Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    Hands-On Career Preparation
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    Alternative Pathways
Sign In
pageview-small-icon

PageView

Notes on scholarly publishing.

A Yawning Field of Study

By Peter Monaghan August 30, 2012

Consider the exploits of Frenchman Joseph Pujol, history’s most melodic master of flatulence.

Early in life, in the 1860s, he discovered a rare ability to draw air into his rectum—to use as an organ of ingress one primarily given to egress. Expelling the air, he performed selections of up to 15 seconds of such animal sounds as a rooster’s crow, creditable imitations of such musical instruments as the violin and trombone, and even a rendition of “La Marseillaise”—the tune, not the lyrics—that moved his audiences to gales of laughter.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

Consider the exploits of Frenchman Joseph Pujol, history’s most melodic master of flatulence.

Early in life, in the 1860s, he discovered a rare ability to draw air into his rectum—to use as an organ of ingress one primarily given to egress. Expelling the air, he performed selections of up to 15 seconds of such animal sounds as a rooster’s crow, creditable imitations of such musical instruments as the violin and trombone, and even a rendition of “La Marseillaise”—the tune, not the lyrics—that moved his audiences to gales of laughter.

Hence, Pujol’s professional name, “Le Pétomane,” which translates as “fartomaniac.” His repertoire was so vast and compelling that in his glory days, at such venues as the Moulin Rouge, he earned far more than “The Divine Sarah” Bernhardt—“the most famous actress the world has ever known.”

ADVERTISEMENT

For serving as a special case, Pujol has an honored place in Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond, Robert R. Provine’s engaging and seriously amusing new book, just out from Harvard University Press.

With such chapter headings as “Tickling,” “Itching and Scratching,” and “Farting and Belching,” the book addresses often-embarrassing expressions of common humanity. As an electrophysiologist and more recently a “sidewalk scientist,” Provine, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has been studying innate human behaviors for more than 40 years.

Neither farting nor yawning, belching, or sneezing are, as Provine unsurprisingly notes, behaviors that have set the scientific world alight. They are instead generally considered undignified, for reasons he both seeks to explain and ultimately dismisses. He points out that, as instinctive or autonomic acts, they say much about humans’ evolutionary trajectory, and hence inner and social life.

Not that scientists’ relative neglect of such actions is surprising, he allows: Biologists focus on processes in physiology or genetics; social scientists consider environmental influences on behavior; physicians treat such symptoms as sneezes or coughs but seldom study them. But those same acts suggest ways to understand the functioning of the human brain, and how it differs from that of other species, suggests the author.

Why is it, for example, that yawning and other behaviors, including laughter, are contagious? That reveals a role for yawning in not only registering fatigue, but also in the development of human sociality and empathy, he writes.

ADVERTISEMENT

His chapter on the yawn typifies his approach in others. He analyzes yawns’ physical characteristics—they resemble slow sneezes, and like sneezes are akin to orgasms, demonstrating that multiple innate acts tap a similar neuromuscular substrate and have a common evolutionary course. An ancient one, apparently. Virtually all vertebrates yawn, suggesting that it is “a relic of our developmental and evolutionary past.”

So contagious are yawns that “simply discussing yawns triggers yawns.” But his experiments have shown that it is not the yawning open mouth that triggers yawns in others, but rather “our neurological yawn detector responds to the overall pattern of the yawning face, including the squinting eyes.”

Mentioning yawning will induce yawning in test subjects in 92 percent of cases within 30 minutes. Reading about yawning for five minutes induces yawning in 20 percent of test subjects during the five minutes, versus 11 percent for a control group who read about hiccupping. “It’s amusing to see one-half of a large lecture class yawning while the other half is not,” he observes.

Evidence that yawning contagion is a factor in the development and evolution of sociality and perhaps empathy comes from consideration of “mirror neurons” in the human brain, he says. Those seem to play a role in imitation, intuition, empathy, language, and realizing that others have minds, too. He speculates that yawning could relate to synchronizing bedtime among members of tribes—it can transform group members into a “collective super-organism.”

Provine similarly analyzes tickling, which appears linked to various forms of play, including sex. It is related, then, to laughter, the sound of physical play—laughter is a form of primal, primate onomatopoeia in which patterns of expired air are harnessed to signal playfulness.

ADVERTISEMENT

More generally, tickling—whether of the pleasurable or intrusive variety—serves as a neurological mechanism for allowing individuals to differentiate themselves from others, which in evolutionary terms would have been crucial for the emergence of personality and social life. He also suggests that it provides “the starting point of programming personhood into robots.”

As for laughter, its suggestive dimensions include that it requires bipedality—walking upright. Bipedality frees the thorax of its role of supporting the skeleton. Humans, unlike chimpanzees, for example, can breathe less often than they stride, and that permits them to use air in their lungs to make such sounds as laughter. Laughter, in that sense, appears to have been a step along the path to the evolution of speech.

Provine says he began his studies of often-marginalized, mundane human behaviors when he tired of inserting electrodes into nerve cells in a laboratory, but wished to retain rigorous approaches in what he calls a “sidewalk neuroscience” mode of inquiry. Cheaply and simply, he observed such subjects as graduate students, for example—to track their behaviors.

While akin to Freud’s study of the unconscious, or B.F. Skinner’s attention to how people behave rather than claim about their motives, Provine’s analysis of shared, instinctive behaviors owes much to ethology. That evolutionarily based, biological study of behavior, championed by the European researchers Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Karl von Frisch, “is more concerned with the adaptive (evolutionary) significance of behavior than is typical of American psychology, with its greater focus on learning, environmental influences, and carefully controlled laboratory experiments,” Provine writes.

Focusing on phenomena that offer insights into how the brain produces and controls behavior, including primal social behavior, he writes, it “reminds us that we are sometimes unaware, neurologically programmed herd animals.”

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Peter Monaghan
Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Marva Johnson is set to take the helm of Florida A&M University this summer.
Leadership & governance
‘Surprising': A DeSantis-Backed Lobbyist Is Tapped to Lead Florida A&M
Students and community members protest outside of Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, on Tuesday, April 23, 2024.
Campus Activism
One Year After the Encampments, Campuses Are Quieter and Quicker to Stop Protests
Hoover-NBERValue-0516 002 B
Diminishing Returns
Why the College Premium Is Shrinking for Low-Income Students
Harvard University
'Deeply Unsettling'
Harvard’s Battle With Trump Escalates as Research Money Is Suddenly Canceled

From The Review

Glenn Loury in Providence, R.I. on May 7, 2024.
The Review | Conversation
Glenn Loury on the ‘Barbarians at the Gates’
By Evan Goldstein, Len Gutkin
Illustration showing a valedictorian speaker who's tassel is a vintage microphone
The Review | Opinion
A Graduation Speaker Gets Canceled
By Corey Robin
Illustration showing a stack of coins and a university building falling over
The Review | Opinion
Here’s What Congress’s Endowment-Tax Plan Might Cost Your College
By Phillip Levine

Upcoming Events

Ascendium_06-10-25_Plain.png
Views on College and Alternative Pathways
Coursera_06-17-25_Plain.png
AI and Microcredentials
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin