Why do we yawn?
Image Credit: Flickr user Barron. Some rights reserved.
A student from the Caribbean island of Bonaire asks the scientists about something all animals do.
Ziran Chin-On: Why do people yawn?
For an answer, EarthSky asked a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. He’s studied yawning for over 30 years – but says why we yawn is still something of a mystery. Here’s Dr. Robert Provine.
Robert Provine: Yawning is a curious behavior because on one level, you can say that we don’t really understand why we do it. So throughout our life, even before birth, we start yawning. And it’s unclear about why we produce this act.
Provine said you might yawn because you’re tired, anxious, or bored.
Robert Provine: What all of these things have in common is a change in state. We’re changing from one kind of mood, one kind of exercise level to another. Yawning may help us through these states by stirring up our physiology.
Yawning is also highly contagious – which makes it even more interesting to neuroscientists.
Robert Provine: It gives us insight about how the brain links people together in social patterns.
Scientists at the University of Albany have also suggested that yawning may cool down our brains. Thanks to Ziran Chin-On and Dr. Robert Provine.
Our thanks to the Monsanto Fund, bridging the gap between people and their resources.
Our thanks to:
Robert Provine
University of Maryland
Baltimore, MD
there’s got to be a better explanation than this :(
Whenever oxyzen contents in our blood flow system is lowered we are likely to yawn.Mostly this is the main purpose of yawning by all living things
Dr. Provine disproved the above explanation over twenty years ago. From the Mental_Floss blog (http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/14707)
“The idea that we yawn to get rid of carbon dioxide and take in more oxygen has been disproved by research, but persists as the “common wisdom” answer. According to this theory, people breathe more slowly when they’re bored or tired and less oxygen gets to the lungs. As CO2 builds up in the blood, the brain reflexively prompts a deep, oxygen-rich breath.
The problem with this theory is a 1987 study by Dr. Robert Provine, who is regarded as the world’s foremost yawn expert. Provine set up an experiment in which volunteers breathed one of four gases that contained varying ratios of CO2 to O2 for 30 minutes. Normal air contains 20.95% oxygen and 0.03% carbon dioxide, but neither of the gases in the experiment with higher concentrations of CO2 (3% and 5%) caused the research subjects to yawn more.”
The explanation that yawning cools down the brain has more support (read on in the Mental_Floss blog), but sadly, there is no definitive answer to why we yawn.
Hold on, all this talk about yawning is…. making me…. yawn.
all what you want to know about yawning can be find on my website http://yawning.info
in french and in english
all the articles written by Bob Provine and more then 1600 other webpages : history, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, pathology, explanation about its contagiosiness and more
Thanks for your visit
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