Winking looks simple, but it demands considerably more brain power than closing both eyes at once. Brain imaging studies show that winking activates several regions of the oculomotor cortex that ordinary blinking does not, including the posterior parietal cortex, which helps coordinate spatial attention and fine motor control. That neural complexity explains why not everyone can do it equally well, why children take years to learn it, and why certain neurological conditions can produce involuntary winking that patients cannot suppress.
Why Winking Is So Much Harder Than Blinking
A normal blink is one of the most automatic movements your body makes. Both eyelids close together, driven by a well-rehearsed circuit that barely registers in the brain. Winking, by contrast, requires your brain to send a “close” command to one eyelid while simultaneously sending a “stay open” command to the other. Functional MRI studies confirm that this split instruction recruits brain areas that blinking leaves quiet. In one imaging study, both left and right winking activated the frontal eye fields, the supplementary eye field, and the posterior parietal cortex, whereas blinking activated only the first two of those regions. Both the frontal eye fields and the posterior parietal cortex showed significantly more activity during winking than during blinking, providing evidence that the frontal eye fields play a critical role in voluntary unilateral eye closure.1PubMed Central. Neural control of voluntary eye closure: a case study and an fMRI investigation of blinking and winking
A separate brain-imaging experiment explored how the brain’s response to winking changes before and after practice. The researchers found that voluntary blinking lit up small areas in both frontal lobes, slightly more on the left side. Left winking activated mainly the left frontal lobe, while right winking activated both frontal lobes with a rightward emphasis.2PubMed Central. Cerebral control of winking before and after learning: An event‐related fMRI study In practical terms, your brain treats a wink as a genuinely different movement from a blink, not just a half-blink. It has to inhibit one side of a normally bilateral reflex, and that inhibition takes effort.
Why Some People Can Only Wink One Eye
Ask a room full of people to wink and you will notice something odd: a surprising number can wink with one eye but not the other. Some scrunch up the whole opposite side of their face trying. The intuitive assumption is that this has something to do with which eye is dominant, the way handedness relates to hand skill. The research, however, says otherwise.
A study looking at eyelid asymmetry during blinking found that eye dominance, measured by which eye a person uses for sighting tasks, did not predict which eyelid moved more during blinks. More directly relevant, the ability to wink only one eyelid also failed to correlate with eyelid asymmetry. Among subjects who could wink only one eye, blinks were actually larger in the opposite eyelid in roughly a third of them.3Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science. Asymmetry of Blinking An older study of students from grades four through twelve who could wink only one eye found that the non-winking eye tended to be the dominant one used for sighting.4PubMed Central. Inability to wink an eye and eye dominance That finding is intriguing but narrow, and broader evidence suggests the relationship between dominance and winking ability is weak and inconsistent.
The more likely explanation is that the motor neuron pools controlling each eyelid simply differ in excitability from person to person, possibly from birth. Just as some people can raise one eyebrow and not the other, the neural wiring governing independent eyelid control varies. This is not a deficiency. If you have always struggled to wink your left eye, it probably means the motor circuits on that side are slightly harder for your brain to isolate from the bilateral blink reflex. With practice, many people can improve, though some never develop a clean wink on their weaker side.
When Children Learn to Wink
Parents sometimes try to teach toddlers to wink and discover it is like teaching a cat to fetch: the equipment is there, but the coordination is not. Winking requires a level of motor control and cognitive maturity that comes only with age. Research on how children learn to close one eye, particularly when dealing with bright light or tasks that demand monocular vision, found that some children with normal binocular vision can voluntarily shut one eye by about four years of age.5Vision Research. Learning to Look With One Eye: The Use of Head Turn by Normals and Strabismics That finding was earlier than what previous reports had suggested, which pegged the ability at around six to eight years old.
The wide range tells you something about how individually variable this milestone is. Some four-year-olds wink effortlessly. Others are still struggling at seven. Children who have strabismus, where the eyes do not align properly, often learn to close one eye earlier out of necessity, because suppressing double vision provides strong motivation to figure out independent eyelid control. For children with typical vision, the motivation is usually social: they see adults winking and want to imitate it. The fact that some children need years of casual practice before getting it right underscores just how demanding that neural inhibition task really is.
Winking as a Social Signal
Humans use winking to convey shared secrets, flirtation, humor, reassurance, and sarcasm. It is one of the few facial gestures that carries meaning precisely because it takes effort and therefore cannot happen accidentally. A blink means nothing socially; a wink means everything. But are humans the only primates who use eye movements this way?
A study of eye-blink behavior across 71 primate species found evidence that spontaneous blinking has taken on a role in social communication during primate evolution, functioning somewhat like grooming as a tool for navigating complex social living.6PubMed Central. Eye-blink behaviors in 71 species of primates Blink rate in primates correlates with group size, suggesting that as social groups get bigger and relationships get more complicated, eye behavior becomes more communicatively loaded. Whether any non-human primate deliberately winks in a human-like, one-eyed social gesture is debatable. Great apes in captivity have been observed closing one eye in ways that look intentional, but controlled evidence is thin. What seems clear is that the eyes evolved as a communication channel long before humans started using the deliberate unilateral version.
Culturally, the meaning of a wink varies enormously. In much of the English-speaking world, winking suggests playfulness, complicity, or mild flirtation. In parts of West Africa and South Asia, winking at someone can be considered rude or overly familiar. In some East Asian cultures, exaggerated winking is more associated with comedy than with subtlety. The gesture’s power lies in its ambiguity: because it is quick, discreet, and deniable, it can carry meanings that more explicit signals cannot. That ambiguity also makes it easy to misread, which is why a wink from a stranger can land as charming or creepy depending on context.
When Winking Happens Involuntarily
Not all winking is deliberate. Several neurological conditions produce involuntary wink-like movements, and understanding the difference between a purposeful wink and a medical one matters for both patients and the people around them.
Marcus Gunn Jaw-Winking Syndrome
One of the more striking examples is Marcus Gunn jaw-winking syndrome, a congenital condition where the eyelid on one side lifts involuntarily during jaw movements like chewing, sucking, or smiling. The underlying cause is an abnormal connection between the nerve that controls jaw muscles and the nerve that controls the eyelid elevator. A baby with this condition might appear to wink every time they breastfeed. In the differential diagnosis of patients with ptosis, or a drooping eyelid, Marcus Gunn syndrome should be considered, especially if the drooping improves during feeding or mouth movement.7PubMed Central. Marcus Gunn Jaw-Winking Syndrome: a Case Report
Management depends on severity. Mild cases, where the eyelid drooping is barely noticeable and the jaw-winking is subtle, are often left alone. In more severe cases, surgical options range from tightening the levator muscle that lifts the eyelid to disconnecting it entirely and rerouting the eyelid’s suspension to the forehead muscle. A case series found that ptosis was adequately corrected in all patients who underwent levator excision combined with frontalis suspension, and the jaw-winking resolved in all of those patients, although it recurred in a few at a later stage.8PubMed. Marcus-Gunn jaw winking syndrome: case series study and management algorithm The surgery essentially trades one muscle’s control for another’s, eliminating the jaw-eyelid crosstalk.
Facial Synkinesis After Nerve Damage
People who recover from Bell’s palsy or other forms of facial nerve damage sometimes develop synkinesis, where movements meant for one part of the face trigger involuntary movements elsewhere. Someone might blink or wink involuntarily every time they smile, or their eye might squeeze shut when they try to purse their lips. The most widely accepted explanation is that when the damaged facial nerve regrows, some fibers take wrong turns and connect to muscles they were not originally wired to.9PubMed Central. Pathogenesis, diagnosis and therapy of facial synkinesis: A systematic review and clinical practice recommendations by the international head and neck scientific group The result is a face that has regained movement but lost some of its precision. Treatment typically involves targeted physical therapy, sometimes combined with botulinum toxin injections to calm overactive muscles, though complete resolution is not always achievable.
Tics Involving Winking and Blinking
Repetitive, involuntary winking or blinking is one of the most common motor tics, particularly in children. In a study of patients with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, roughly 95 percent reported eye tics at some point in their lives, and about 92 percent specifically reported eyelid and eyebrow movement tics including blinking and winking.10PubMed. Prevalence and phenomenology of eye tics in Gilles de la Tourette syndrome Eye tics are often the very first tic a child develops, which can alarm parents who mistake them for a vision problem or a neurological emergency.
The good news is that isolated eye tics in children frequently resolve on their own. A review of pediatric patients diagnosed with ocular tics, with a mean age of about eight years at diagnosis, found that these tics tend to follow a waxing-and-waning pattern and often fade with time.11PubMed. The long-term outcomes of ocular tics in a pediatric neuro-ophthalmology practice The distinction between a tic and a deliberate wink is usually obvious to a trained observer: tics tend to be rapid, repetitive, and often preceded by an uncomfortable urge, while deliberate winks are controlled, singular, and context-appropriate. If a child’s “winking” is frequent, appears involuntary, and persists for more than a few weeks, a visit to a pediatrician is reasonable, though a tic diagnosis is rarely cause for major concern on its own.
Winking and Eye Comfort
One underappreciated consequence of winking or incomplete blinking involves the tear film that protects the surface of the eye. Your tears are not just a layer of water; they form a thin, structured film that lubricates and shields the cornea. Every full blink redistributes that film evenly across the eye’s surface. Incomplete blinks, where the upper lid does not travel all the way down, leave the lower part of the cornea exposed to air for longer than normal. Research on tear instability found that incomplete blinks roughly double the duration of evaporative exposure for the lower corneal surface, and that tear instability was detected most commonly on the inferior cornea in about 46 percent of normal subjects, compared with only 5 percent on the superior cornea.12Journal of Optometry. Tear instability importance, mechanisms, validity and reliability of assessment
Winking is not the same as an incomplete blink, but the mechanics overlap. When you wink, the closing eye gets a full sweep of tear redistribution, while the open eye goes without. If you are someone who winks frequently, say as a habitual social gesture, your open eye is intermittently missing its scheduled tear refresh. For most people this is trivial. But for anyone already dealing with dry-eye symptoms, heavy screen use, or contact lenses, habitual winking could contribute to asymmetric dryness. The practical takeaway is not to stop winking but to be aware that your eyes are not getting equal treatment during the gesture.
Can You Train Yourself to Wink Better
If you have always struggled to wink, you are not stuck. Because winking relies on voluntary motor control rather than a fixed reflex, it responds to practice. The same brain-imaging research that mapped winking’s neural footprint also looked at what happens after training, and the broad finding is that the brain becomes more efficient at the task with repetition. The frontal regions involved in inhibiting the opposite eyelid do not have to work as hard once the movement becomes familiar.
A practical approach is straightforward: start by manually holding the difficult eye open with a finger while closing the other, then gradually reduce the finger’s help over days or weeks. Many people find that the struggle is not in closing the winking eye but in keeping the other eye from closing sympathetically. Practicing in front of a mirror helps because you get instant visual feedback on whether the non-winking eye is staying fully open. Children learning to wink often go through a stage where they compensate with exaggerated facial scrunching, pulling up a cheek or wrinkling the nose to force the eyelid shut. Adults trying to learn or relearn the same skill often do the same thing, and the goal of practice is to isolate the eyelid movement from all that extra facial recruitment.
People who have lost the ability to wink due to facial nerve damage face a harder road. The nerve regrowth process described in the synkinesis section can restore some eyelid function, but the fine-grained independent control needed for a clean wink may not return completely. Physical therapists who specialize in facial rehabilitation use targeted exercises, mirror biofeedback, and sometimes electrical stimulation to help patients regain selective movement. The outcomes vary widely depending on the extent of the nerve injury and how much aberrant rewiring occurred during recovery.
Why Some Winks Look Fake
There is a social dimension to winking skill that goes beyond whether you can physically close one eye. A “good” wink, the kind that reads as natural, confident, and intentionally communicative, is quick, uses minimal extra facial movement, and involves the eye that feels most natural for the winker. A “bad” wink involves visible effort: the face contorts, the mouth pulls sideways, or both eyes half-close. The reason some people’s winks always look forced is the same reason some people’s smiles look forced: the brain is recruiting muscles beyond the minimum needed, and the observer reads that extra effort as awkwardness.
Interestingly, the social reading of a wink depends heavily on the surrounding facial expression. A wink paired with a slight smile reads as friendly. A wink with a neutral or serious face can read as conspiratorial, aggressive, or simply odd. The same physical gesture carries entirely different emotional weight depending on what the mouth and eyebrows are doing at the same time. This is part of why winking translates poorly to text-based communication: an emoji wink strips away all the contextual facial information that gives a real wink its specific meaning, leaving only a generic “I’m being playful” signal.
The quick, almost subliminal quality of a real wink also distinguishes it from the exaggerated stage wink used in theater and comedy. A stage wink is held longer, uses the whole side of the face, and is designed to be visible from a distance. An actual conversational wink lasts a fraction of a second and is often noticed only by its intended recipient. That brevity is part of its social function: it creates a tiny private moment between two people in a public setting, something that a slower or more obvious gesture cannot achieve.