{"id":1209,"date":"2013-10-27T23:54:45","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T04:54:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1209"},"modified":"2013-12-01T12:43:53","modified_gmt":"2013-12-01T17:43:53","slug":"yawn-interrupted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=1209","title":{"rendered":"Yawn Interrupted"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have — quite by accident, as one does<\/em> — achieved something truly incredible. In just a few short days I have completely destroyed a fundamental behavioural reflex that is shared by all the mammals I’ve ever shared a house with: yawning. I didn’t use pain or taste conditioning, no electrodes or supra-threshold induced currents with TMS. I didn’t use dopamine agonists, opioids, or GABA inhibitors — I didn’t inject anything at all. <\/p>\n

What happened was that I was exhausted and a little silly from playing with Blueberry. Wayfare was going off to bed and yawning quite a lot. So I mimicked her: as she yawned, I opened my mouth. I didn’t have a sympathy yawn, I didn’t mimick the movement in my eyes or the tilt of my head: all I did was open my mouth wide until she was done yawning. And that cognitive dissonance of a not-quite-a-sympathetic-yawn made her laugh. So I did it again. Over the course of 2-3 days I did it maybe 5 or 6 times, that’s it. Now — completely untaught by me — Blueberry is doing it to her too. <\/p>\n

And now she can’t yawn in front of either of us without laughing. “It’s so frustrating, I can’t satisfy my urge to yawn,” she says, leaving the room to get a good yawn in. <\/p>\n

Beyond the fact that this is so hilarious that I pretty much give myself an asthma attack laughing at her tragic yet ultimately trivial problem, it is completely fascinating. Yawning is a hard reflex to suppress (though to be fair “broken” is not the same as suppressed), so I’m surprised that a few bouts of giggling is all it took. Fair warning to you all: I may be trying this out on the next few people I catch yawning. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have — quite by accident, as one does — achieved something truly incredible. In just a few short days I have completely destroyed a fundamental behavioural reflex that is shared by all the mammals I’ve ever shared a house with: yawning. I didn’t use pain or taste conditioning, no electrodes or supra-threshold induced currents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}