Dusting Off The Cobwebs

Yes, it's true:  Culture Dish is still alive under all the dust and cobwebs that have accumulated since my last post.  The good news:  My book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is finished and headed toward publication (which is why Culture Dish went on hiatus), and I'll be back to blogging soon.  I'll also be launching a new website at rebeccaskloot.com as well as giving Culture Dish a serious makeover.  First step:  It's moving to ScienceBlogs.  Stay tuned for more information, including a link to the new blog location once it's up and running ...

Blog Down Time

As anyone who's visited this blog in the last many months has noticed: Culture Dish has been sleeping. Teaching, freelancing, column writing, book work, travel and blogging over at Critical Mass have left little time for personal blogging lately. But I'll be starting up a pets blog for Prevention Magazine soon -- a companion blog for my monthly column there -- so stay tuned for more information about that. And once my book hits stores, I'll be back blogging on my own as well.

In the meantime, those interested in following my freelance work can find stories on my website. Those interested in reading my pets column can do so on this page, which I update monthly. And poke around here on Culture Dish -- there's lots to see.

On The Road Again

For those wondering why my blog has been so quiet lately, here's why: I've accepted a faculty position at The University of Memphis, where I'm moving in exactly two weeks (which explains why I've had this great song stuck in my head for months). I'm really excited about the move (the food! the music! the Reverend Al Green! Elvis! the mississippi delta! huge fenced-in backyard for the dogs! kool-aid pickles!?), and about working with such great writers in the MFA program there, where I'll teach creative nonfiction. The plan at this point: Live in Memphis during the academic year, and spend the rest of the year back in NYC and in my native Portland, Oregon.

The hiring process, combined with deadlines, teaching at NYU, and my work with the National Book Critics Circle have left this poor blog a little quiet. That will likely continue through the summer as I settle and get my book ready to go out into the world. But stay tuned for all kinds of interesting Memphis stories ...

Catching Up

I just got back from several weeks of writing stories in hotel rooms and speaking at the 412 festival in Pittsburgh (pictured left, with Michael Rosenwald and Daniel Nester, talking about freelancing) and the Nieman Narrative Nonfiction conference in Boston, where I spoke about freelancing, writer/editor relationships, and narrative science journalism (including a panel with the wonderful Michael Pollan). The highlight of Nieman for me: hanging with Joe Sacco and Stacy Sullivan and finally getting to meet Marc Abrahams (I must hear the end of that story, Marc!)

Because of all my travels, the blog has been a bit quiet. To catch up a bit, here's a quick round-up of things I've been wanting to post about:

* A doctor in New York got the go-ahead to do the first ever womb transplant, which I find amazing: Elective organ transplantation for a non life-saving organ? No thank you.

* After a few scandals and a congressional investigation, the National Institutes of Health has finally tightened their ethics rules to restrict researchers' abilities to earn money from outside sources. As a result, a new survey says, though 73% of NIH researchers believe those new rules will increase the credibility of the organization, almost 40% say they're looking for new jobs because of the tighter restrictions.

* A group of children born as part of "Font of Life," -- the project Hitler developed to create a breed of people that fit his idea of the perfect human (blond hair, blue eyes, non-Jewish, etc) -- met for the first time as adults recently, to talk about the trauma they've experienced over their origins.

* The Chinese have admitted what experts have known for some time but haven't been able to prove: That they take organs from prisoners for transplantation, and Americans buy them on the black market.

* And a study found that elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror. How scientists figured this out is pretty fascinating, though it always frustrates me when researchers seem shocked to find that animals are just as intelligent/feeling/whatever as we are...

Speaking of Dr. Seuss ...

In an earlier post, I mentioned that tomorrow is the anniversary of Dr. Seuss's death. Well ... Thanks to Boing Boing, I just came across another Dr. Seuss fact very worth mentioning: The Dr. Seuss Taxidermy Collection (!), which is an absolutely fabulous thing. From the gallery's website:

"Seuss embarked on an ingenious project in the early 1930s as he evolved from two-dimensional artworks to three-dimensional sculptures. What was most unusual for these mixed-media sculptures was the use of real animal parts including beaks, antlers and horns from deceased Forest Park Zoo animals where Seuss’s father was superintendent. Unorthodox Collection of Taxidermy was born in a cramped New York apartment and included a menagerie of inventive creatures with names like the “Two Horned Drouberhannis,” “Andulovian Grackler,” and “Semi-Normal Green-Lidded Fawn.” Shortly after Seuss created this unique collection of artworks, Look Magazine dubbed Seuss “The World’s Most Eminent Authority on Unheard-Of Animals.” To this day, Seuss’s Unorthodox Collection of Taxidermy remains as some of the finest examples of his inventive and multi-dimensional creativity."

In case anyone is feeling generous, I thought I should mention: I would like any or all of the taxidermy collection for my birthday, which also happens to be tomorrow. ;-)

His secret art collection is quite wonderful too. Given my current status as a writer actively worrying about her book, my personal favorite is certainly, "Self Portrait of an Artist Worrying About His Next Book," pictured right, which really nails it. The book he was worrying about when he painted this: "Green Eggs and Ham."

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

It's that time again: Tomorrow, September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Japanese Respect for the Aged day ... and my birthday. It also happens to be the day Giles Corey was "pressed" to death by villagers who stacked increasingly large rocks on him because he'd been declared a wich in the famous Salem Witch Trials (1692). It was the day women were finally allowed to vote (1893) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid committed their first robbery (1900). It's the anniversary of the first underground nuclear bomb test and the Dodgers last game at Ebbets Field (1957), where they beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0 (fortunately, my father was watching the Dodgers game that day, not the nuclear bomb test). Khruschev was banned from Disneyland on September 19 (1959), 155 people died when a Boeing 747 collided with a mountain in Turkey (1976) and 171 died when their DC-10 was decimated by a terrorist's bomb over the Tunuru Desert in Niger (1989), which probably explains my life-long fear of flying.

September 19th is the day Twiggy was born, which has always made me happy, and the day Red Fox died, which has always made me sad. This may explain why the Sanford and Son theme is one of my all time favorite songs. It's also the day Scott Fahlman posted the first recorded emoticon :-) to the internet (1982), which I like, and an earthquake in Mexico killed thousands (1985), which I don't like. Hurricaine Hugo hit South Carolina (1980), the Guelb El-Kebir massacre hit Algeria (1997), a couple of German tourists discovered Otzi the Iceman, and hours later, death took Dr. Seuss (1991), otherwise known as Theodor Seuss Geisel, who drew animated insects for a bug spray company before he became Dr. Seuss the childrens book author. He also penned many a brilliant and bizarre political cartoon. And September 19th isn't our only connection: Dr. Seuss was born in Springfield, MA; I was born in Springfield, IL. And, as many people have pointed out over the years, my last name sounds very much like the name of a Dr. Seuss character.

Organizing Bookshelves

I just posted this at Critical Mass, but had to post it here too, in part to explain why this blog has been quiet lately: Jay Parini has a fun essay in the current Chronicle of Education about his obsession with other people's bookshelves, and the secrets that lurk behind them: "A personal library is an X-ray of the owner's soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements."

Reading that made me laugh: Over the years, my father and I have had endless discussions about the organization of our bookshelves, which we change all the time, usually when we're supposed to be doing something else, like finishing a story for a presssing deadline. Currently, mine is organized by genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, with trinkets separating each genre -- a stone gargoyle, a picture of my nephew, a small rubber brain), then by category within genre (science, general nonfiction, memoir, etc, which gets tricky when books fall in more than one category), then alphabetical by author within each category. Those books stand one next to the other on the shelf, but I have special categories within each category for subjects I plan to write about someday -- those books lie flat, stacked one on top of the other, also alphabetized by author.

So I read Parini's essay and thought, someone looking at my bookshelves will immediately learn three things about me: I'm a science nerd, I'll someday write about Appalachia and memory and tattoos, and I probably have a borderline case of OCD, which I clearly inherited from my father, whose shelves are even more intricately organized than mine.

Parini's essay was quite timely for me, because this week I start putting all my books in boxes (alphabetically and categorized) because I'm moving and leaving my wall of built-in shelves behind (that, combined with a big story deadline, explains the quiet blog). This is exciting, because it means I have to buy new bookshelves, which means I have to re-organize my books by shelf as well as category and author ... It's all about perfectly organized chaos.

Blackberry Addiction 'Similar to Drugs'

They don't call them crackberries for nothin: A study just out from Rutgers University says those Blackberry email devices you see attached to everyone's hips (including mine) "can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users," and that Blackberries are "fuelling a rise in email and internet addiction, with sufferers able to survive only a few minutes without checking for new mail." Reports on the study call Blackberries "seriously damaging to mental health," and offer this as a diagnostic aid: "One key sign of a user being addicted is if they focus on their Blackberry ignoring those around them." Professor Gayle Porter, the scientist who lead the study, says becoming Blackberry addicted can be "devastating." And they say someday soon, we may start seeing lawsuits over this.

It's certainly true that our culture has become email-obsessed to a pathological degree. But I don't think Blackberries are the problem. I actually think they can be part of the solution. I spend far far far (far) too much time dealing with email. It's safe to say I get several hundred emails a day. For years, many of the messages I've written started with the sentence, Sorry for my slow response, but [insert excuse here, usually it's I was out of town and my inbox is now filled with hundreds of unanswered messages I'm wading through]. Because of all this, I was worried about getting my new Blackberry. I knew it might take over my life. But in fact, it's liberated me: I now don't have to wade through hundreds of unanswered emails when I come home from traveling, because I can respond to them while I'm away. Before I got a Blackberry, I spent about half of each day responding to emails, but now sometimes I go all day without even turning on my email program (because I can see if any important emails arrive with my Blackberry and ignore the rest), which allows me to focus on my writing when I'm at my computer instead of my emailing. Plus, the Blackberry forces me to keep my responses short and fast, because you can only type so much on those tiny keyboards. So honestly, I feel like the Blackberry has helped fix my email problem.

It's true, some people might find it strange that I email while dog-walking, or that I often exchange 20 or more emails a day with one particular friend -- who shall remain nameless -- and that we've been known to do this when we're both sitting in the same room. People might find it suspicious that, after this same friend convinced me to buy my Blackberry and helped me pick it out via telephone from hundreds of miles away, he started sending regular emails saying things like, "how is your berry?" and "don't you just love your blackberry," to which I always responded, "yes" within seconds. Recently, on a particularly Blackberry-heavy day, we both noted that we seemed to be developing tendonitis in our thumbs. But we've agreed: We're not addicted. Our Blackberries have helped us get our lives back (we've been emailing like this for years, now we just spend less time at our desks doing so). This morning, another good friend -- who shall also remain nameless, but who I'll call "Dinty" -- forwarded this article with a note saying he's, "consumed by guilt" over over the fact that he and our other friends have become "classic 'enablers" by not taking our blackberries and locking them away. But he has nothing to worry about: He sent that email nearly an hour ago and I have even replied yet. I'm so not Blackberry addicted! What more proof could a person possibly need?!

A Bit of Teaching News

I'm very excited to report that I've just taken a position teaching in NYU's graduate Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, otherwise known as SHERP. So starting in January, I'll be teaching their Writing and Reporting Workshop, (it's one class that's offered every-other semester).

And speaking of teaching, I'll also be teaching and speaking at several conferences in the coming months: The Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference at Goucher College in August, the Penn Writers Conference and the beautiful writers' house at Washington College in October, then the Nieman Narrative Nonfiction Conference in Boston and the 412 Creative Nonfiction Festival in Pittsburgh in November. I look forward to them all.

On The Road Again

I’m back at my West Virginia writing retreat putting finishing touches on my book, so my blog will be a little quiet for a while: I can get email on my Blackberry, but I don’t have internet access unless I drive into the nearby town and go online at Baristas or the local library (which is the whole point of being here – distraction free writing time!). I won’t be back in New York and posting regularly again until mid-August. But I will be posting periodically until then.

On A Personal Note: Why My Blog Will Be Quiet For a While

In my post last week, I mentioned that my grandmother died recently (thanks to all who sent condolences). I just got back from her funeral and learned that one of my best friends has fallen into a coma-like state at the age of 41-- doctors originally thought it was from encephalitis, but now have no idea what's causing it. So I'm headed out of town again, this time to the intensive care unit to be with my friend -- a wonderful writer, teacher, and friend (that's us in the photo; she's on the left).

This is why my posts have been so brief (instead of my usual more detailed ones listed under recent favorites below and to the right). It also explains why I'll be offline for a while again. More when I return ...

A Personal Update and Interesting Stuff

My blog has been a bit quite for the last few days because my 95 year-old grandmother died, and I've been busying myself with her funeral and lots of time with family. My grandmother (who my father has written about in several books) was theatrical, and she loved Broadway like nothing else, so we memorialized her by seeing a smashing performance of Spamalot. And now, as I head out of town for a few days with the family, I leave you with these thoughts:

It's finally legal to get a tattoo in Oklahoma (I had no idea it was illegal!)

Mixologists are throwing science at alcohol with some crazy (and surely expensive) results

Abstinence only advocates are causing problems again

A non-profit organization has launched a website that assigns grades to health stories that appear in the press -- I have to check it out more when I get back to town. I'm curious about who runs the place ...

And the New York Times ran a creepy story that introduces a new extreme strategy for protecting yourself and your family from genetic discrimination -- stealing your own medical records. It'd be much safer and more effective to enact those laws people keep talking about that would make genetic discrimination illegal.

That's all for now, our regularly scheduled blogging will return next week ...

Critical Mass: My Other Blog Life

About a week ago, I launched Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, where I'm on the board of directors. It's been a serious labor of love, so I'm excited to see it alive and thriving (we're already getting thousands of hits a day). I'll be posting at Critical Mass with a team of other bloggers, all fellow NBCC board members -- we're all professional writers, critics and book review editors, and judges of the yearly NBCC awards. Critical Mass will feature publishing and criticism news and commentary, noteworthy book reviews, tips, useful products, and anything else that catches our attention.

I won't be posting any less here -- I'll just be posting there too, as will several great writers. So check it out, spread the word (and look at how cute our new mascot is!) ...

A Sad Day for Science Writers: Laura Van Dam's Obituary

Laura Van Dam was amazing; a tireless advocate of science writing and science writers, a brilliant woman -- she died this week after fighting lymphoma for years. This is a huge loss to science writing, and the many people like me who counted her as a friend. I just visited the website for the National Association of Science Writers -- which Laura was president of until her death. NASW members have posted incredible comments about Laura that really show the amazing impact she's had ... so many wonderful writers and reporters (Laurie Garrett, Joe Palca, Deborah Blum, Natalie Angier, Robin Marantz Henig, and on and on) credit Laura for encouraging -- and in some cases discovering -- them and their work. As do I. Laura and I spent many hours talking about my articles and my book over the years: She encouraged me when I hit hard spots, pushed me to write the best book I could, believed in it and me even when others didn't. The tragedy of young death robbing everyone of such a bright future applies to Laura in spades.

Her approach to the end was amazing and thoughtful. About two months ago, she called me to talk about her death. She hoped it wouldn't come for a few more years, because she desperately wanted to see her son off to college. Laura's own mother died after Laura went away to school; she knew that would probably be easier for him than the alternative. But she also knew the end might happen sooner than that. We talked for almost two hours about life and death, about living with brain damage (my father has written quite a bit about his own experience with brain damage, and Laura's illness caused extensive brain damage). All I can say is, Laura was one amazing woman many many people will miss -- those who knew her will miss her energy, her excitement and brilliance. Those who didn't know her will miss everything she did behind the scenes for the science writers of the world.

If you're an NASW member, I urge you to read the tributes to her on the NASW site. Her obituary and the many responses to it are there:

"An independent book editor, Laura spent many years as a senior editor with Houghton-Mifflin, where she specialized in books related to science, technology, medicine, and health. She worked with authors including Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography), Daniel Schacter (The Seven Sins of Memory), J. Richard Gott (Time Travel Through Einstein's Universe), and Steve Olson (Mapping Human History, a National Book Award finalist) ... Laura served as a senior editor with the MIT publication Technology Review and as a newspaper reporter.

She is survived by her husband, Howard Saxner, and son, David Saxner. A memorial service is planned for Sunday, April 30, at 2 p.m. at the First Parish Unitarian Church, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. Donations may be made in Laura's name to the Pappas Center for Neuro-Oncology c/o Massachusetts General Hospital, Development Office, 165 Cambridge St., Suite 600, Boston, MA 02114."

There's also a wonderful detailed obituary in the Boston Globe.

Happy travels, Laura ... we'll miss you.

Moleskine Mania

Oh no!! I, like many writers (including, at one point, Hemingway) am addicted to Moleskine notebooks. I carry several at all times: One for story ideas, another for my to-do lists and calendar type things. Plus I have one next to my bed for writing thoughts in the middle of the night, and another on my desk for taking notes during phone conversations (even with my family -- it's a hazard of my profession). They're slick, not-too-expensive, perfectly sized, sturdy ... they've gained nearly cult status among writers (and everyone else, apparently).

The owner of the company that makes Moleskines, who is now 69 years old, just announced that he's put Moleskine up for sale. He said: "Moleskine is growing very quickly and it is becoming too big for us. We do not have the capacity to follow it through."

At this point, the Moleskine is so successful, surely someone will snatch it up. That someone just better not change a damn thing about those notebooks! Just the thought of that makes me want to pull a Bruce Chatwin -- when the company that produced Moleskines went bankrupt in the 80s, Chatwin, a travel writer, ran out and bought 100 of them. Right about now, I'm tempted to do the same. My only question is, Why just 100?

Tips on Freelancing and Getting Published

People often contact me asking for advice on getting published, breaking in as a freelancer, coming up with story ideas, you name it. I've often told myself I'd come up with a FAQ page, or maybe even write a short book on the topic, but I've never had time. So I'm very pleased to say that Elaine Vitone, an MFA student in the University of Pittsburgh's nonfiction writing program (where I went to grad school, and where I was a visiting teacher last semester) has taken several handouts I wrote, combined them with a lengthy phone interview she did with me, and turned them into a great sort of Conversation With Rebecca Skloot. The document will be available soon as part of a guidebook for writing students in Pitt's graduate program. I'm posting it here with hopes that it will provide useful information for those who contact me seeking tips. Many thanks to Elaine for putting it together.

On The Line - A New Play

I'm very excited to say that my boyfriend David Prete and our good friends Joe Roland and John Zibell have just launched a website for their new and fabulous Off-Broadway play, On The Line, which will be at the historic Cherry Lane Theater this April. As they describe it, "The play explores what happens when three lifelong friends take on management, the union and ultimately each other when a strike wreaks havoc on their working class town. Along the way they have to negotiate mobs of angry first graders, bat wielding bartenders, no-neck coroporate shills, and the North American Free Trade Agreement."

It's being put on by Mike Nichols (academy award winning director of The Graduate, Angels in America, Closer, Spamalot) and produced by Bill Haber and Bob Boyette (producers of Spamalot and many other amazing things). So check out the website, go see the play ... it'll be amazing: www.onthelinetheplay.com

Of Note: The Economics of Obesity

My friend Mike Rosenwald just published a very creepy story called Why America Has to be Fat, about the economics of obesity:

"I am fat," he writes. "Sixty pounds too hefty, in my doctor's opinion. Probably 80 pounds, in my fiancee's view. Being fat makes me a lot of things -- a top contender for type II diabetes, for instance, or a heart attack, or stroke, maybe even a replacement knee or hip. My girth also puts me in familiar company, with about two-thirds of the U.S. population now considered overweight. But in many ways, my being fat also makes me pretty good for the economy."

His story makes the case that the boom in the US economy following the Depression helped cause our current obesity epidemic, and that obesity now actually helps fuel our economy:

"The obesity problem is really a side effect of things that are good for the economy," said Tomas J. Philipson, an economics professor who studies obesity at the University of Chicago, a city recently named the fattest in America. "But we would rather take improvements in technology and agriculture than go back to the way we lived in the 1950s when everyone was thin. Nobody wants to sweat at work for 10 hours a day and be poor. Yes, you're obese, but you have a life that is much more comfortable."

[To which I say, As if those are the only two options: sweat at work and be thin but poor, or have a comfortable work life and be fat?! Please!]

"For many corporations, and even for physicians, Americans' obesity has also fattened the bottom line. William L. Weis, a management professor at Seattle University, says revenue from the "obesity industries" will likely top $315 billion this year, and perhaps far more. That includes $133.7 billion for fast-food restaurants, $124.7 billion for medical treatments related to obesity, and $1.8 billion just for diet books -- all told, nearly 3 percent of the overall U.S. economy."

Never mind the gazillions of dollars obesity-related illnesses cost in health care, disability payments and diminished workforces. People are cashing in on obesity, and those people certainly aren't obese ...

On Writing: Baltimore Review Interview

I often get emails from writers asking for tips on breaking into magazine writing or making the leap to becoming a full time freelancer. I keep promising myself I'm going to put together a Frequently Asked Questions page as a resource (I actually plan to write a book about this stuff at some point), but my writing schedule has been particularly hectic lately. So, for now, I thought I'd post a link to a recent Baltimore Review interview, where writer Heather Harris asks me about writing, getting published, and more. The answers are very condensed, but some of them touch on points folks may find useful.

It starts with this hilarious (and undeniably true) first line: "Talking with Rebecca Skloot is like sticking your head out the window of a car moving at 70 miles per hour." What can I say ... I've been accused of being a fast-talking whirlwind since I was three. And riding with your head out the window is fun (see above). So I thank her for that, and for making me younger in print than I am in life -- can't complain about that.

On Writing: Contagious Yawning (and celebrity Teeth and Unpopped Popcorn)

Today the New York Times Magazine published three short stories of mine as part of their annual Year in Ideas issue -- a catalogue of interesting ideas from 2005. This issue is always a blast to write for: Last year I got to write about Eyeball Jewelry and one man's quest to Make The National Anthem Singable. This year it's Why Certain Popcorn Kernels Won't Pop, and People Who Want celebrities' Teeth and Why Yawning is Contagious.

The yawning story, which was probably the most interesting one, had to be short for space reasons, so there was a lot I couldn't go into: The scientist I wrote about, Steve Platek, is actually interested in using contagious yawning to study the evolution of human consciousness, which is completely fascinating and at points mind-boggling abstract.

Platek, as the story explains, has found that contagious yawning has to do with empathy: The more empathetic you are, the more likely you are to relate to a yawner and experience a yawn yourself. The way this relates to consciousness is almost counter intuitive: The neural pathways involved in empathy are the same pathways involved in self-awareness, because we empathize with people by tapping into our own experiences. Self-awareness gives us a reference point for empathizing with people: You fall down on the sidewalk and get embarrassed, and I feel embarrassed for you because my brain remembers a time when I felt the same.

Yawning exists in all living creatures: Insects, fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, you name it. But contagious yawning only exists (as far as scientists know) in humans and certain "higher primates" that have been shown to have "empathetic abilities." (Don't get me started on this idea that some animals are self-aware and others aren't -- I have issues with that, but I won't go into it here.) The way Platek sees it, at some point in evolution, certain brains -- specifically those of humans and some primates -- evolved a level of consciousness that allowed them to experience empathy (and therefore contagious yawns), and other brains didn't.

"In trying to understand something like the evolution of the self, of consciousness and empathy," Platek told me, "we need specific tests for it. We can't use Petri dishes and microscopes to see these things, so we have to develop creative ways of looking for evidence that they exist." Which is precisely what contagious yawning is, Platek says. It's a cue that a brain has a level of self-consciousness that makes "empathetic mechanisms" possible.

Platek and I had a great time talking about yawning. When we got to this point in the conversation I said, Wait a minute ... You're saying you can study consciousness by looking at yawning? To which he said, Yep, that's right: "Contagious yawning is a way for science to have a window into understanding the basic neural mechanism that may have given rise to the evolution of consciousness, or what we call the human condition." Then he paused.

"Whoa," I said, "that's heavy."

"I know," he whispered, laughing. "I was just thinking the same thing: It's weird. We were talking about yawning and now I'm talking about consciousness!? But that's where it all came from, so that's what happens. You talk about yawning, you end up at consciousness. "

Who knew studying yawning could be so useful. And there's more: Certain types of brain damage can cause people to suddenly lose their empathethic abilities, so contagious yawning can serve as a test to see if your brain is functioning normally. Yawning is also a very curious (and little understood) side effect of certain drugs -- especially impotence drugs, which has led one researcher to investigate the connection between sexuality and yawning. Then there's scizophrenia (as I mentioned in my last post): Platek uses people with schizophrenicenic tendencies to study contagious yawning -- since schizophreniaenia interferes with empathetic abilities, it can make people immune to contagious yawns.

Clearly, I could go on and on about yawning. And I will with a longer story soon. But until then, I'll end with this: You want evidence that yawning is contagious? Just do a google images search for "yawn" and start looking through the pictures ...