Son : Amma, why are you yawning so much?
Me : I'm soo so tired baby.
Son : so, after yawning do u feel better?
Me : no, I'm still tired.
Son : Then why did you yawn?
Me : ( a little puzzled ) I'm feeling very sleepy. So, am yawning. Will feel better after I get some sleep.
Son : hmmm... I also feel like yawning. Am I also tired now ?
Me : yes baby
Son : ma, you yawned first. Which means, you were tired first. Then I yawned. Which means I got tired too. So whenever you are tired, I also get tired. Why? Is it because...... I like you very much?
Me : ( delighted at the way the conversation was going, rushed to say .. ) yes yes baby. You like me very much
( Hugging and kissing followed )
Little did I know back then, that contagious yawning had really something to do with empathy. And to prove that point, did you know psychopaths and autistic children who cannot emote with other people are immune to contagious yawning? Ok, before we go deeper into this, let's first understand why yawns happen at all in the first place?
People, thinkers, psychologists, scientists, doctors, all have been wondering about why we yawn and what yawning does to the body for like 2500 years now!! Yeah, you read it right. 2500 it is. The famous greek guy Hippocrates, heard of him? Apparently, he had documented 2500 years ago, that yawn's purpose could be to let out bad or infected air out of our bodies especially during fevers. With that as a baseline, people back then started experimenting. Did we yawn only when we had fever? No...
Later , some people stated that yawning draws a huge supply of oxygen to the body. Maybe whenever the body needed oxygen, it triggered a yawn. They conducted whole lot of experiments around this theory. People were given different compositions of air to breathe in, and their need to yawn was documented and it turned out that yawning wasn't affected by the air composition.
Have you observed, sometimes we yawn when we are stressed out. Like, before an important presentation, maybe job interview. To explain that, another person, I hear he was french, suggested that yawning increased alertness, and it was the body's way of rebooting the brain. He said, yawning increases the cerebro spinal fluid activity around the brain thereby altering the neural activity. And he goes on to say that maybe contagious yawning was to make the whole group alert. That is, yawn spreading through the group could help everyone attain the same level of alertness. That sounded reasonable.
Now how did they verify this theory? Many experiments. They gave people who wanted to yawn a cold compress and asked them to put it on their forehead everytime they felt the need to yawn. This experiment gave favourable results. only 9% of the people who were given the cold compress yawned anyways. The others were able to suppress the yawn.
Maybe chilling increases alertness.. could be! Maybe the other theory about brain alertness is also right.
So far, the text might have compelled you to reasonably conclude that yawning is to chill the brain. And maybe chilling the brain increases alertness. And maybe contagious yawning was to synch the behaviour of the group for effective working of the group. But, did you know, foetus in the womb yawns too? Now why did they have to yawn? Are they practising for the life outside, or is there more to the yawn than just chilling our brains? Maybe yawning in the foetus is to guide the development of jaws. Maybe, maybe not.
Yawning still remains a little mystery to all of us. The temperature chilling effect it creates, we know about. But is that all yawning is? We've to wait for someone to unravel it. But, hey, I read this one tip. The next time you are mustering all your strength to suppress a yawn that might give away the fact that the lecture(or something else) is droning you to boredom, try drawing in a good big breath through your nose. Maybe it would help you suppress your yawn a little bit. Best of luck! Yaaawww ........ ( deep breath ) suppressed !
