Why Yawning Is SO Contagious

Why is yawning so contagious that you might be fighting one right now just from reading this? This is the real science of contagious yawning, from why about half of us catch it and babies can't, to the empathy theory that fell apart and the brain reflex that actually explains it. You catch yawns without deciding to, it works through a screen, and some people catch one just from the sound. This video breaks down what is actually happening. There are really two different kinds of yawning: the ancient, automatic one you do on your own (babies do it in the womb, and everything from cats to fish does it), and the contagious one you catch from other people, which only shows up in social animals and which you were not born with. Contagious yawning switches on around age four, autistic children catch far fewer, and even dogs catch human yawns. For years the go-to explanation was empathy, that you catch yawns because you care about the person yawning, but the biggest study ever done blew a hole in that: empathy, intelligence, and tiredness predicted almost nothing, and even age explained only a sliver. The best answer we have now came out of a Tourette lab, where brain measurements showed that how excitable one strip of your motor cortex is predicts about half of whether you catch yawns, which is also why fighting a yawn only makes the urge worse. We finish on the two things still unsolved: why we yawn at all (the leading idea is that a yawn cools the brain), and what actually creates the urge in the first place. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 SOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Helt & Fein, Contagious Yawning in Autistic and Typical Development (Child Development, 2010) Tested 120 children ages 1 to 6 and found contagious yawning jumps sharply around age 4, and that autistic children were much less susceptible than their peers. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01495.x Bartholomew & Cirulli, Individual Variation in Contagious Yawning Suscept