Yawning…

You may have noticed that I get a bit grumpy when you openly yawn at me in class. It has been happening a lot in the last few days and the yawning towards the end of the HM’s speech on Wednesday morning was of almost epidemic proportions. In part, I don’t like you yawning at me because it feeds my insecurity that I am deeply boring, but I also find it highly addictive. If I see you yawning then I feel a huge compulsion to yawn back at you. It is hard to disguise a yawn but I am always very grateful when any of you takes the time to suppress the more extravagant and obvious stretching and gaping involved.

A recent episode of The Skeptics’ Guide To The Universe (a podcast from the New England Skeptical Society) featured a “Fact or Fiction” section with three supposed scientific ideas about yawning. As always with this section of the program, one of the three supposed facts was an intentional falsehood.

The three statements this time were…

1. Contrary to popular belief, yawning has been shown to have an arousing, rather than sleep inducing, effect.
2. A large study of yawning finds that yawns are significantly more contagious from family members and friends than acquaintances or strangers.
3. Yawning has been observed in every class of vertebrate.

I think that I have said that yawning is a way to fill your lungs with extra oxygen, but this is almost certainly not the case. From a brief read of these, can you spot the one that is also false. I thought it was pretty obvious – so was suspicious that I had got it wrong! In fact I was right, the first statement is the false one. Some research done in 2010 reported that “yawning occurs during states of low vigilance; thus, substantiating the notion that it is provoked by sleepiness”; in other words yawning is associated with being tired and relaxed.  Both the Guardian and the Telegraph have carried articles suggesting that yawning can be a sign of arousal but this research would suggest that conclusion was false.

The second statement seems logical to me. The research paper for this study was published on the 7^th of December this year.  The abstract says, “The ability to share others’ emotions, or empathy, is crucial for complex social interactions.” The suggestion is that closely related subjects have more empathy for one another so are more likely to respond to a yawn with a yawn. The research showed that the more distantly related (e.g. family to friend to acquaintance to stranger) you are to the yawner the less likely you are to respond with a yawn of your own, or the longer it will take you to respond with a yawn.

Finally, I did wonder about the third one but ‘class’ is a very broad taxonomic group. As you know, there are five classes of vertebrates; Fish, Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds and Mammals. It only takes one observation of yawning in each class to render this statement true. I can’t really imagine a fish or a bird yawning but apparently they do. It seems that amphibians have only been seen yawning in their tadpole stage rather than as adults but fish yawn quite readily and it is thought that this has something to do with the buoyancy of their swim bladders.

Yawning, it seems, has been around for millions of years, so human yawning may have first evolved in our ancient fishy ancestors, millions of years ago. I suppose this should make me more sympathetic to you when you yawn at me in class. I must empathise quite strongly with you for it to have such a strong impact on me. That is probably a good thing – I don’t regard you all as strangers – there is always a silver lining to these things I suppose.

ps If you like science, and don’t subscribe to the Skeptics’ Guide then you are missing a treat. One hour of sciency goodness you can download to an mp3 player for free every week. I have also recommended the Radiolab podcast in the past (it is amazingly well recorded) and suggest you search through their back catalogue for topics that sound interesting. The one on Stochasticity is much more intriguing than the name suggests.