Yawn.
Yawn. Yawn.
Yawn. Yawn. Yawn.
Are you yawning yet? No? How about now?
I thought so. All we have to do is utter the word yawn, or actually yawn, to know the act is entirely contagious. The same goes for scratching, which has long been considered another ‘socially contagious’ behaviour – the minute someone starts to scratch, why do we then feel the need to itch?
It’s a strange one, and one that’s seemed to baffle scientists for years. The rest of us just accepted our body’s innate reactions as a fact of life and went about our days.
But the question still does remain: Why do our bodies, and our minds, find certain behaviours so contagious? And is there anything we can do to stop them?
In a paper in leading journal Science, researchers found in a study of mice that the mere act of seeing another scratch prompted the brain to release a chemical. This chemical then helps communicate an “itch” signal from the skin to the spinal cord, coercing you to start scratching yourself.
By putting a group of mice in the experiment who had chronic itching issues with a group that didn’t, the researchers found that mice are hard-wired to feel the need to itch when watching someone else scratch. Which means no, there’s probably nothing you can do to control it.