Don’t hold your breath as you learn about the hiccup

From July 24, 2003:

No, Mr. Rogers was not an ex-Navy Seal who fought in Vietnam and had to wear long sleeves to cover up the tattoos on his arms. He was a Presbyterian minister, for Pete’s sake.

I just don’t know where you guys get these ideas or what comes over you.

Now settle down and pay attention to today’s question.

Hiccups are annoying and irritating. So what’s the point? Just what are they good for and why do we get them?

I didn’t know this. I thought hiccups had some useful role in the scheme of things. But nobody knows for sure what they’re for. They’re like my masters. Their purpose in life is a mystery.

A hiccup (the medical word is singultus) is a contraction of some of your breathing muscles. Just as your breathing-in muscles start to move, the glottis, the opening between the vocal cords in your larynx, snaps shut, closing off your windpipe and making the “hic” sound.

Hiccups are associated with low levels of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream, which is why holding your breath sometimes makes them go away.

As noted, nobody knows for sure what the point of hiccups is, but there are some theories.

The latest comes from France, where some researchers have suggested we learned to hiccup about 370 million years ago, when some of our evolutionary ancestors started crawling out of the ocean into the fresh air.

They came up with this idea by studying primitive air breathers such as lungfish and some amphibians with gills. Such animals get air by pushing water through their mouths and across their gills with the glottis closed to keep water out of the lungs. “Sacre bleu,” the French researchers may have said, “That’s a lot like hiccuping.”

It’s possible, some researchers think, that mammals adapted hiccuping as a means of teaching the young to nurse because suckling involves closing the glottis to keep milk out of the lungs.

Or maybe God just wanted to annoy us.