What kind of eye shaker are you?
First of all, Hi! I came across the AskReddit post that spawned this sub and was so happy to find other eye shakers that I had to make an account! It's so crazy to find out there are other people out there who share my weird alien ability.
I've been compulsively reading about voluntary nystagmus on the internet now and it seems like it's not very well understood by science. I found this fascinating paper (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC493105/pdf/jnnpsyc00145-0037.pdf) that suggests that there might be different kinds of eye shakers out there:
- Some people's eyes shake with more amplitude (meaning farther side-to-side) or more frequency (meaning more shakes per second) when they go more crosseyed.
- Some people can shake their eyes continuously, other people shake them in short repeated bursts with rests in between.
- The average amount of time the people in the study could shake their eyes for was 25 seconds, one person could shake them for up to 90 seconds.
- One of the people in the study could control how fast their eyes shake!
I just checked and I can only shake my eyes for about 30 seconds before they get tired, but I've been doing it a bunch today after reading about it so maybe I'm just fatigued! I haven't managed to control the frequency, but I can control the amplitude if I focus, and my eyes seem to vibrate continuously instead of in short bursts.
I think it would be really cool if we could get the members of this sub to put up videos shaking their eyes, to compare the differences between how we all do it. I'll upload one later when I have time to take a quick video. Maybe it could even be a useful collection for scientists studying our talented tribe!
So, what kind of eye shaker are you?
(edited for formatting)
Posted Apr 15, 2016, 2:12 AM UTC · edited