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The Perfect Yawn

Category: Culture
Posted on: September 25, 2007 10:17 AM, by Jonah Lehrer

Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious?

A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55 percent of the audience. So that was his starting point: could he design a yawn powerful enough to move from a 55 percent response right up to Total Yawn-ness?

He tried.

Our story (just push on the icon up above and cover your mouth) describes what happened next.

Listen to the whole thing. And yes, studying the spread of yawning has a real practical application.

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Comments (1)

1

I've personally always wondered about it. Why is there always someone yawning while I am yawning? Thanks for bring up this article.

Posted by: skeptic4u | September 26, 2007 12:19 AM

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