Why do we get hiccups?

I love hiccups. Absolutely adore them things.

Simply because they break down barriers and differences.

Just imagine this: You are in an all-important meeting chaired by THE BOSS who heads everything in your company and is revered as much as the Pope is. Halfway through the meeting, he starts hiccuping like an idiot. The next time you think of that boss, am sure your mental image would no longer return that dynamic guy. You might even smirk.

Such is the power of the hiccup in crashing barriers down. It is a small thing, but often entirely out of our control.

How does it happen? Here's a highly simplified version of the story...

Real estate in the human body is very limited. God had to design and implement this huge complex system within a very small area and volume. So he had to resort to extreme compression (see what happened to your kilometres-long intestines) and intelligent design. Till date this remains a record in VLSI design.

Coming to the point, this limitation on space forced God to fabricate a lot of multipurpose entities.

No, am not going to talk abt what you have on mind, though that is a multipurpose thing too.

What I want to refer to, is the throat. The same throat is used to transport air, as well as food. This happens through a 2-lane traffic system: one lane is reserved for food, while the other is for air.

However, there is one specific length of the throat in which both food and air have to travel along the same lane. To avoid their intercourse (meaning, intermixing in the course) God has placed a small door in that part of the throat. This door will make sure that at any point of time, the region hosts air alone, or food alone.

While talking about breathing, we need to get the diaphragm into the scene. It is the breathing muscle situated beneath our lungs. It is this diaphragm that pushes air out or pulls it in.

Now a lot of coordination is needed in the way all this functions. i.e., the diaphragm cannot push or pull air, when food is coming down the pipe. These kind of conditional decision making responsibilities lie with the brain.

While God is absolutely amazing as a VLSI design engineer, his coding skills leave much to be desired. He wrote the code for sharing throat-time between air and food with some constraints. These constraints imply that the code will work well at normal pace. But if something happens too fast, the code will go kaput.

For e.g, let's say you are eating. The brain keeps sending out signals to the diaphragm and all other gizmos referred to above saying: "Now pull air in - Stop - now let the food pass through - No you fool, make the food go DOWN, not UP! - Stop - now send some air out" and so on and so forth. All the elements of the system function perfectly as long as there is a small time gap between these instructions. But when these commands come rapidly (say, when we eat very fast), the system becomes unstable. And unable to comprehend what has to be done, the diaphragm pushes some air up the voice box. There is a small opening on top of the voice box. When the air gushes out through this opening, we get the characteristic "hic" sound. Voila! You have hiccuped!

Now why does it keep recurring for sometime?

Once the first hiccup happens, the brain senses that something is wrong, and sends some correction signals. As long as these correction signals fail to synchronize with the diaphragm, we would keep hiccuping.

Now, the way to stop hiccups is: to clear up all the confusions in the commands, and set on flow a clear flow of instructions - to either swallow, or breathe. This is why some people succeed in controlling hiccups by holding their breath (for a limited time, mind you). Or by taking in several sips of water successively. These would set a clear stream of commands in motion again, and succeed in controlling hiccups.

(I have avoided all jargon here. If you wish to know actual biological names of the parts of the anatomy I spoke abt here, check out MSN's Encarta entry on hiccups)