Skip to main content

Yawning


I'd like to congratulate the Wall Street Journal for running a recent opinion/analysis piece on the mysteries of yawning.

In particular, the big one: "why is yawning contagious." People say, "the power of suggestion" but that sounds like a merely verbal answer, a bit like the claim that sleeping pills work because of their dormitive efficacy.

A better approach, says the WSJ, is to think about survival effects. Yawning may have evolved as a way in which an organism maintains its alertness. It doesn't merely mean you're tired, it means that you are tired and recognize that you should be awake (in some non-moralistic sense of the word "should" of course.)

This in turn suggests that the urge to yawn could well be triggered by the yawn of someone nearby. After all, alertness is a trait that small groups in close proximity often need to maintain together. They have common predators, or common prey, about.
Labels:

Comments

  1. monsAugust 23, 2014 at 4:39 AM

    Payday loans no credit check advantage of having a loan such costs is that it does not have a surface tension that cash is insufficient.

    Credit score of all, it has been accepted by specifying the perfect financing options - the site of application specific below

    However, if you have a bad credit history, you will not be able to have the kind of help. The owner of the bad credit history, it is assumed as a dangerous candidate for the new loan.

    ReplyDelete
  2. monsAugust 23, 2014 at 4:40 AM

    Payday loans no credit check

    For more info :-
    http://www.paydayloanswaywithnocreditcheck.co.uk

    ReplyDelete
  3. ChristopherMarch 15, 2015 at 7:21 AM

    This sort of "comment" makes me yawn.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
24 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

The Growing Block Theory of Time

My own disposition, in regard to the philosophy of time, is toward the "growing block" theory. This is the view that past events remain realities, that present-moment events are also realities, but that future events are not yet real. The image is of the universe as a block with an edge on (say) the right-hand side. The block is expanding because that edge is moving ever further right, and that edge is what we call the present, or, simply, "now." Everything to the left of that edge is both static (the past is complete) and, still and forever, real. Think of the phrase "the moving finger writes." The chief alternatives to the growing-block theory are "presentism" (only the now-edge itself is real) and "eternalism" (past, present, and future are all real." I believe that time is a growing block because (1) that's what it feels like, (2) we should stick with the introspective phenomenon unless we have good reason to abandon ...
8 comments
Read more