Blinkety Blink An average person spends 6 months a year blinking, a recent report from Hamburg has revealed. This is a 100% increase on just fifty years ago when the average time an adult spent blinking was just 3 months a year. Scientists attribute this increase to the conditions we are now subjecting our eyes to. Blinking is the body's version of the windscreen wiper, the way we clean our eyes and as the atmosphere gets more and more clogged up with smog and general dirt our eyes suffer. The eyelids then over compensate, rubbing the eyes not only twice as frequently but also with twice the force. This leads us to frightening conclusions. Professor Greg Dremms explains: "In the same way as windscreen wipers slowly wear down as they clean your windscreen our eyelids are doing the same and with this increase in pressure, friction, and frequency, the average human eyelid, just 3mm thick, will gradually wear away. "If we take a twenty year old living in central London, for instance, by the time he is just thirty-five his eyelids will be completely transparent and by his early forties there is a very real possibility his eyelids will have gone completely raising a need for some sort of prosthetic - otherwise the eyes will just fall out of their sockets and dangle on their optic nerves like two white conkers, with big thick white string."

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