BBC - Future - One of science's

most baffling questions? Why we

yawn
Mid-conversation with Robert Provine, I have a
compelling urge, rising from deep inside my body.
The more I try to quash it, the more it seems to
spread, until it consumes my whole being. Eventually,
it is all I can think about but how can I stop myself
from yawning?
Provine tells me this often happens when people are
talking to him; during presentations, he sometimes
finds the majority of his audience with their mouths
agape and tonsils swinging. Luckily, as a psychologist
at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and
author of Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing,
Hiccupping, and Beyond, he isnt offended. It makes
a very effective lecture, he says. You talk and then
the audience starts yawning. And then you can ask
people to experiment on their yawns like closing the
lips, or inhaling through clenched teeth, or trying to
yawn with the nose pinched closed.
It is through experiments like these that Provine has
tried to explore a millennia-old mystery: why do we
yawn? We all know that tiredness, boredom, or the
sight of someone else can all bring along the almost
irrepressible urge but what purpose does it serve the
body? When he first started work on so-called
chasmology in the late 80s, Provine wrote that
yawning may have the dubious distinction of being
the least understood, common human behaviour.
Nearly three decades later, we may be closer to an
answer, but its one that has split the field.

Does infectious yawning ensure that we all go to bed at the same
time? (Getty Images)
Arguably the first studier of yawns was the Greek
physician Hippocrates nearly 2,500 years ago. He
believed that yawning helped to release noxious air,
particularly during a fever. Like the large quantities
of steam that escape from cauldrons when water boils,
the accumulated air in the body is violently expelled
through the mouth when the body temperature rises,
he wrote. Different incarnations of the idea lingered
until the 19th Century, when scientists instead
proposed that yawning aids respiration triggering a
rush of oxygen into the blood supply, while flushing
out the carbon dioxide. If that were true, you would
expect people to yawn more or less frequently
depending on the oxygen and carbon dioxide
concentrations in the air. Yet when Provine asked
volunteers to breathe various mixtures of gases, he
found no such change.
Many theories have instead focussed on the strange,
contagious nature of yawning a fact that I know only
too well from my conversation with Provine. Around
50% of people who observe a yawn will yawn in
response, he says. It is so contagious that anything
associated with it will trigger one seeing or hearing
another person, or even reading about yawning. For
this reason, some researchers have wondered if
yawning might be a primitive form of communication
if so, what information is it transmitting? We often
feel tired when we yawn, so one idea is that it helps set
everyones biological clocks to the same rhythm. In
my view the most likely signalling role of yawning is to
help to synchronize the behaviour of a social group
to make them go to sleep more or less at the same
time, says Christian Hess, at the University of Bern in
Switzerland. With the same routine, a group can then
work together more efficiently throughout the day.

Danario Alexander of the San Diego Chargers yawns before the
start of a American football match (Getty Images)
Yet we also yawn during times of stress: Olympic
athletes often do it before a race, while musicians
sometimes succumb before a concert. So some
researchers, including Provine, believe that the
strenuous movements might have a more general role
in rebooting the brain when you are sleepy they
make you more alert, or when you are distracted they
make you more focussed. Spreading through a group,
contagious yawns could then help everyone reach the
same level of attention, making them more vigilant to
a threat, for instance. The mechanism is somewhat
hazy though one French researcher, Olivier
Walusinski, proposes that yawning helps to pump
cerebrospinal fluid around the brain, which could
trigger a shift in neural activity.
With so many competing and contradictory ideas, a
grand unifying theory of yawning may seem like a
distant speck on the horizon. But over the last few
years, one underlying mechanism has emerged that
could, potentially, appease all these apparent
paradoxes in one fell swoop. Andrew Gallup, now at
the State University of New York at Oneonta, was first
inspired with the idea during his undergraduate
degree, when he realised that yawning might help to
chill the brain and stop it overheating. The violent
movement of the jaws moves blood flow around the
skull, he argued, helping to carry away excess heat,
while the deep inhalation brings cool air into the sinus
cavities and around the carotid artery leading back
into the brain. Whats more, the strenuous
movements could also flex the membranes of sinuses
fanning a soft breeze through the cavities that
should cause our mucus to evaporate, which should
chill the head like air conditioning.
The most obvious test was to see if people are more or
less likely to yawn in different temperatures. In
normal conditions, Gallup found that around 48% felt
the urge to yawn, but when he asked them to hold a
cold compress to their foreheads, just 9% succumbed.
Breathing through the nose, which could also cool the
brain, was even more effective, completely dampening
his subjects urge to yawn potentially suggesting a
handy trick for anyone facing embarrassment during a
tedious conversation.

Can yawning give you a brain boost? (Thinkstock)
Perhaps the best evidence comes from two troubled
women who approached Gallup soon after he first
published his results. Both were looking for relief
from pathological yawning attacks, sometimes lasting
an hour at a time. It was extremely debilitating and
interferes with any basic activity, says Gallup.
Theyd have to walk away and go to a secluded area
it affected their personal and professional lives.
Intriguingly, one of the women found the only way to
stop the yawning attack was to throw herself into cold
water. Inspired, Gallup asked them to place a
thermometer in their mouths before and after the
attacks. Sure enough, he saw a slight rise in
temperature just before the yawning bouts, which
continued until it dropped back to 37C.
Importantly, this brain chill might underlie the many,
seemingly contradictory, events that lead to yawning.
Our body temperature naturally rises before and after
sleep, for instance. Cooling the brain slightly might
also make us more alert waking us up when we are
bored and distracted. And by spreading from person
to person, contagious yawns could therefore help a
whole group to focus.

Does this picutre make you yawn? (Thinkstock)
Gallups unified theory has been somewhat
contentious among yawning researchers. Gallups
group has failed to present any convincing
experimental evidence to support his theory, says
Hess. In particular, his critics point out he hasnt
made direct measurements of temperature changes in
the human brain, though Gallup says he has found the
expected fluctuations in yawning rats. Provine is more
positive, however believing that it could be one way
in which yawning helps the brain change state, and
focus.
Even if Gallup has managed to find that unified
theory, many mysteries remain. Why do foetuses
yawn in the womb, for instance?
It could just be that they are practicing for life outside,
or perhaps the yawn plays a more active role in
guiding the bodys growth by helping to develop
articulation in the jaws joints, for instance, or by
encouraging the growth of the lungs, says Provine. If
so, Provine suggests that yawnings functions in the
womb may be more important than our attacks as
adults.
Provine also points out that yawning and perhaps
other bodily functions, like sneezing shares some
strange parallels with sex. The facial expressions
involved are surprisingly similar, he says just take a
look at this picture and you can see where hes coming
from.

(Thinkstock)
Like sex, yawns and sneezes involve a build-up that
ends in a pleasant climax. Once initiated, they go to
completion you dont want a yawnus interruptus, is
how Provine puts it. For these reasons, he wonders if
a shared neural machinery underlying these different
feelings. Mother Nature does not reinvent the
wheel, he says. As evidence, he points to the fact that
certain anti-depressants can lead some patients to
orgasm during a yawn a rare side effect that could
quickly lose its appeal.
Eventually, the temptation to yawn just proved too
irresistible during my conversation with Provine. It
was a warm summer day, so perhaps my yawns were
stopping my brain from over-heating during our
stimulating conversation. Whatever function it was
serving, the relief was almost worth the agonising
wait.
Im willing to bet youve been stifling a few yawns
yourself by this point as Provine points out, reading
or even thinking about yawning can be enough to set
us off. So go ahead, let it out and do so in the
knowledge that you are enjoying one of lifes most
enduring mysteries.