h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Alright, linguistic pedantry, it isn't, it's not vrial or anything. But you know what I mean, someone yawns, and everyone else yawns until someone says 'stop it- you're making me yawn'. Any ideas why this is?

psychological response

i started yawning when i read the post

subject 1 yawns. closing eyes

other subjects assume it is safe to close eyes as well so yawn, getting an extra bit of needed oxygen into the system

is that:
a)received wisdom
b) and intelligent guess
c) stuff you just made up

'In humans, yawning has an infectious quality (i.e., seeing a person yawning, talking to someone on the phone who is yawning, or just thinking of yawning can trigger yawning) which is a typical example of positive feedback. Infectious yawning has also been noted in chimpanzees and dogs.'

From a Wiki article - sorry, but no h2g2 article showed up on the first page of google results.

Using the h2g2 search function however results in this: A54557607

Too bad it didn't show up on google though...

""is that:
a)received wisdom
b) and intelligent guess
c) stuff you just made up""


yes!

I was always led to beleive that it was to do with oxygen levels - We yawn not because we are tired particularly, but because the tiredness causes us to breathe more shallowly (is that a word?) and so a yawn is triggered to get more oxygen into our systems. The 'catching' part of it comes in in case the atmospheric oxygen levels are low, so if you see someone yawn, your brain goes 'ooh, there might not be much oxygen about, I'd better get a deep breath in just in case' and so you yawn too.

The last I heard about yawning was that nobody really knows what function it performs... the oxygen levels thing being the best hypothesis.

University at Albany researchers Andrew C. Gallup and Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. conducted a study outlined in the May 2007 issue in Evolutionary Psychology (Volume 5.1., 2007). The researchers concluded that "people do not yawn because they need oxygen, since experiments show that raising or lowering oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood fails to produce the reaction. Rather, yawning acts as a brain-cooling mechanism. The brain burns up to a third of the calories we consume, and as a consequence generates heat."

Here is a link to an article:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070621161826.htm

Interesting stuff, HN, that's certainly a plausible sounding explanation. Thanks

I don't entirely buy the oxygen idea. When I yawn I don't necessarily inhale any differently, it's a stretching of the facial muscles as much as anything else.

I like the motor neurone theory. We apes ape each other. Brain scans show that if we see someone extend his hand say, the motor part of our brain associated with that motion lights up. It also works by suggestion. If the experimenter asks the subject to thinks about moving his hand but not actually move it, the motor part of his brain still shows activity.

If we see or hear someone yawning, we just physically empathize. A wordless suggestion elicits a wordless response.