Focus on Brain Disorders. Penn Gazette. 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. Superfluidity: The Psychology of Peak Performance. Flow is an energized mental state that occurs when a person is totally focused and immersed in an activity and the challenge matches a person's level of skill.
Being ‘ in the zone ’ is another way of describing flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first defined flow in his seminal book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play (1975). He later acknowledged that, “there seems to be a need to reinvent or re-express the answer of what to do to create flow every couple of generations.” Elisha Goldstein Archives - Psychotherapy Networker.