Yawning

I have to admit, these writings have been pretty boring recently — I imagine they have produced a yawn or two. Well, that got me to thinking…. why do people yawn anyway? And did you ever notice that yawning seems to be contagious? I think  it even has an official term — “contagious yawning.”

You may think that people yawn because they’re tired or bored, but the traditional medical explanation is that oxygen levels in their lungs are low. However, some of my extensive research on the subject discovered that babies yawn before they’re even born. They pick up the habit as early as 11 weeks after conception. If I’m not mistaken, babies don’t take in oxygen through their lungs and I don’t see how they’d get tired — they pretty much sleep all day. I’m not sure if they get bored or not….

It appears that the bottom line is that scientists don’t really understand why we yawn. I did find an interesting “study” though — it found that 55 percent of people will yawn within five minutes of seeing someone else do it. Sometimes just hearing, thinking or reading about a yawn is enough to make people unconsciously yawn themselves. 

Even though scientists don’t know exactly why, they have come up with a few theories.
One theory is that contagious yawning is more common among those who demonstrate a greater ability to understand and share other people’s feelings. I suppose that makes some amount of sense.

Dr. Gordon Gallup and his team at the University of Albany say that contagious yawning evolved as a way to “maintain group vigilance.” Gallup thinks yawning keeps our brains working at cool, efficient, and alert levels. So in the days of early man, contagious yawning helped raise the attentiveness and danger-detecting abilities of the whole group. I’m not too sure about that one….

Humans aren’t the only ones that yawn — foxes, sea lions, hippos, dogs and cats are some of the animals that do it. There are some studies that demonstrate some animals, like dogs and chimpanzees, may also suffer from contagious yawning. 

But it looks like yawning is here to stay… when I see someone yawn I always think of an old joke — A wife was talking to her husband and after a few minutes she said, I was talking to you and I saw you yawn 5 times — was I boring you? And the husband said, I wasn’t yawning, those were unsuccessful attempts to speak.
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