Mister Teacher

Nearly every vertebrate on earth yawns. When it comes to human yawning, though, in my readings yawning is often connected to a detached attitude toward something. In boring situations like a dead end job or these lengthy lectures in College, yawning comes easy. It doesn't necessarily imply being tired, discontent, detached or disinterested. Instead, there may be more behind the strange deep breath and prying jaw movement than we thought.

Yawning can be a sign of drowsiness, stress, aggression, or even excitement, which doesn't explain any patterns in the correlation of mood and yawn. Yawning functions in several different ways with our bodies. It stretches the jaw, diaphragm, and stretches the lungs to their capacity. Yawning also proves to be an energizer. People seem to have a burst of energy after a yawn, which could explain why our body's natural tendency is to yawn when we are tired. Yawning also brings a sense of pleasure. For instance how do you ever feel after a big yawn and stretch? Researchers have said that yawning is highly influenced by the body's dopamine level. Anything that makes you feel good releases dopamine in the body, and the higher level of dopamine, the higher the frequency of yawns. Dopamine is released during sleep, which explains the high frequency of yawn when we wake up. There are several other triggers to induce a yawn, or increase how often a yawn occurs. On average, we will yawn about 240,000 times in our life.

People of the world have been searching yawning for years, and have also linked yawning an age old instinct to signal sleepiness to other tribe members in order to help develop consistent sleep and wake cycles (social bonding). This might explain why seeing someone yawn can make us tired, or yawn ourselves. It's likely that yawning is an ancestral instinct, but its purpose in human communication is still unknown. It's so amazing how strangely contagious yawning can be. The reason behind it is unclear, but it's estimated that 40-60% of the population are susceptible to yawning from reading the word, hearing it spoken or seeing it done.

Strange but true we aren't the only creatures helpless to the yawn bug. The strange condition occurs in chimpanzees, and many other mammals. Even dogs can be tempted to yawn after