Posted on 10/24/2005 6:26:05 PM PDT by Rudder
The yawn is primal, unstoppable and contagious, revealing the evolutionary and neural basis of empathy and unconscious behavior
Imagine a yawn. You stretch your jaws open in a wide gape, take a deep inward breath, followed by a shorter exhalation, and end by closing your jaws. Ahhh. You have just joined vertebrates everywhere in one of the animal kingdom's most ancient rites. Mammals and most other animals with backbones yawn; fish, turtles, crocodiles and birds do it. People start yawning very early, offering further evidence of its ancient origins. Yawning is present by the end of the first trimester of prenatal human development and is obvious in newborns.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanscientist.org ...
((((Ping))))
I've just about perfected the closed-mouth yawn. I've been getting lots of practice in meetings and classes.
yawn
Looks like an interesting read, but unfortunately it requires registration, and bugmenot doesn't have a working login :(
This gives me the first paragraph of the article, with a link at the bottom saying "Go to article" ... when I click it, I get the following message:
"The content you've requested is available without charge only to active Sigma Xi members and American Scientist subscribers."
I tried the PDF version as well, but it also requires a login.
Ah, well :(
I'm a member of Sigma Xi and I'll try to help you out...give me a few minutes, please.
No rush at all ... and thank you for taking the time to try to find a solution :)
Same 'restricted' message again, unfortunately.
Yawning is a wonderfully rich topic for anyone interested in the neural mechanisms of behavior. The simple, stereotyped nature of the yawn permits rigorous description, a first step in discovering neural mechanisms. And this application of the "simple systems" approach involves human beings going about their normal activities; there's no need to use bacteria, fruit flies or nematodes. You can forget about cleaning messy animal cages—much can be learned by experimenting on oneself and observing fellow Homo sapiens. By now, you may be experiencing one of the most remarkable properties of yawning: its contagion. Yawns are so infectious that simply reading or thinking about them can be the vector of an infectious response. The property of contagiousness offers an opportunity to explore the neurological roots of social behavior, face detection, empathy, imitation, and the possible pathology of these processes in autism, schizophrenia and brain damage.
I'll keep excerpting if you like.
Sounds right to me. But I do thank you for your time and patience, in any case :)
Have a good evening :)
That would be much appreciated; and I'm sure there are others who are interested, as well. I'm off to bed at the moment, but I'll check back again tomorrow for additional excerpts. Thank you again for your time!
Fortunately for aspiring students of yawning, the scientific frontiers are near and relatively unpopulated, the result of our tendency to undervalue and neglect the commonplace. Serious science may require no more than a stopwatch, note pad and pencil. The accessibility of yawning as a problem makes it ideal for what I call "sidewalk neuroscience," a low-tech approach to the brain and behavior based on everyday experience. Whether you follow in my scientific footsteps or simply read along, don't be put off by the primitive tools, simple methods and behavioral focus. It's easy to be seduced by the trappings of big science and to neglect the extraordinary in our midst.
When I began to study yawning in the 1980s, it was difficult to convince some of my research students of the merits of "yawning science." Although it may appear quirky, my decision to study yawning was a logical extension to human beings of my research in developmental neuroscience, reported in such papers as "Wing-flapping during Development and Evolution." As a neurobehavioral problem, there is not much difference between the wing-flapping of birds and the face- and body-flapping of human yawners.
I've been running an unscientific study of yawning with one subject--my baby. It took until the 5th or 6th month before yawning was "contagious" for her. Yawning had no affect on her until recently, and now I can get her to do it quite often by yawning myself.
However, I don't know if there's anything to learn from that.
Just out of curiosity, where is the evidence that this is the product of some evolutionary mechanism?
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