Try this experiment when you’re in a comatose-inducing meeting or class: Take a hearty yawn (please cover your mouth out of courtesy) and see how many classmates or colleagues yawn. There’s a pretty good chance that your yawning will cause a chain reaction of yawns.
And it’s likely you’ll yawn at least once after reading this article. Oh, don’t misunderstand, this article doesn’t intend to bore you. It’s just that reading about yawning or hearing or seeing someone else yawn makes us yawn.
What is yawning?
Yawning is widely seen as a signal of boredom, tiredness, lack of sleep, or even rudeness. Basically, it’s an involuntary action causing humans and some animals to open their mouths wide and breathe in deeply. We yawn even before we’re born. In fact research has shown that fetuses as young as 11 weeks yawn.
Many parts of your body are also in action when you yawn. First, your mouth opens wide and your jaw drops. This allows you to take in as much air as possible. The air you breath in then fills your lungs when you inhale. This is followed by the flexing of your abdominal muscles, pushing your diaphragm down. The air you take in then expands your lungs to capacity. Finally, some of the air you breath in is blown back out.
Yawning theories
One of the prevailing theories of yawning is the physiological theory, which holds that the human body induces yawning to draw in more oxygen and remove carbon dioxide build-up. Proponents of the evolution theory of yawning, suggest that yawning was used by the earliest people to intimidate others. Lastly, the boredom theory asserts that people yawn when they are, well, bored. But it fails to explain why some singers yawn in the middle of a competition. It’s doubtful their audience bore them.
Contagious yawning
Researchers assert that the phenomenon of yawning is contagious. You don’t need to see a yawning person to involuntarily yawn yourself. The sound of someone else’s yawn and even reading articles about yawning can induce the same reaction. However, infectious yawning goes beyond this mere suggestibility.
Recent research shows that yawning is also linked with human’s predisposition toward empathy, or the ability to connect with and understand others’ emotional states. It may sound strange, but whether you’re susceptible to infectious yawning may actually be connected to the empathy you feel for other people.
Some interesting facts about yawning
Yawning commonly lasts for about six seconds. Fifty-five percent of people will yawn within five minutes after seeing other people yawn. Blind people tend to yawn more when they hear an audio tape of people yawning. When you yawn, your heart rate can rise up to 30%. Many Olympic athletes yawn before competition.
