Who takes the time to count how many times politicians blink their eyes? Eric Ostermeier does, and he says Rick Santorum was the most prolific blinker during the debates.

While watching the Republican primary debates, Ostermeier noticed then-candidate Rick Santorum blinking at a high rate. He found that Santorum blinked almost twice as much as other candidates.

He offers no explanation for why Rick Santorum may have blinked a lot but he says that Obama’s high blink rate, which is ostensibly lower than Santorum’s, indicates that he was “searching or uncomfortable as he was searching for answers.”

There are many reasons that people blink a lot. Blinking can be voluntary or involuntary, so there is no way to accurately assess why someone may blink a lot unless you look at other things about that person. One thing that may cause an increased blink rate is dry eyes. Higher dopamine levels can also cause an increased blink rate, and higher dopamine level can itself indicate multiple things. It’s best not to read too much into a blink rate, or even into a higher dopamine level, if that’s what is going on here.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter and its role in human behavior is still uncertain, but there are lots of studies on the topic. Richard Depue, a researcher at Cornell, links dopamine with the extrovert personality , short-term memory and responsiveness to incentives, which are all things that I very much associate with Rick Santorum’s personality.

From a series of experiments with humans and based on what was already known from animal studies, Depue has concluded that dopamine is strongly related to the trait some researchers call extraversion, but Depue and his colleagues prefer to refer to it as “positive emotionality.”

“This is the first time it has been shown in humans that a central nervous system neurotransmitter is associated strongly with an emotional trait in humans,” Depue said.

The higher the level of dopamine, or the more responsive the brain is to dopamine, the more likely a person is to be sensitive to incentives and rewards.

While I would always shy away from making an assessment about anyone’s character or intelligence based on how much or how little they blink, I can’t help but think there may be something to this. Maybe Barack Obama and Rick Santorum have something in common that we didn’t know about. I would argue that both have infectious charm. Both seem able to store a lot of information in their short-term memory. Both are driven by a sense of justice, though I would argue that Obama’s idea of justice is disordered — and this sense of “justice” may come from an inward sensitivity to incentives. Having said that, whether to tell the truth about something or not is a decision that can often be more of the heart than of the brain. If you love truth with a passion, as Rick Santorum does, and if you are not that concerned about truth, as I would argue about Barack Obama, then it changes everything about the comparison and turns it into a bold contrast.

Having said all that, maybe Rick’s eyes were just dry that day.