Penn Gazette | Essays | Notes from the Undergrad. By Andrew Newburg | Yawn. Go ahead: Laugh if you want (though you’ll benefit your brain more if you smile), but in my professional opinion, yawning is one of the best-kept secrets in neuroscience. Even my colleagues who are researching meditation, relaxation, and stress reduction at other universities have overlooked this powerful neural-enhancing tool.
However, yawning has been used for many decades in voice therapy as an effective means for reducing performance anxiety and hypertension in the throat. Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy. One of those areas is the precuneus, a tiny structure hidden within the folds of the parietal lobe. According to researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London, the precuneus appears to play a central role in consciousness, self-reflection, and memory retrieval. If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. « SEXY. Delightful. Lesson 566 - Professional Prerequisites.