Why Mine Joe Rogan Videos for Blink Signals?

On the show, Lex Fridman downloaded every Joe Rogan podcast as video from before Joe Rogan went with Spotify and kept the files as a private collection. Processing extracted all of the faces, then ran blink tracking, pupil tracking, and blink detection.

Computer vision studies the eye by non-contact sensing of humans, including behavior in places such as semi-autonomous vehicles. Lex Fridman says there seemed to be a lot of signal from blinking that is not fully understood yet. In the lab, dilation of the pupil has been used quite a bit to infer workload and cognitive load, but the picture is murky. In the wild, how much signal comes from the eye and the human face is not completely well understood. The careful pass starts around episode 900, when the videos switched to 1080p. Earlier video was much worse. Marijuana consumption and drinking came up as relevant to the people in the data. Only long sequences where the eyes detect exceptionally well were kept.