News release – We are proud to announce the First International Conference on Yawning. These two days meetings bring together leading international speakers to review both emerging information and its convergence with current understanding. . .

Yawning is a very common and phylogenetically old behavioral event that occurs in vertebrates under different conditions. Yawning appeared very early in vertebrate history, with contagiousness evolving much later.

Yawning has many consequences, including opening of the eustachian tube, tearing, inflating the lungs, stretching and signaling drowsiness, but these may be incidental to its primal function which may something as unanticipated as sculpting the articulation of the gaping jaw during embryonic development.

Selecting a single function from the many options may be an unrealistic goal. However, reviewing the disparate facts, we may be impressed that yawning is associated with the change of behavioral state wakefulness to sleep, sleep to wakefulness, alertness to boredom, threshold of attack, sexual arousal, switching from one kind of activity to another.

The speakers list includes Wolter Seuntjens, who spent more than two decades in graduate school studying yawning. . .