Celebrity Traitors: neuroscientist on whether you can really make someone yawn by faking it

By Stephen Jackson, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Nottingham

In the BBC reality show The Celebrity Traitors, the Traitors – James Acaster, Maya Jama and King Kenny – were set an unusual challenge: murder a Faithful by making them yawn. Their plan was to bore their target into yawning, then deliver the line “Am I boring you?” to seal the murder.

The task plays on one of yawning’s strangest features: its ability to spread from one person to another. Seeing someone yawn can be enough to trigger a yawn of your own, sometimes even when you are not tired. But would the same…

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