The UK’s Press Association (2/13) reports that, according to a study published in the journal Science, “unconscious flickering eye movements,” known as microsaccades, “once thought to be random ‘motor noise’ may in fact be necessary to stop us going blind.” For the study, researchers from the Salk Institute in California “focused on the superior colliculus, the ‘command center’ in the brain responsible for eye-tracking,” and found that “the brain region played an integral part in the neural mechanism that controlled microsaccades.” The team now believes that “microsaccades provide a vital function by ‘refreshing’ images on the retina which would otherwise fade away,” a function that is “necessary for normal vision.”