Parts of the brain are temporarily "switched off" when we blink, scientists have found. According to BBC news website, the team from University College London found the brain shut down parts of the visual system for each blink.
Writing in Current Biology, they said this was the case even if light was still entering the eyes.
The researchers said this could explain why people do not notice their own blinking, as it gave us an "uninterrupted view of the world".
A blink lasts for between 100 and 150 milliseconds. We automatically blink 10 to 15 times a minute to moisten and oxygenate the cornea.
During a blink, there is no visual input and no light, but we do not consciously recognize everything has momentarily gone dark.
The study used a specially-designed device to assess the effects of blinking on the brain.
The device, made with fiber optic cable, was placed in the mouths of volunteers who were wearing light proof goggles and lying in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner.
The optical fiber lit up the eyeballs through the roof of the mouth using a strong light - making the head glow red.
This meant that the light falling on the retina in the eye remained constant even when the participants blinked.
The scientists were then able to measure the effects of blinking on brain activity independently of the effect of eyelid closure on light entering the eye.
They found that blinking suppressed brain activity in the visual cortex and other areas of the brain--known as parietal and prefrontal--which are usually activated when people become conscious of visual events or objects in the outside world.

Tests are underway to see if heart attack victims could have injured muscles repaired using stem cell injections, ananova.com said.
The treatment in Baltimore, Maryland restored the function of pigs' damaged hearts by between 50 and 75 per cent within two months.
48 heart attack patients have agreed to take part in the first human study, and will have the adult stem cells injected into their hearts reports The Sun.
Prof Joshua Hare, who led the study said: "There is reason for optimism about these findings. The goal is to develop a treatment to repair and reverse damage done to the heart by an attack."

Researchers say they have discovered a protein that could be injected to repair damaged nerves and brain cells, PsychPort.com said.
The protein, KDI tripeptide, works by blocking the harmful effects of a substance present in degenerative brain diseases and spinal cord injuries.
By blocking this substance, called glutamate, KDI prevents permanent cell death and helps the body heal itself.
The Finnish work from the University of Helsinki will be published online by the Journal of Neuroscience Research. So far the researchers have tested KDI in the lab on animals and nerve cells from humans.
The findings have been promising and they hope to be able to begin treating people with nerve and degenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, using KDI injections within a year.
Since KDI occurs naturally in some form in the body, researchers do not believe it will have major toxic side effects. None have been noted during their work to date.
Currently, KDI has to be injected as a solution directly to the damaged area.
However, in the future it might be possible to make the treatment as an oral drug or an intravenous injection, said Liesi.

Strains of the influenza virus are constantly swapping genes among themselves and giving rise to new, dangerous strains at a rate faster than previously believed, US researchers reported.
According to ABC news website, they found that slightly mutated influenza A strains in New York that circulated between 1999 and 2004 gave rise to the so-called Fujian strain that caused a troublesome outbreak in the 2003-2004 flu season.
Such events probably are what lead to the occasional pandemics of flu that can kill millions of people, David Lipman and colleagues at the National Institutes of Health found.
They hope their findings will help scientists better predict which viral strains will attack during upcoming flu seasons and design better vaccines.
Influenza viruses are notorious for trading genes back and forth and mutating. Lipman and colleagues sequenced the genomes of 156 influenza A viruses, named H3N2, that were collected by New York State public health officials between 1999 and 2004.
They found "at least four reassortment events occurred among human viruses during the period 1999-2004"--meaning there was an exchange of genes four different times.