Yawning

Looking up why we yawn is like looking up the meaning of the. Vague at best. I get that it has something to do with oxygen, but what?

The theory is that yawning helps us bring more oxygen into the blood and move more carbon dioxide out of the blood. Sounds logical, but studies have shown that breathing more oxygen does not decrease yawning. Likewise, breathing more carbon dioxide does not increase yawning.

I yawn mostly when I am tired, sometimes I get uncontrollable yawn fits, they make my eyes run and drain my body of energy. Why? No one knows, for sure. What’s up with that shit? They can split an atom, clone a sheep, and invent a cell phone that hears a song and can take you to the i-store store, where for .99 it will play it for you! All this and still no one knows why we fucking yawn, how to cure the common cold, or why we need to sleep and how to create a machine that simulates 8 hours in 10 minutes?!?! Why? Because some rich philanthropist has a family member who has hydrocephalus, so they hire a B-list comedian to represent the cause and paints his mural on the side of a building in Sheepshead Bay!!! But I digress. I guess, much like the female orgasm, no one really cares that much about yawning, and so it remains one of life’s little mysteries.

On a side note about yawning, studies show contagious yawning appears to involve the very human trait of emotional empathy. Humans, uniquely, are able to imagine what someone else is thinking or feeling, therefore when they see someone yawn they yawn too. Consequently, people who do not contagiously yawn are usually autistic, schizophrenic, or psychotic.