I’m always tired so I constantly yawn and I have always wondered why. I’ve also noticed that other people yawn when I yawn and I am curious as to why this happens.
You may think that you yawn because you are just tired, but that may not fully be the case. Believe it or not, the movement of yawning could come from the brain. When you are tired, bored, or stressed, your temperature in the brain changes and this is actually what leads to yawning. “Yawning- a stretching of the jaw, gaping of the mouth and long deep inhalation, followed by a shallow exhalation—may serve as a thermoregulatory mechanism,” says Andrew Gallup who is a psychology professor at SUNY College.
Why is yawning contagious?
Mimicry is probably the main reason of why yawning happens to be contagious. As people, we like to understand and feel other people’s feelings through empathy (Matthew Cambell). Matthew Campbell is a researcher at Emory University. For example, when you see someone smile, you usually smile as well just because they are smiling. “We catch yawns for the same reasons. It isn’t a deliberate attempt to empathize with you. It’s just a byproduct of how our bodies and brains work.” Matthew Campbell says.
Platek states that yawning is contagious for about 65% of people. Using an MRI, Platek found that the areas of the brain that are activated during contagious yawning, the posterior cingulate and precuneus, are used while handling our emotions and others.
Studies:
In a 2007 study, Andrew Gallup discovered that holding warm or ice packs to one’s forehead affected how often people yawn when they witnessed someone else yawning. When the participants had a warm pack held to their forehead, they all yawned 41% out of the times they saw it. When someone was holding a cold pack, they only yawned 9% of the time. Everyone’s brain contains 40% of his or her body’s energy. This means the brain heats up more than other systems in the body. As a person stretches their jaw, they make the rate of their blood flow to their brain rise, Gallup says. Also as a person inhales, the air changes the temperature of their blood flow, which brings colder blood to their brain.
A thermoregulatory system mechanism can clarify why people seem to yawn most either in the morning or at night. “Before we fall asleep, our brain and body temperatures are at their highest point during the course of our circadian rhythm,” Gallup says. When we go to bed, our temperature goes down. Also when we wake up, our temperatures rise again.
There was a study done with mice studies of mice, It showed a rise in brain temperature after yawning. As soon as the mice began to inhale at the bginning of the yawn, the temperature went down. “That’s pretty much the nail in the coffin as far as the function of yawning being a brain cooling mechanism, as opposed to a mechanism for increasing oxygen in the blood,” says Platek.
However, different researchers at The Duke Center for Human Genome Variation discovered that contagious yawning might go down as people get older and may have nothing to do with empathy at all. “The lack of association in our study between contagious yawning and empathy suggests that contagious yawning is not simply a product of one’s capacity for empathy,” said Elizabeth Cirulli, the author of the study. They stressed that a better understanding of contagious yawning could potentially lead to such as schizophrenia and autism. It may seem weird but people with autism or schizophrenia didn’t yawn as much when other people yawned. More in depth research on this could maybe help us understand these two diseases more.
http://academicminute.org/2014/10/andrew-gallup-suny-oneonta-yawns-are-cool/
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2012.00188/abstract
You did a great job on this blog! You found great information to support your hypothesis and explained it in great detail. I enjoyed this blog because I have always wondered the same thing. Whenever I see people yawning, I yawn too. I never knew why. It would just happen. But, now I know why. You talked about the experiment with the hot and cold ice packs and that more people yawned when they had the warm one on their head. But, why exactly does this happen? What causes the brain to react that way to the warmth and not the cold? Also, does closeness to the other person yawning play a role in it?
I liked this article! I played trumpet in high school, and after a long series of songs we would begin to yawn. Our band director told us it was because we weren’t breathing correctly, and our brain needed more oxygen. Little did I know that what he was telling us was only half the battle. I would also believe that maybe our brains actually needed cooled off. I also know that the morning after a night out I find myself yawning very frequently, and It’s really a nice feeling. (also I’ve yawned 3 times while writing this response so talk about contagious)