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Hic Hic Hooray: Hiccups Explained
Anonymous Hero writes "Finally after millions of years (and zillions of hiccups) New Scientist gives us an explanation for this most annoying and least obvious of adaptations!"
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Why do I yawn when I see someone else yawn?
That's the only cure for hiccups that i've seen work for (almost) everyone. Thankfully I'm always at a bar when i get hiccups - hmmm, maybe there's a correlation there...
The doctor also said that they have no clue why it happens, and that at least one study had shown that if you bring a baby out into bright light they will often start hiccuping. I keep pointing my daughter at the sun, but so far, nuthin. :)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
There is a trick to making them go away. It takes some concentration, but you can consciously prevent your muscles from doing that to you. I wish I knew how to explain it - it's like teaching someone to burp on command - I just "know" how to do it, but I'm not sure how to explain what to do.
like people coughing in a theatre, once one person starts the others follow.
:
My hypothesis
Falling asleep and/or coughing is a dangerous activity with predators around. So when one person coughs and gives the game away it would be prudent to get your coughing over and done with now rather than when it goes quiet again.
With yawning maybe it's a trigger to take an oxygen blast before it's necessary.
Will that do?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Have you ever noticed hiccups in babies.
:)
My brothers just had a little girl. She quite a noisemaker - Cries almost all the time. Now I've noticed that sometimes in her rare quiet periods when she gets hickups - she doen't seem to care.
Now this is a child that uses high screaming as the first symptom of hunger, or any othe discomfort - but when she has hickups she doesnt seem to notice. She'll just go on watching our faces - or whatever little people does for fun. This is even though every hickup makes her little body jump.
While not even resembling proof for anything - it might suggest that the theory that suckling and hickups are related behaviour is not that far of.
I get the worst hickups myself. My little 100kg 190 cm body, shakes in cramps an my head and throat aches - and they last for a long time. We once threw a dinner party - and I had the hickups all through dinner - quite conversationkiller
Knowing why and how it happens is good, but what about healing hiccup?
For most of us, hiccups are just a small annoyance for a couple of minutes, but I remember watching a medical TV emission where people explained that they suffered from chronical hiccups. These persons could have hiccups for several days (night and day), and their life was not funny at all.
JB.
Because basically, we are fish....
I mentioned this article to the recently-pregnant project manager who sits next to me and she said she could feel her baby hiccuping while it was still "in development" and that it is a very strange sensation.
I have this argument with my significant other all the time. She gets hiccups fairly regularly - perhaps once a month. I haven't had the hiccups in over 15 years.
When I was young, I remember reading an article that suggested hiccups were purely psychological. Since then, I've been convinced that it was purely a matter of will.
Occasionally I'll get a single hiccup - usually after drinking a carbonated beverage of some variety. But I know that hiccups are psychological, and I never have a second hiccup. As I said, this has worked for over 15 years.
My significant other? She swears that it's some biological function. Her hiccups? They last for at least five minutes - sometimes up to half an hour.
Call me crazy, but at least I'm hiccup-free.
I don't know how scientific my technique is, but it's practical. :)
Place both of your fingertips so that you feel the "bottom" of your rib cage, about 2 inches above either side of your belly button. Then move your fingers down about an inch, and then finally push in about an inch. Basically, you're pushing on your diaphragm. Hold for about 30 seconds. (Basically two hiccup cycles.)
I discovered it after learning musicians should be breathing from their diaphragm. Has worked like a charm over the many years.
Cheers
This has only failed me once in the last ten years. YMMV.
1. Get a glass of water.
2. Take a deep breath and let it out, but don't push it out. Don't worry if you hiccup during that breath.
3. Without taking another breath, start taking *tiny* sips of the water; try to take at least one per second. Swallow each one. Keep your epiglottis closed as much as you can, in case you hiccup in the middle of doing this.
4. After 10-15 sips, the muscles in your mouth and throat will start to get tired, making it more difficult to do this. Keep going.
5. After a few more sips you won't care about the tired muscles, because you'll really REALLY want to breathe. Force yourself to take a couple more sips, then stop drinking and take that breath.
You should have no more hiccups after this. If you keep hiccuping wait a few minutes and try again. If it doesn't work on the second try, you're screwed. Also, this will not work if the hiccups are from being drunk and it may not work if they're a side-effect of medication.
There's a problem for fighter pilots called photopic sneeze which affects them when they are suddenly hit in the eyes with bright sunlight and can cause loss of control at high speeds. Interesting that some guy here mentions a drinking buddy who used to both sneeze and hiccough when out drinking. Wonder how closely these two spasmodic reflexes are linked.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I only get hiccups when I have air trapped in my stomach. I've found there are two ways to get rid of them (for me). Both involve burping. The first is to swallow more air by closing off the windpipe and sucking air into the stomach, which almost immediately causes me to burp and usually takes both the trapped air and the new air I swallowed with it. This is what I've always assumed that my hiccups were trying to make me do, so bully on the article that was posted. The second, which I prefer, is to tense my stomach muscles in such a way that at the next hiccup, the air is forced out of my stomach. Using these techniques, I rarely hiccup more than three times. In fact, the last time I couldn't get rid of them was right after I had my wisdom teeth removed (years ago) and I was still recovering from the effects of whatever valium derivative they used.
GreyPoopon
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Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
I've found that taking a gulp of coca-cola and letting it fizz in my mouth before swallowing usually does the trick. If no carbonated beverage is available, swishing water in my mouth really hard, then swallowing really fast also works.
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So let's get Haeckel's embryos out of science classes. Since you have previously said you don't want non-scientific things taught in science class, I'm confident we're in agreement on that. For those tuning in late, Haeckel's embryo drawings were completely faked - ask your nearest friendly embryologist, or check out this writing by Stephen Jay Gould, who was a leading evolutionist (revived Goldschmidt's punctuated equilibrium theory)
And while we're at it, let's get rid of some other absurdities that are very commonly taught in science classes. Like the Miller-Urey experiment. Textbooks with that in them do not mention that the experiment produced only racemic amino acids, and only three of them at that. They also do not mention that the experiment assumed a nearly oxygen-free atmosphere, an atmosphere in which the ammonia (NH3) would not exist (without oxygen, there would be no ozone; without ozone, there would be lots of hard UV; with hard UV, two NH3 would rapidly dissociate into N2 and 3 H2 molecules).
I'm ready to join with you in the campaign to remove these myths from science classes. When do we start?
It helps if you've had any relazation training. The best way I've found to describe it is to concentrate on your chest and try to relax the muscles that are unusally tense. It takes some practice to get it right but it usually works.
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
You're not here to argue your position, fine. Neither am I. Actually, I am only reluctantly posting as a non-AC because I'd actually like you to read what I've got to say.
The problem is that there are a large number of different positions that can be lumped under the "creationist" title. In one point of view, it forms a continuum:
Young Earth Creationist to Old Earthers
6000 years old ala Archbishop Ussher, the earth is flat, pi is exactly 3, rabbits chew their cud, etc. uber-strict literalism(yes these people exist)
6000 years old ala Archbishop Ussher, literal 7-day creationists
~10,000 years old earth, literal 7-day creationists
~10,000 years old earth, "God's Time" 7-days; ie not using our notion of time, aka Day-Age
10,000-millions years old, with either day-age or literal 7-days
Billions of years old, often using day-age terminology for creation events.
Except for the first group all of the above might incorporate evolution or big-bang theories in some modified form. Common modifyiers might be that God created "kinds" of animals (the term "kinds" usually nebulously defined, if at all) and that they evolved into the current species we see today. Stricter I suppose would be those who agree with "kinds" being created and that they adapt via microevolution (never macro-) or that they can differentiate to some degree, but only through degeneration. Big bang might be incorporated as how God created the universe, stars, planets, etc. but with some different rate than the mainstream accepts or using day-age terminology for God's forming the stars and planets, etc.
After the more or less literal creationists come different positions in theistic evolution. People here might range from "God made everything look the way science tells us to test our faith" to "evolution happens but God made people with some day-age thingie" to "evolution happens, but God guides it" to "evolution and big bang yeah, but God's so friggin smart he coded it all into the laws of nature at the start" or "I don't mix my science and religion." The first group might prefer to be called creationists whereas the others would find the term insulting.
There are of course many other variants, but that's kind of the point of this: creationism applies to a lot of different points of view which directly contradicts what you've been saying. Also, you're calling the more literalist positions ignorant the same way evolutionists call creationists of all stripes ignorant. Pot. Kettle. Black.
For a history of the creationist movement in America and how the different camps relate to each other try Ronald L. Numbers' "The Creationists." It's a little dated now (1992) but is an excellent read. The guys' an evolutionist, but Gish (of Institute for Creation Research and one of those more literal guys you'd call ignorant) gave it the thumbs up, if memory serves. As for me, I like my religion and science seperated.
About your statements on the Grand Canyon formation, catastrophism as a cause is gaining favor even among old-earth geologists. See when Mt. St. Helens blew up in 1980, there was a mud dam between part of the remnants of Spirit Lake and the Toutle river. That burst and in a period of about four hours, a small canyon was formed complete with multiple layers of sedimentary rock that look remarkably similar to the Grand Canyon on a smaller scale.
A small extrapolation based on the waters from a worldwide flood easily explains the Grand Canyon.
Next you talk about oil deposits. Yes, they are a great argument for a young earth, thanks for bringing that up. See oil seeps into the surrounding rocks at a rate that would mean no pools would be around after (depending on the deposit and the rock) 50,000 to 250,000 years. No way millions of years would leave the deposits in the condition we find them now. That goes even more emphatically for natural gas deposits or for helium in deep granites. And you're probably unaware of the patent for forming oil from organic deposits in about half an hour. It does not take millions of years to form oil.
For an explanation of distant starlight, there are a number of possibilities. I personally favor white hole cosmology. If you'd like to learn more, I'd be glad to provide more details.