Apparently The Length Of Your Yawn Is Determined By The Size Of Your Brain

Yawning when you’re tired is just like sneezing, blinking or even crying: a bodily response that usually can’t be halted.

When you’re feeling especially wrecked, your breathing slows, meaning you take in less oxygen. To compensate, your brain stimulates the lungs to take in a large gulp of air, to boost the oxygen levels in the blood.

The reason why we yawn is pretty well-documented in science, but it turns out there’s more to that giant stretch ‘n’ yawn than just a deep breath.

According to researchers at the State University Of New York, the length of our yawn is directly linked to the size of our brains and how many neurons we have. For humans like us, with the largest brains of all mammals, a short sharp breath in just won’t do, it seems.

The study, which saw researchers investigating the yawn length of 177 different creatures via YouTube videos, noted that although gorillas, hippos and elephants are bigger than us, they have smaller brains, and so their yawns are shorter in duration.

At 6.5 seconds us humans have the longest yawns of all the individuals surveyed, just above dogs and camels, with a mouse’s teeny yawn registering at just 0.8 of a second. Cute!

Before you go comparing yawn sizes with your other half though, it’s important to note that the study examined only brain size and not intelligence. YAWN.

• yawning