Years ago, when I was in graduate school, I wrote a paper called "It Started with a Yawn." I noticed that when people got together and one person yawned, others yawned within seconds afterwards. Some researchers have claimed that yawning could control brain temperature so that it does not reach extremes.

A team of researchers led by Andrew Gallup of Princeton University analyzed the pattern of yawning in people during winters and summers and found that a significantly higher number of participants yawned in the winter then they did during summers. This led the researchers to think that yawning must be serving the purpose of regulating brain temperature so that it stays within permissible limits.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience, the study is said to have involved 160 people from Tucson and another 80 from Arizona in both the seasons.

I Observe and I Am Curious...

Since I was young, I have been watching, noticing and wondering why people yawn. I have noticed that people yawn together. When someone yawns, others around them often yawn as well. It is as though they are mimicking each other.

I've also noticed that people yawn when someone they are talking with 'talks for a long time' about a complex subject that they are not fully following. 'Metaphorically it's like communicating "enough, I can't hold that much information in my brain." or "I can't understand what you are saying - I can't grasp it all."

I am curious about the connection between "yawning to regulate temperature" and "people yawning together" - either as a mimicking response or as a possible overload response.

In the case of Overload ... Angelika Dimoka, a neuroscientist from Temple University Fox School of Business has been studying overload and decision-making. 

In her study, researchers gave people a bidding task with lots of information to work with in order to make their decisions. As the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off as if a circuit breaker had popped." The bidders reached cognitive and information overload," says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision-making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain's emotion regions -previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC - run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. "With too much information, " says Dimoka, "people's decisions make less and less sense." (Newsweek, February 27, 2010, Sharon Beagley)

If we use this new information about cognitive overload, we can see that our whole brain state shifts when we are called upon to deal with and comprehend complex subjects. Overload causes us to shut down the parts of the brain needed to think.

Yawning may help restore a state of equilibrium. Breathing may slow our heart rate and enable us to get into a higher state of coherence. When we yawn, it's possible we are calling upon our ability to restore a state of clarity, openness and receptivity.

In the Case of Mimicking...Is Yawning Contagious?

While yawning is often associated with being tired and needing more oxygen in the bloodstream, people yawn for many reasons including stress, boredom, emotion and over-work.

Yawning together with others suggests another fascinating principle about human behavior. Yawning may be contagious. Is it possible that what triggers people to yawn together is a herding response - a subtle way to communicate group behavior - such as when one bird in a flock flies and the others follow the behavior of that one bird so they all rise together as a whole flock.

When one person yawns it appears to cause another person to yawn. Researchers have found that 40-60% of people who see a picture of someone yawning will yawn themselves. Even reading the word YAWN can make people yawn.

Maybe a yawn is a signal to the group that it's time to go to sleep. Or, if someone yawns when they're bored, it may be a sign to change the topic of conversation.

Yawning is not limited to humans. Animals of all types yawn. If you have a dog or cat, you've probably seen your pet yawn several times. Even some birds yawn, such as cockatiel parrots, Adelie penguins and Emperor penguins.

What we do know is that yawning helps replenish the levels of oxygen in the blood, and may help regulate our body temperature. The same chemicals in our brain that affect our moods and emotions also cause us to yawn.

Ancient Greeks started the ritual of covering your mouth when you yawn so that your soul does not escape!

Notice when people yawn ... what is going on in the conversation? What might trigger the need for more oxygen? Why might a deep breath be needed? Why is this conversation having such an impact at the deep visceral level?

Maybe there are times we need to breathe new life into a situation, a conversation or relationship. Think about it...notice it...reflect on it...and talk about it with others...it's a phenomenon of nature.

Want to learn more about contagious yawning? Check out this cool video from Discovery Channel's MythBusters.

Trust at the Moment of Contact
In my new book on trust, I talk about the most important social forces that are hardwired into our DNA and drive our 'humanity.' Whether we were around three thousand years ago, or we are living today, these forces guide our interactions with each other. We are still struggling to figure it out, to work it through, and to find ways to emerge more whole and more humanized as a global community. You can check out three sample chapters here.

Judith E. Glaser is the author of two best selling business books: Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking & Build a Healthy Thriving Organization - winner of the Bronze Award in the Leadership Category of the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards, and The DNA of Leadership; the DVD and Workshop titled The Leadership Secret of Gregory Goose; and editor and contributor of 42 Rule for Creating WE, an Amazon bestseller. Learn more about her online at: www.benchmarkcommunicationsinc.com.

Blind spots are ways that our mind becomes blocked from seeing reality as it is - blinding us from seeing the real truth about ourselves in relation to others. Once we form a conclusion, we become blind to alternatives, even if they are right in front of their eyes.

Emily Pronin, a social psychologist, along with colleagues Daniel Lin and Lee Ross, at Princeton University's Department of Psychology, created the term "blind spots."  The bias blind spot is named after the visual blind spot.

Passing the Ball

There is a classic experiment that demonstrates one level of blind spots that can be attributed to awareness and focused-attention. When people are instructed to count how many passes the people in white shirts make on the basketball court, they often get the number of passes correct, but fail to see the person in the black bear suit walking right in front of their eyes. Hard to believe but true!

Blind Spots & Denial

However, the story of blind spots gets more interesting when we factor in our cognitive biases that come from our social needs to look good in the eyes of others.

When people operate with blind spots, coupled with a strong ego, they often refuse to adjust their course even in the face of opposition from trusted advisors,  or incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.

Two well-known examples of blind spots are Henry Ford and A&P:

• Ford's success with the Model-T blinded him to the desires of his customers. That gave the fledging General Motors an opportunity to capture a winning share of the automobile market with a broader range of models and options.
• A&P stuck with the grocery chain's private label products even as their customers defected en masse to supermarkets that carried the national brands they saw advertised on TV.

Recovery

The good news is that companies can recover from denial; even when they seem permanently wedded to their histories, their philosophies, or their belief systems. IBM, which had been caught up in its own "bureau-pathology," learned to conquer arrogance and overcome its history and culture, under the leadership of Louis Gerstner.

Intel, DuPont, and Coca-Cola, are more examples of corporations caught in denial traps when launching new products. They demonstrated that when corporate management has strong convictions, or worse yet, hubris about their points of view, they can become blind to their customer's needs - needs that are right in front of their very eyes.

Seeing the real truth is an art and a science. When we get the balance right between what we think is true and what is really true - we are managing our blind spots with integrity, and wisdom.

Fortunately, these well-known brands did not live in denial very long. It was only a passing phase, and they recovered from it by revisiting reality with an open mind. Blind spots explain why the "smartest people in the room" (as Enron's top executives were famously called) can sometimes be very dumb. They do not see the light - they are not open to changing their minds.

The Power of Coaching to Dissolve Blind Spots

Denial and Blind spots are one of the primary reasons why Executive Coaching is so vital for leaders, and why peer coaching is equally important for employees to practice. Coaching can effectively uncover and deal with blind spots and denial and give the decision-makers a fresh perspective on how to handle executive challenges.

Coaching can also help individuals gain a broader and more 'realistic perspective' about situations and themselves. Executive, Team and Organizational Coaching can help leaders calibrate with the world around them, giving them reality checkpoints that position them  to navigate the real world with wisdom and insight.

From time to time, we all need a wake-up call to be sure that we do not allow ourselves to confuse our denial maps with the actual territory.

Check Yourself

Here are 7 Common Blind spots:

1. Denial of Reality - Feeling so strong about our own beliefs that we deny the beliefs of others, or deny facts right in front of our eyes.
2. Control - Seeing ourselves as being more responsible for things than we actually are, or having more control over things and events than we truly do.
3. Made-Up Memories - Making decisions based on memories that did not happen. Often we confuse our imaginations, or our dreams, with reality.  
4. Reality Distortions - Distorting reality to conform to preconceptions.
5. Know it All - Thinking that we know more than what we really do. (We simply don't know what we don't know.)
6. Listening Only to Validate What We Know -  Failure to listen to others.
7. Undervaluing What We Do Know - Listening too much to others, and allowing others' beliefs to talk us out of our beliefs; or in some cases cause us not to trust our instincts.

Neuro-tips: Removing Blind Spots 

Tip #1 - It Takes Thought to Learn
The brain does not always allow us to hear all the facts if they do not fit our prior understanding of a concept. To learn new facts, you must be actively open to accepting opposition.

Tip #2 - Effectively Working Together
Partners who were considered controlling were perceived as critical and rude, and their advice was generally rejected and not trusted. When the same partners showed appreciation, a feeling of rapport and trust developed, creating a deep 'WE-centric' bond.

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Judith E. Glaser is the Author of two best selling business books: Creating WE: Change I-Thinking to We-Thinking & Build a Healthy Thriving Organization - winner of the Bronze Award in the Leadership Category of the 2008 Axiom Business Book Awards, and The DNA of Leadership.