Why is yawning contagious?

Answer 1

Although the real cause of yawning is still unknown, it is believed that a lack of oxygen for the brain, sleepiness, or the need for increased alertness leads to yawning.

Therefore, i think the reason that people think its contagious is because when there is a group of people together, they are in the same state of mind or freshness. For eg., if one is tired, chances are all of them are tired. This leads to some of them starting to yawn. Which in turn leads to the idea that yawning is contagious.

Answer 2

OK, I skipped the long answer. I read the more empathetic a person you are, the more likely you are to yawn when someone else is yawning. So, not everyone yawns with the power of suggestion. Also, it is a learned behavior--little kids don't do it. I'm still waiting to see when my 2 1/2 year old starts yawning by suggestion. The pediatrician said it doesn't happen until they are 3 yrs +. Yes, I asked--I was curious!

Answer 3

Because you don't think about yawning until you see someone else do it. Your mind is then forced to think that you need more oxygen in your, so you yawn. If you're just going about your business and not thinking about it, you don't, unless you really do need a little extra air.

Just reading about yawns makes me yawn... btw :)

**edit**

funny, that whole study seems to show exactly what I said :P

Answer 4

may not be one of life’s deepest mysteries, but as scientific conundrums go, it has a peculiar staying power. Why is yawning contagious?




Fox

Sea Lion
Different animals, same yawn. (Credits: Road Safety Council of Western Australia, Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

Click here for an online movie of a chimpanzee yawning in reaction to a video of another one yawning. (From Biology Letters, December 2004 online issue)

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Researchers recently found that yawning isn’t only catching among people; it is also among chimpanzees. (Click here for a brief video from this research.) No one has devised a fully convincing explanation of why.

Compounding the mystery is the odd way in which the contagious power of yawning is largely unconscious. We can see someone yawn, yearn to replicate the action ourselves, and do it, all without thinking about it. Other times we’re aware it is happening, though it still floats somewhere beneath the realm of reason and of purposeful actions.

So what gives? In an effort to find the answer, the Finnish government recently funded a brain scanning study. The results turned up some hard-to-interpret, possible clues. It also confirmed the obvious: yawn contagion is largely unconscious. Wherever it might affect the brain, it bypasses the known brain circuitry for consciously analyzing and mimicking other people’s actions.

This circuitry is called the “mirror-neuron system,” because it contains a special type of brain cells, or neurons, that become active both when their owner does something, and when he or she senses someone else doing the same thing.

Mirror neurons typically become active when a person consciously imitates an action of someone else, a process associated with learning. But they seem to play no role in yawn contagiousness, the researchers in the new study found. The cells are have no extra activity during contagious yawning compared with during other non-contagious facial movements, they observed.

Brain activity “associated with viewing another person yawn seems to circumvent the essential parts of the MNS [mirror neuron system], in line with the nature of contagious yawns as automatically released behavioural acts—rather than truly imitated motor patterns that would require detailed action understanding,” wrote the researchers, with the Helsinki University of Technology and the Research Centre Jülich, Germany. The findings are published in the February issue of the research journal Neuroimage.

But if seeing someone yawn doesn’t activate these centers, what does it do to the brain? The researchers found that it appears to strongly activate at least one brain area, called the superior temporal sulcus. But this activation was unrelated to any desire to yawn in response, so it may be irrelevant to the contagion question, the researchers added.

Possibly more significant, they wrote, was the apparent deactivation of a second brain area, called the left periamygdalar region. The more strongly a participant reported wanting to yawn in response to another person’s yawn, the stronger was this deactivation.

“This finding represents the first known neurophysiological signature of perceived yawn contagiousness,” the researchers wrote.

Exactly what the finding means is less clear, they acknowledged. The periamygdalar region is a zone that lies alongside the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure deep in the brain in the area of the side of the head. The periamygdalar region has been linked to the unconscious analysis of emotional expressions in faces. Why it would be deactivated in tandem with yawn contagion is unclear, the researchers said.

One thing seems clear from the study is that “contagious yawning does not rely on brain mechanisms of action understanding,” wrote one of the researchers, Riitta Hari of the Helsinki University of Technology, in a recent email. Rather, she continued, it seems to be an “‘automatically’ released (and most likely very archaic) motor pattern,” or sequence of physical actions.

In the study, volunteers looked at videos of actors yawning or making other mouth movements. Meanwhile their brains were scanned using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a system that shows the amount of activity or work going on in various brain areas based on the amount of oxygen being used up there. The volunteers were later asked how strongly they had been tempted to yawn while viewing the pictures.

Apart from the physical brain mechanisms of yawn contagiousness, researchers have offered different reasons as to why it exists. Some have proposed that in early humans, yawn contagiousness might have helped people communicate their alertness levels to each other, and thus coordinate their sleep schedules.

This might be part of a more general phenomenon of unconscious signals that serve to synchronize group behavior, the authors of the Neuroimage paper wrote. “Such synchronization could be essential for species survival and works without action understanding, like when a flock of birds rises to the air as soon as the first bird does so—supposably as it notices a predator.”

Answer 5

Wow, I yawned even when I read the question. I have no idea what the answer is. My silly guess would be it's a wired-in kind of 'remember to breath' form of subtle communication between people, to stay alive.

Answer 6

Isn't it too weird? I can make my cat yawn by just pretending to yawn. I know there must be a scientific explanation for this , I just don't know what it is!

Answer 7

Its like my mothers laugh, it was contagious.its just one of those human things, that's a mystery. praise god for mystery's.

Answer 8

subconcious aggresive reaction to possible aggression