why is it when someone else yawns, you yawn to?

Question

even hearing someone yawn triggers me yawning??

Answer 1

Adelie penguins, for instance, employ yawning as part of their courtship ritual. The happy couples face off amid the ice floes and the males engage in what is described as an "ecstatic display," their beaks open wide and their faces pointed skyward.

It may be, therefore, that when your entry upon the scene inspires a round of uncontrollable yawning, you have merely stumbled onto a gaggle of Adelie penguins in disguise, who are signaling their powerful erotic longing for you. A slim hope, admittedly, but any port in a storm.

As for the larger question of why yawns are catching, nobody really knows. Fact is, we don't know why people yawn, period.

It was long believed you yawned when there was too much carbon dioxide and not enough oxygen in your blood. A part of your brain called the brain stem detected this and triggered the yawn reflex. Your mouth stretched wide and you inhaled deeply, shooting a jolt of oxygen into the lungs and thence to the bloodstream.

Subsequently, you exhaled a lot of CO2. Often you'd stretch while yawning, which seemed to temporarily improve circulation. You yawned and stretched a lot more when you got tired because your breathing slowed down.

Or so people thought. In recent years, though, a few radicals have said the preceding is all malarkey. Who knows, they say, maybe we yawn because it's too warm in the room.

Cecil isn't about to settle the issue here, and he doesn't need to. We merely observe that whatever yawn-inducing conditions prevail for you also apply to your friends.

If you're out late in some crowded dive, you're probably all tired, all warm under the collar, and all breathing the same stale air. You're probably all on the verge of a yawn, too, and the power of suggestion from seeing one person do it is enough to push everybody else over the edge.

Adults rarely catch a case of the yawns from a child or animal, which tends to corroborate this idea.

Children usually have different sleep schedules and respiration rates from adults, so you would expect them to yawn at different times. Animals, on the other hand, often yawn not for physiological reasons but as a display of hostility, to which humans are evidently unresponsive.

Answer 2

Yawning is a reflex triggered when the brain is not getting enough oxygen - usually because there's not enough oxygen in the area (e.g. a badly-aired room). Yawning is an attempt to get a lot of oxygen into the bloodstream in one go.

If someone else yawns, you brain registers this, and figures (subconsciously) "Well, if he's not getting enough air, maybe there's not enough air in the room, and I'm not getting enough either and just haven't noticed yet - better take a big gulp just to be on the safe side!". And you yawn.

In theory, this means you shouldn't yawn if you hear someone yawn over the phone or on tv. But since those technologies weren't around yet when the reflex developed, your brain doesn't differentiate those yawns from yawns from someone in the same room.

Answer 3

I heard that its the body's way of getting more oxygen into the system, usually when the breathing slows down when you are tired. Therefore, when you suck in most of the oxygen inthe room it creates a shortage, meaning that people near you are also then needing more oxygen.

That kind of makes sense until you think that that would surely have no ending, meaning that eventually everybody would be yawning.

just imagine for 1 minute if you walked into town and every single person was yawning at the same time, freaky huh? ha ha ha

Would look like a horror movie.

Answer 4

You yawn because your body needs extra oxygen so inhales extra. When you see someone yawn your brain is triggered and thinks that you too will need exttra oxygen so you yawn and take in the extra breath.

Answer 5

So why has just reading this question made me yawn??? Weird

Answer 6

No one is entirely sure why. Some seem to think it's some form of communcation barried deep within human history. While others think it's do to our nature of being tired, and we need more oxygen to our brain.

Answer 7

I don't know, but that is a good question.

Answer 8

its highly contagious