Which animals yawn

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Design Co. Design This gleaming machine turns human poop into fertile soil. Work Life Work Life How to celebrate big achievements when your entire team works remotely Work Life The 3 crucial steps to building a perfect startup pitch Work Life Make sure you research these 3 things before your next job interview. They had all appeared in a paper on brain evolution , which listed their brain weight, and the number of neurons in their cortex—the outer layer of the brain, which governs our most important mental skills.

Put it this way: If you take a mammal and time its yawn, you can reasonably predict how heavy its brain is and how many cortical neurons they have.

Because this connection offers hints about why yawns exist at all. Even locked-in patients who cannot voluntarily move their limbs can yawn. A covered mouth will still spread a yawn, as will an upside-down face. For this reason, some scientists have suggested that yawning is a way of involuntarily showing empathy. After all, the species that have contagious yawns are all highly social. What might that be? The most popular answer is that yawning helps to cope with a build-up of carbon dioxide, by increasing the flow of oxygen to the brain.

Nonsense, says Provine. When you yawn, you constrict and relax your facial muscles, increasing the flow of warm blood around the skull, and allowing some of that heat to radiate into the surrounding air. Yawning also involves a deep inhalation, which brings cool air into nose and mouth, chilling our blood from within.

For example, he implanted temperature probes into the brains of rats and showed that they yawn when their brains heat up, and that yawning does indeed cool their brains. They discovered that orangutans, like humans, are prone to catching yawns from others.

By looking at our close relatives and at animal species that vary in their sociality, we try to get a better picture of this", says behavioural researcher Jorg Massen. The researchers were not only interested in whether orangutans yawn contagiously, but also in whether this automatic behaviour is influenced by how familiar the individuals on the videos are to the orangutans who watched the videos.

To study this, orangutans saw videos of group members, strangers, or a 3D orangutan avatar named Waldo kindly donated to the team by graphics designer Paul Kolbrink from XYZ-Animation. Interestingly, the yawns of Waldo did not result in more yawns. The findings of the study show that contagious yawning is not confined to very social animals. The results show that this contagiousness is probably something that all great apes exhibit.