The secret of the Yawn

When a scientist began to study yawning in the 1980s, it was difficult to convince some of his research students of the merits of “yawning science.” Although it may appear quirky, his 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. Yawning is an ancient, primitive act. Humans do it even before they are born, opening wide in the womb. Some snakes unhinge their jaws to do it. One species of penguins yawns as part of mating. Only now are researchers beginning to understand why we yawn, when we yawn and why we yawn back. A professor of cognitive neuroscience at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Steven Platek, studies the act of contagious yawning, something done only by people and other primates. In his first experiment, he used a psychological test to rank people on their empathic feelings. He found that participants who did not score high on compassion did not yawn back. “We literally had people saying, ‘Why am I looking at people yawning?’” Professor Platek said. “It just had no effect.” For his second experiment, he put 10 students in a magnetic resonance imaging machine as they watched video tapes of people yawning. When the students watched the videos, the part of the brain which reacted was the part scientists believe controls empathy – the posterior cingulate, in the brain’s middle…