As far as I know, the purpose of yawning isn’t really understood, but it’s present in nearly all land vertebrae. Maybe it’s a universal bug in the breathing animation code.
It clears your sinus / ear tubes, useful for pressure equalization even when walking mild elevation changes
Probably at least somewhat related to that somehow I bet
Does it also help reticulate my splines?
Then why contagious?
Monkey see, monkey do.
But my pets yawn when I yawn
Nice pet monkeys you’ve got there
Yawning also has a social effect, which is why it is “contagious”
If a big part of the tribe gets tired, then everyone will want to rest.
Yawning is for getting more air when you don’t have enough.
Its actually pretty difficult to have inadequate blood oxygen if you have full functional lungs
You actually breath less when you sleep, so you yawn when you wake up to transition to a higher breathing state
musk believes we’re living in a simulation, so I’m sure we don’t.
In my opinion it’s the modern “explain what cant be easily explained with gods”
It also helps them being inhuman and cruel, because it’s a simulation anyways, right?
It’s the equivalent of degaussing your character.
I thought I’d read that yawning is just to help boost your oxygen levels, but I don’t have sufficient motivation to actually look it up.
That’s easy to check. I’m currently insanely jet lagged and super tired, yawning every few minutes. My pulse oximeter is indicating 99% saturation, so that’s not it.
Edit: on the other hand, I’m a flight attendant, so my body is used to lower oxygen atmospheres, so I usually have >98% O2 levels.
Maybe you’re at 99% because you’ve been yawning?
Ok, I am sufficiently caffeinated and bothered to look up a study: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3678674/
According to the above, they suspect it has to do with helping to keep you relative alert/awake but also, possibly to cool the brain and adjust ear pressure.
The thing is that my o2 saturation doesn’t drop between yawns, which is what leads me to believe that’s not it.
Yeah, there doesn’t seem to be anything (at least in that study) to suggest it actually impacts blood oxygen levels either.
neither is sleeping - nor dreaming. sleep is still such an interesting and elusive thing.
i’ve recently fallen into what i can only hope is a trap. i think i’m already dead, and this experience is just me remembering my life.
Woof. I dread to think that I would remember in such precise detail all the dozens of lemmy posts and comments I’ve read this morning. But it’s quite a thought!
i can’t quite describe the intensity of the horror. it’s like a dream where you can’t run, but at time same time someone’s forcefully twiddling a finger on your precious in-between. it’s a scream you just can’t type.
Can you really recall every single detail? I’m not sure about you, but I can easily spend 30 minutes reading comments and then forget exactly what I was reading. Could I be reading gibberish that feels meaningful in the moment, but is gone as soon as I move on? Kind of like a dream?
How could you possibly have an experience if you’re dead? We don’t fully understand what consciousness is - the fact that it feels like something to be - but it seems like a safe bet to claim that it’s an emergent feature of what our biological body does. When the body dies, that process ends, and with it, so does experience. There’s no such thing as “positive non-existence” after death. Not being, by definition, cannot be experienced.
i agree with everything you said.
are we living in the moment, or are we just remembering right now?
when you die, your brain does a bunch of crazy shit. it doesn’t take more than a few psychadelics to see that. perception changes. perspective changes. you realize that you’re just part of the One Big Soul.
and then you realize it’s really dusty and you’re poor again.
You could be a brain in a vat - what you experience in that case would effectively be a simulation running on wetware instead of silica. But that still wouldn’t change the fact that what you’re experiencing is happening right now from your subjective point of view. Even if this were just a pre-recorded memory from someone else, it still feels like the present moment to you.
Everything you perceive could be smoke and mirrors, completely fake - but the one thing that remains undeniably true is that it feels like something, not nothing. Even a psychedelic trip, as bizarre or unreal as it may seem, is still just another appearance in consciousness. And for that to happen, your biological body needs to be alive. If you’re dead, there’s nothing left that could have - or host - that experience.
i’m hung up on the “wetware” thing. explain or gtfo.
I’m refering to the meat computer i.e. human brain.
you’ve to to explain how they write “wetfare”. i thought i was clear.
I don’t understand what you’re asking.
i see your opinion (it’s a small world; voting is pretty clear). do you care to argue for it, or are you happy with your downvote?
oh hi DP/DR.
oh no there’s a wikipedia article. i’m not going to get any sleep tonight
He once saw a painting that told his whole life story…
Many many animals yawn. Not just mammals but birds and reptiles. Even if we don’t understand fully why something happens, seeing it throughout the tree of life like that probably means there’s some reason for it.
Always compiling those damn shaders
Smog is just the developers’ workaround for overpopulation because the universe machine can’t handle that many animated entities without distance culling.
It’s your soul trying rush out, but saying"God Bless You" crams it back in.
