A large-scale animal study from 2021 revealed something interesting about yawning: Vertebrates with larger brains and more neurons tend to have longer-lasting yawns.
Researchers collected data on 1,291 separate yawns from zoo trips and online videos, covering a total of 55 mammal species and 46 bird species. They found"robust positive correlations" between how long an animal yawns and the size of its brain.
"We went to several zoos with a camera and waited by the animal enclosures for the animals to yawn," ethologist Jorg Massen from Utrecht University in the NetherlandsThe study could fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge about yawning – including why it happens in the first place, and why animals"Although the pattern of yawning is fixed, its duration has co-evolved with brain size and neuron numbers," the researchers"Moreover, this function seems to be conserved across a diverse range of animals, such that its evolutionary origin may be traced back to at least the common ancestor of birds and mammals and potentially even further."by one of the researchers that worked on this study: that yawning is an essential way of cooling down the brain. It, therefore, follows that bigger brains need longer yawns to properly cool them. That would seem to be backed up by this data, which also shows that mammals yawn longer than birds. Birds have a higher core temperature than mammals, which means a greater temperature difference with the surrounding air, which means a shorter yawn is enough to drag in some cooler air.involving humans, though in that case, only 205 yawns and 24 species were measured. It found the shortest yawns came from mice, with the longest yawns coming from humans. "Through the simultaneous inhalation of cool air and the stretching of the muscles surrounding the oral cavities, yawning increases the flow of cooler blood to the brain, and thus has a thermoregulatory function,"The researchers don't make any link to intelligence, only the size of the brain and the number of neurons it packs in; nor is there any reference to the frequency of yawning. For example, we humans tend to yawn between 5-10 times a day.for this is that it serves a social function, getting a group into the same state of mind and perhaps helping to synchronize sleeping patterns. "Getting video footage of so many yawning animals requires quite some patience, and the subsequent coding of all these yawns has made me immune to the contagiousness of yawning,"While there's more research to be done to tease out the reasons for why we yawn at all, the study authors conclude that"these findings provide further support for distinct predictions derived from the brain cooling hypothesis."
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