinking³? No, it’s not a new Olympic sport for slackers. It’s something that seems to happen when we watch a video. Because none of us want to miss the good parts.

If you stop to add it up, humans spend a lot of time not looking. We blink² every couple seconds, which means we lose about six seconds out of every minute of viewing time. So 10 percent of the time we have no visual information coming in. Yet we rarely notice this interruption of service.

That’s because we tend to time our blinks⁴ so that we don’t get left in the dark. Or so says a report in the Royal Society journal Biological Sciences. Fourteen people watched a couple episodes⁵ of Mr. Bean. And it turns out they all tended to blink at the same moments: just after Bean finished doing something stupid or when the camera showed a long shot with nothing much going on. Such synchronized eye-shutting did not happen when the subjects watched a video of fish swimming around a tank.

So when we need to pay attention, we keep our eyes open. Until we see whether Mr. Bean gets through his holiday in one piece.

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1 synchronized
同步的
参考例句：
Do not use the synchronized keyword in Managed Objects. 不要在管理对象上使用synchronized关键字。来自互联网 The timing of the gun was precisely synchronized with the turning of the plane's propeller. 风门的调速与飞机螺旋桨的转动精确同步。来自辞典例句

2 blink
vi.眨眼睛，闪烁；vt.眨（眼睛），使闪烁
参考例句：
In a blink of an eye he had disappeared.一眨眼的工夫他就没影了。 The boy disappeared around the corner in a blink of an eye.一眨眼，这男孩就在拐角处不见了。

3 blinking
a.(英俚)该死的，讨厌的；十足的
参考例句：
Shut the blinking door! 关上那扇该死的门！ Her ring is an odd little concern fitted with blinking diamonds. 她的戒指是装有许多闪光钻石的小玩意儿。

4 blinks
闪光小鸡草；水生小鸡草；闪光繁缕；小繁缕
参考例句：
He is a person who blinks responsibility. 他是一个漠视责任的人。 I get time off when Joe blinks. 乔眨眼时我就能休息片刻。

5 episodes
插曲，片断( episode的名词复数 )；一集
参考例句：
The novel deals with the romantic episodes of her early life. 小说叙述了她早期生活的浪漫插曲。 Three episodes have been telescoped into a single programme. 把叁集的内容压缩成了一个节目。