The following post is from a series about the annual Ig Nobel
Prizes in science, which honor “achievements that first make
people laugh and then make them think.” They were awarded in
September in Cambridge, Mass. Now we come to the Ig Nobel
Physiology Prize. Yawns are notoriously contagious in humans and
in other social animals, especially primates. In humans, yawning
has been thought to do various things, including cooling the
brain, increasing arousal when you’re sleepy and, possibly,
helping to synchronize group behavior. Could yawning be a form
of unconscious empathy? This would mean that in order to have a
contagious yawn, the animals involved would have to be capable
of empathy, of fellow feeling. We know that dogs and primates,
and humans, probably are, but that means we can’t really test
for whether it’s empathy or not. We need a species that is
social but probably can’t feel for its compatriots. That’s where
tortoises come in. To test whether yawning requires empathy and
thus get at the real purpose