Why yawning is contagious

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Published the 03.09.2017 at 17h21

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Two, seven, ten… and A good landlord would yawn several of his peers, according to the proverb. This phenomenon has been demonstrated, and is called the yawn was contagious. It affects approximately two-thirds of the population.

A study from the university of Nottingham (Uk) attempts to understand the mechanisms governing this phenomenon. Previous studies on the topic had evoked the empathy to explain it. The british researchers suggest another explanation. They observed that the excitability of a part of the brain, the motor cortex, was related to the sensitivity of the yawn, which is contagious.

Unequal before the yawn

To do this, the researchers recruited 36 people. In a first step, they stimulated their brain through electrodes directed to the motor cortex. This area is associated with actions of anticipation and movement. They were then able to measure the nerve activity in response to stimuli, and thereby classify the study participants according to the capacity of the area to be excited.

They were then released videos of people in full yawn. They then noticed that those who were most susceptible to the yawn contagious, were precisely those in which the motor cortex was the most ” excitable “.

“Some of us have a network engine is particularly sensitive, and are very susceptible to yawn contagious, while others are less so,” says Stephen Jackson, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the university of Nottignham, and lead author of the study.