If yawning makes you more alert, it makes a lot of sense that you'd yawn when your alertness is slipping, which is to say, when you're bored.
Or when you're tired but interested. If you were just plain bored, why yawn at all?
If you were just plain bored, why yawn at all?
It's not a conscious choice; the paper argues that you yawn when your brain exceeds a certain temperature and the air is cool enough to cool your brain (ie, you don't yawn when it's really hot out).
Or when you see someone else yawn, presumably.
The fact remains, your dour, pessimistic interpretation is not the only reasonable one. You're just so eager to see the worst in people, you can't tell when something beautiful and magical is before you.
You're doing wonders for my view of my fellow man.
Obviously you yawn not out of boredom, but because what you're listening to is so fascinating that your brain's ON FIRE.
But I think you're right that "tired but interested" is another possibility, although I'll note that if I were you, I'd spend the next hour arguing, with diminishing plausibility, that "tired but interested" is oxymoronic.
I'm going to bed, you humanities types sort this out by morning.
Ogged is tired and completely uninterested. But is he yawning?
I'd spend the next hour arguing, with diminishing plausibility, that "tired but interested" is oxymoronic.
It's hard to diminish from from none, ogged; I don't see why you think I'd do something so patently foolish.
You know what is oxymoronic? "Prefatory remarks".
The decline in the amount of text spewed on this site on a day when no one is working might be grounds for a class action suit. If I employed people,and they commented here, I'd flog them for sure. I'd probably flog them anyway. but commenting here seals the deal.
On the last sentence, I think they're hypothesizing that if someone else yawns, you know that that person's attention has been slipping. Everyone else then yawns to redouble their alertness on the assumption that their attention may be about to slip.
Wild-assed handwaving and halfbaked evolutionary hypothesizing are not, I'm afraid, uncommon features of the last paragraphs in discussion sections of behavioral science papers. Some people have a hard time wrapping things up.
If cooling our brains aids alertness, could employers increase productivity by issuing some sort of cooling hat to all the worker bees?
You're just so eager to see the worst in people, you can't tell when something beautiful and magical is before you.
You say this as though it were something bad.
The dour, pessimistic interpretation is, in fact, the only reasonable one. Yay Ogged! Boo w-lfs-n!
Inc as I wasn't clear, I meant that the dour, pessimistic interpretation of anything at all is the only reasonable one. One of them universal non-relative truths.
the paper argues that you yawn when your brain exceeds a certain temperature and the air is cool enough to cool your brain
I yawn a lot more when I feel cold. And when I'm nervous about something in the imminent future, particularly having to give a presentation.
And I sneeze when I walk into the sun.
I AM BEYOND SCIENCE
Sun-sneezing is pretty common, and it would make sense that you yawn when you're nervous, since your brain is probably working harder. Yawning when you feel cold is weird, but maybe you feel cold when you're not actually cold.
You're just so eager to see the worst in people, you can't tell when something beautiful and magical is before you.
=> 13
15: It's the behavorial psych equivalent of 'from the dawn of time', isn't it?
I yawn when my eyes are dry and it wets them. I have slightly dry eyes, saith my opthalmologist.