THEORY II
The oft quoted, oft mis-quoted, oft referenced, cross-referenced, and wholy infamous yawning theory.
Ever notice how when you yawn, the person next to you yawns soon after? (see C& H "one of us should have left the room" for further reading) It isn't just you, this phenomenon has been well-documented and researched over the years that Eric and I have been around. At this point that is almost fifty years of combined human years we're talking about, so no laughing matter here.
Well now that you're most likely wondering what the hell the point is, I'd better get on with it. You know how when you're in an airplane and the pressure changes as the plane ascends or descends... well, how do you counteract this change? You pop your ears by yawning or flexing those jaw/cheek/ear/whatever muscles to simulate a yawn. They pop, you're happy and you can go on and enjoy the lack of legroom and processed air and stale food as you fly to your lovely destination of choice. Anyway, the point is that the yawning changes the pressure.
SO what happens when you're sitting around a room where sudden changes in pressure are few and far between, and someone yawns and you feel compelled to join in? Well see, they've just changed the pressure in the air directly surrounding them and you have to compensate for the difference by adding in your own yawn so you can adjust and reach that same pressure equilibrium that you were so clearly content with before the other person yawned.
Think about it.
posted by Eric @ 3:37 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Just reading this made me yawn. What does that prove?
OK yaniv told me weeks ago to post a comment on this and finally i am, because i have some gels running (yawn). from reading the abstract of eric's first reference and from the discussions i've had on the topic, i offer the following:
1- The authors in that reference say that contagious yawns can be triggered by "seeing, hearing, reading, or thinking about another person yawn." As it seems this is well-documented, this eliminates the proposed idea of a "pressure wave," as that can't happen if you just see someone yawn on tv or read about someone yawning.
2- They argue that contagious yawning activates "self-referential" parts of the brain (someone put a bunch of people in a scanner and played a tape of someone yawning and measured the brain activity of the subjects who "caught" the yawn??), and that people with disorders in "self-reference" don't catch yawns. Interesting, though the concept is a little vague. They offer "empathy" as an example of an emotion that relies on self-reference.
3 - A colleague once told me that yawning is an evolutionary remnant of an animal baring its teeth when it feels threatened, as a counter-threat i suppose. So if one animal threatens a second one by baring its teeth, the second one makes a counter-threat, and contagious yawning is a vestige of this behavior. I guess since there is no evolutionary pressure to lose the behavior (we're not put at a disadvantage by catching yawns), it remains.
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