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If You Yawn Because People Around You Are Doing It, You Have a Weak Brain

On this week's Macrodosing, we discussed some of the historical phenomena attributed to mass hysteria. There's villages having laughing fits for weeks, the Salem Witch Trials, people saying the saw the Sun zig-zag in the sky and all sorts of other wild events.

In the course of the episode, we set out to send our listeners into a bit of mass hysteria ourselves by talking about yawning. And we received plenty of tweets from people letting us know it actually worked.

Here's my thing about all this "mass hysteria" though: if you allow yourself to be tricked into some sort of nonsense like laughing uncontrollably for days at a time, or even just yawning because you heard someone yawn on a podcast, you have a tiny brain. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules.

As soon as we started talking yawns, I scanned the room to see who was going to crack. Billy trotted out his patented take with no evidence that's likely inaccurate about how if you don't yawn when somebody else does, it means you're a psychopath. No, Billy, it means you're someone capable of thinking for himself.

Mass hysteria is just reading way too much into weak-minded people. If you start meowing like a cat because other nuns in a convent are doing it, you were always dumb and easy to trick, it just hadn't been tested yet.

I'm very sorry to all the sympathy yawners out there. You still have time to re-train your brain.