By Robert R. Provine
Robert Provine boldly is going the place different scientists seldom tread-in seek of hiccups, coughs, yawns, sneezes, and different lowly, undignified human behaviors. Upon research, those instinctive acts endure the imprint of our evolutionary origins and will be uniquely priceless instruments for realizing how the human mind works and what makes us various from different species.
Many actions showcased in Curious Behavior are contagious, yet none surpasses yawning during this regard-just studying the observe could make one succumb. although we regularly take it as an indication of sleepiness or boredom, yawning holds clues to the improvement of our sociality and talent to empathize with others. Its inescapable transmission reminds us that we're occasionally unaware, neurologically programmed beasts of the herd. different ignored behaviors yield comparable revelations. Tickling, we study, could be the key to programming personhood into robots. Coughing is available in musical, scientific, and social kinds. Farting and belching have import for the evolution of human speech. And prenatal habit is out there because the strangest convey of all, defying postnatal good judgment in each approach. Our earthiest acts outline Homo sapiens up to language, bipedalism, device use, and different extra studied characteristics.
As Provine courses us via peculiarities correct lower than our noses, he beckons us to stick with with self-experiments: tickling our personal ft, holding a log of after we chuckle, and trying to suppress yawns and sneezes. Such humble investigations offer fodder for grade university technology initiatives in addition to doctoral dissertations. Small technological know-how can yield colossal rewards.
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Extra resources for Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond
Example text
If you are questioning the relevance of the eyes to the act of yawning, recall that the eyes squint or close during yawns, and that observing squinting eyes contributes to the contagiousness of yawns. ) So far we have demonstrated that inhalation through the oral airway and the gaping of the jaws are essential for normal yawns, and that the motor program for yawning will not run to completion unless these parts of the program have curious behavior ç 28 been accomplished. But yawning is a powerful, generalized movement that involves much more than airway maneuvers, jaw gaping, and eye squinting.
Laughter is primate onomatopoeia. The origin of human laughter would have been discovered long ago if we pantlaughed like chimpanzees instead of being one step removed with our ha-has. Fortunately, this evolutionary saga has no missing link, and we can trace the evolutionary path. The first step in human laughter evolution is the pantpant of heavy breathing of physical play, followed by the ritualization of this sound in which pant-pant emerged as the vocal symbol for the act that produced it, followed by ha-ha, which is a human abstraction of the original pant-pant.
As conventional wisdom suggests, we yawn when we are bored, as when viewing a television test pattern. ) But there is also anecdotal evidence of paratroopers yawning before making their first jump, musicians yawning while waiting to perform, and Olympians yawning before their event. 34 The demonstrative yawn and stretch Clifton Williams made while his cousin Jason Mayfield was being sentenced for a felony drug charge earned him six months in jail for contempt of court, of which he will serve at least twenty-one days (Chicago Tribune, August 10, 2010).