Why are yawns contagious??
Question:
Answers:
I think that the person who yawns first, sends off a subliminal message to the next person. if there were 10 people in a room together, have 5 on one side that 5 on the other side, all facing the person across from each other, if one yawns, the one or ones on the other side will start to yawn. it will be a very long day of yawning, because they will be sending subliminal to each other constantly.
because laziness and boredom is contagious.
I think it's a psycological thing. Whenever we see someone yawn, for some reason we have our own desire to yawn.
Have you ever seen that Mythbusters episode about this?
Yawns actually aren't contagious. The yawn is something your body does automatically so when you see another person yawn your body subliminally reacts to this and thinks that if he/she's yawning you should.
The yawn reflex is often described as contagious: if one person yawns, this will cause another person to "sympathetically" yawn.[6] Mythbusters attempted an experiment documenting this effect in episode 2.28, "Is Yawning Contagious?", but failed to gather conclusive results. The proximate cause for contagious yawning may lie with mirror neurons, i.e. neurons in the frontal cortex of certain vertebrates, which upon being exposed to a stimulus from conspecific (same species) and occasionally interspecific organisms, activates the same regions in the brain.[7] Mirror neurons have been proposed as a driving force for imitation which lies at the root of much human learning, e.g. language acquisition. Yawning may be an offshoot of the same imitative impulse.
To look at the issue in terms of evolutionary advantage, yawning might be a herd instinct.[8] Other theories suggest that the yawn serves to synchronize mood behavior among gregarious animals, similar to the howling of the wolf pack. It signals tiredness to other members of the group in order to synchronize sleeping patterns and periods of activity. It can serve as a warning in displaying large, canine teeth.[citation needed] This phenomenon has been observed among various primates. The threat gesture is a way of maintaining order in the primates' social structure. The contagion of yawning is interspecific, for example a human yawning in front of a pet dog can incite the dog to yawn as well. A specific study was conducted on chimpanzees. A group of chimpanzees was shown a video of other chimpanzees yawning, and the study chimpanzees yawned also. This helps to partly confirm a yawn's "contagiousness".
More Questions & Answers...