So what... He has looked at how "believing in God affects our brains" - his idea that yawning could be a good thing is still valid and interesting.
He is a neuroscience professor (but then we'll fall into "Appeal To Authority"). Anyhow, I think we should stick for what he is saying now, and not what he has said or researched in the past.
To me it sounds a lot like a title fabricated to sell more books. According to the Amazon review, he also writes about techniques that atheists can use that have similar effects.
He just seems to be good at marketing - the "yawn" article seems to be another incarnation of that. I remember all sorts of newspapers picking up the "belief affects the brain" stuff, and yawning makes a good story, too.
If he has done experiments and research to see how belief of God affects the brain, then his approach could be scientific and he may even conclude that belief in God affects the brains of partitioners. Reading on Wikipedia he has also researched "non God" religions such as Buddhism - - and he has found out that stuff like meditation (and praying) affects the partitioner's brain.
And really, as somebody has noted it above: it's very plausible that belief changes our brains, given that most humans throughout our history have had belief. And research in belief is _very_ interesting and might put light on why most of the humans today believe in something.
It irks me that while the story is interesting and potentially inspiring, the idea that this guy has a god fixation means I have to disregard it. Why don't these people do double blind studies (in this case with MRI) to find out if what they are saying is actually true rather and just post as if it was true.
I've always found yawning very intriguing, and how people often get triggered to yawn as others around them are yawning. And how I just yawned at the thought of that!
Ditto for me, especially on squats. About 8 seconds after my first lift in a set, the lack of oxygen hits me hard: I first yawn and then begin breathing faster. This is when going straight into the squats with no warmup whatsoever.
It could be that your heart rate increases (exertion, nerves) and this is your body's way of increasing oxygen in the system. That'd be my guess, anyway.
I was always told by biology teachers and such, from junior highschool up to college professors that yawning is stimulated by a decrease in oxygen in the brain. A decrease in oxygen can be related to a number of things, one being exercise (which will reduce overall body oxygenation), another being concentration (certain areas of your brain can locally reduce its oxygen levels by working more than normal, likely when you shift from using one area of your brain to another), another is tiredness due to reduced respiration and heart rates, and finally by waking up as your body tries to increase its oxygenation levels to cope with rapidly increasing demands (this can be effected by what state of sleep you're in: light, deep or REM; typically deep sleep would cause the most yawning when being woken up from).
I'd certainly believe you could induce yawning from anaerobic exercise. If it was induced by aerobic exercise, I'd say you're not doing the exercise properly!
