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)

Why do my eyes look eerily red in some photos?

Am sure this has happened to all of us: When posing for a photo, we smile heartily. That is, initially. But the photographer does not click. He keeps twiddling with the controls, awaiting the right moment, which would ALWAYS arrive just after we stop smiling and literally start saying cheese, in a meek attempt to sham a smile.

After all this rigmarole, we rush over to the photographer to look at the picture. And our eyes look as red as #FF0000.

This phenomenon is called "red-eye" (now, you didn't guess that, did you?).

Why does it happen?

Visualize a room having a window with curtains. The wall opposite to the window, is red in colour. The curtain can be opened or closed to control the amount of light passing through the window.

The human eye has a very similar structure. The wall is the retina, which is red because it is rich in blood cells. (For the girls, the shade of the colour is what you would call "blood red")

In front of Retina the Wall (akin to Rahul the Wall) is the window with the curtain - the iris. It is designed to let in an optimum amount of light. So in very bright conditions, the iris will close as much as possible, allowing little light to enter the eye. In dark conditions, the iris will open as wide as possible to gather all the light it can grab. (So the iris is similar to us in being discontent with what it gets by default)

When we take photos in low-light conditions, the iris of our eyes would naturally be wide open. When the photographer clicks, a blinding flash appears..

And everyone dies..

No, I mean, the flash is fired from the camera. The white light from the flash falls on the eyes of the people posing for the photograph. (On other parts of the anatomy as well. But we are interested in the eyes only. For now). This light is of very high intensity and is fired at very short notice. This short duration is not sufficient for the iris to close completely. So by the time the camera stores the photo, the iris is still wider open than it should be, meaning the retinal wall is still largely visible. And remember, it is red in colour. This is what is reflected as red-eye in photographs.

How do we avoid red-eye effect then?
After a picture is taken, one can remove red-eye by software means. There are so many tools that do this.
But a way of eliminating red-eye from occurrence itself is called "advanced strobing". Most new digicams have this feature. If you set "Red-eye reduction" to "on" and try taking a picture in low-light conditions with flash, the flash would be fired twice. The first time is just to trigger the iris into closing, and the second time is to take the actual picture. So by the time the picture is taken, the iris would have closed and blocked the (literally) bloody retinal wall.

So the next time someone wonders why red-eye occurs in photos, you would be able to tell them....
.... where to look for info right? (He he.. My Google analytics reports can do with more numbers)