Contagiousness

This past week, I began reading The Tipping Point, by Malcom Gladwell. This book, is subtitled, "How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference." In the introduction, Gladwell discusses, contagiousness, but he wants us to look at it in a different light than just things like Swine Flu. I think we've become better at this. We now say someone may have a contagious laugh or attitude. It's a positive thing. Now, I'm not going to go all cerebral on you here, because even though the point in the excerpt below is well made, I couldn't help but laugh while reading it. See if you find humor in it...or perhaps it may just make you sleepy....

A world that follows the rules of epidemics is a very different place from the world we think we live in now. Think, for a moment, about the concept of contagiousness. If I say that word to you, you think of colds and the flu or perhaps something very dangerous like H.I.V. or Ebola. We have, in our minds, a very specific, biological, notion of what contagiousness means. But if there can be epidemics of crime or epidemics of fashion, there must be all kinds of things just as contagious as viruses. Have you ever thought about yawning, for instance? Yawning is a surprisingly powerful act. Just by reading the two yawns in the previous two sentences--and the two additional yawns in this sentence--a good number of you will probably yawn within the next few minutes. Even as I'm writing this I've yawned twice. If you're reading this in a public place, and you've just yawned, chances are that a good proportion of everyone who saw you yawn is now yawning too, and a good proportion of the people watching the people who watched you yawn are now yawning as well, and on and on, in a ever-widening, yawning circle.

Yawning is incredibly contagious. I made some of you reading this yawn simply by writing the word "yawn". The people who yawned when they saw you yawn, meanwhile, were infected by the sight of you yawning--which is a second kind of contagion. They might even have yawned if they only heard you yawn, because yawning is also aurally contagious: if you play an audio-tape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too. And finally, if you yawned as you read this, did the thought cross your mind--however unconsciously and fleetingly--that you might be tired? I suspect that for some of you it did, which means that yawns can also be emotionally contagious. Simply by writing the word, I can plant a feeling in your mind. Can the flu virus do that? Contagiousness, in other words, is an unexpected property of all kinds of things, and we have to remember that if we are to recognize and diagnose epidemic change.

OK, maybe it's not that funny. As a matter of fact, I'm bushed. Goodnight.