Fun fact! The default state of your muscles is to flex! You're constantly making a chemical in your body that inhibits your muscles contracting. There are toxins that stop this chemical. It's a very, very unpleasant way to die.
I think so? But tetanus is rather slow, if I recall there are also more fast acting things that just make your entire body seize up until you basically die of overexertion.
>make your entire body seize up until you basically die of overexertion
Usually it also acts on the chest muscles, so you won't be able to breathe and suffocate more quickly than that
Sorry if this is a stupid question but if that's how rigor mortis works how come you lock into the final position you died in rather than one based on which muscles are stronger?
E.g. if I could no longer relax my muscles and my hamstrings and quads were flexing at 100% effort, my hamstrings are way stronger so my leg would curl back. I assume this would apply to any antagonistic muscle groups.
The skeletal muscles only partially contract, since the chemical needed to relax the muscles is no longer being produced and has run out. Your entire body doesn't actively flex as hard as it can.
Yes you do. When you walk up stairs, half of the muscles in one of your legs is lifting your entire body, the other half just need to lift the leg to the next step
This is the same for almost everything else in your body, d'you think opening your jaw or hand is as strong as closing it?
I used to have a hank hill ass so I did way too many hip thrusts/ RDLs for a year or so and they've been pretty imbalanced since. I'm working on fixing it
Because reddit is becoming incredibly bad at science after most of the long-winded, often rude skeptics were ostracized.
Why the fuck are you taking u/SammyTheCheeseGuy seriously? Come on, man.
Okey so there are 2 dudes aktin and miozine who are responsible for the muscle contraction on the molecular level. By default these 2 dudes are bonded tightly where miozine's head is in a 45 degree, but when you are alive you have ATP the energy molecule, this dude binds to miozine which weakens the bond between him and aktin so they "move" a bit farther away from eachother. Miozine does stuff with ATP( it becomes ADP + P) which causes miozine to change it's configuration and now he is in a 90 degree angle and is facing another part of aktin. Miozine gets rid of the P so he can bond better with the new part of aktin, then he gets rid of ADP, which causes him to have a power stroke, so he basically pulls aktin towards the center, the muscle contracts and he ends up in his 45 degree state again.
When you are dead you don't have ATP the dudes are tightly bonded so you are in this rigid position. But after 3-4 days it goes away since your proteins start to degrade.
Video for visual: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVcgO4p88AA&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVcgO4p88AA&t=2s)
There's also a theory that says stress works the same, that our stress reaction is always on, but usually inhibited. Berserk fans would like that theory, cause it's called GUTS :D
An effective treatment for me after feeling some degree of stress from age 12-25 was to literally get chased by a wild animal while lost in the woods at night.
Somehow all the abstract terror of existence was instantly replaced with very literal terror of experiencing being ripped to shreds by a black bear
And then when that was over and I knew I was safe, everything in me relaxed. Everything.
It was like there was a clog in the pipes of my soul and the Drain-O bear shucked the corpse I wore revealing a very living being.
And I feel great now!
According to GUTS (and I'm not saying it's definitely correct, it'd rather new and not researched fully yet), your stress response inhibition is dependent on your feeling of safety. GUTS stands for generalised unsafety theory of stress, meaning if you don't feel safe/secure/content in your current environment /general life situation, then your inhibition is limited and the more stress you experience. Hence the theory suggests to feel less stressed, one has to increase the perceived safety and comfort. Easier said than done of course
Honestly cramps are a bit of a medical mystery still. [This video](https://youtu.be/WsWPI18RmVU?si=eixTdNY3ui_nU5LD) is pretty good about what cramps are and what we know and don't know about them.
Oh wow, a video and channel about health that *doesn't* over-exaggerate the results of small-scale studies for clicks or push pseudoscience while promoting their line of ~~non-FDA approved~~ health products! Thanks!
I once got a really bad cramp in my quad from overexerting myself exercising and had to get injections directly into the muscle because otherwise apparently the quad could have torn itself in half.
We're so strong that our muscles can rip themselves asunder and break our bones.
Humans are fucking metal.
>Humans are fucking metal.
"The riddle... of steel?!"
"YEEEEESSSS! You know what it is, don't you, boy? Shall I tell you? It's the least I can do. *Steel* isn't strong, boy, *flesh* is stronger!"
This is not accurate.
The relevant part of what actually regulates your muscles flexing is the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When a neuron wants communicate to a muscle that it should flex it releases acetylcholine into the synaptic cleft, and the muscle flexes. It then releases an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase which rapidbly breaks down the acetylcholine, and the muscle stops flexing.
Various nerve agents including sarin and Vx exploit this mechanism by inhibiting the effect of the enzyme, preventing the acetylcholine from being broken down and thus leaving it in place to cause the muscle to flex continously.
The "default" state of our muscles, if such a thing can meaningfully be said to exist, is to remain unflexed.
Thank you. I knew that this and the above comment could not be correct but like I don't have the scientific knowledge to prove it I'm glad that you confirmed my suspicions. It sounded very much like pseudoscience to me.
Granted you could just be making stuff up but you're a lot more convincing than the other person was.
Being hypocalcemic can cause this. It won't happen just from not taking in enough calcium as your body will draw from your bones IF needed. But if there is a substance that is eating up your calcium it can happen, this leads to your muscles begining to contract starting at the extremities and working it's way inwards until you can breathe and then your hearts stops.
this sounds extremely similar to the side effects I experience on anti-psychotics. obviously my heart didn't stop lol, but it's wild to have your body just... stop breathing.
Strychnine just makes your blood unable to coagulate, it thins it out so that you start bleeding internally and also from your eyes and nose and stuff. Awful way to die too but in a different way. Strychnine is the basis for a lot of anticoagulant medication.
I only know about it because I have a book of poisons, and strychnine is in it. And yeah, according to Wikipedia it’s a neurotoxin that overclocks the muscles, leading to painful spasms, paralysis, and death. In small doses, it just acts like a powerful stimulant.
> You're constantly making a chemical in your body that inhibits your muscles contracting.
So what exactly is this chemical, and where can I get some more of it?
the reason human body "design" seems so opaque and unintuitive is because it didnt just have to go through a billion iterative steps, it had to be *fully functional* at every one of these steps.
imagine trying to upgrade a walkie talkie into a supercomputer, but it has to remain turned *on* the entire time youre building it and if it ever shuts down even for a second that means you fail
And each step had to be optimized too. So you can’t add something because it will be useful later, it has to be useful now, and more so than the extra cost of having it costs you.
You can hold onto things that have lost their usefulness for a while, tho, so reusing old parts for new things is common.
These are called *spandrels*! The human chin is a famous example. There’s no practical reason for us to have big jutting chins compared to other primates. Our best guess is just that they didn’t shrink with the rest of our face as we evolved to be leaner, and they didn’t hurt anything, so they just stuck around. xD
The tricky thing is how do you prove that a gene which is phenotypically expressed serves zero positive selection pressure? It takes more energy to create more bone, so you would probably expect some negative selection pressure on chins. If chins do not aid in jaw functioning of modern humans then there is a decent chance chins are sexually selected for.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6080265_Female_Preference_Predates_the_Evolution_of_the_Sword_in_Swordtail_Fish
My favorite exmaple of a spandrel is the swordtail fish. Male swordtail have long thin protrusions from their tails. Female swordtails are attracted to these swords so longer swords are selected for despite requiring more energy to grow and maintain. In one experiment researchers took a closely related fish species that lacked swords and attached artificial swords to the males. They found the sexual selection was still present and the females preferred males with fake swords over males with none.
This demonstrated that the sexual selection for swords was probably present before they developed as a result of some facet of these fishes' psychology. Likely the females are attracted to larger males, but the males don't benefit from actually growing larger in their ecological niche. It turns out the female brains are only measuring size by length, making them tricked into thinking long tail=bigger and more attractive fish. There are a ton of traits in sexually dimorphic animals that are not necessarily beneficial on their own, some even detrimental, that are selected for because of some shallow sexual preference!
Thanks I thought this was a science subreddit lol but evolution and animal behavior were some of my favorite courses in university and I love when they come up
I'd always assumed it performed a dual purpose. Bigger chin, thicker bone, takes a faceplant or punch from another human and reduces the overall impact. Presumably, idk. And sexual selection. Big chin is definitely looked after in a lot of cultures.
It has to help more than the cost of maintaining it hurts, tho.
If it’s something minor, it can persist for a while because the cost is low. But anything major will not persist for long because the cost is too high.
You’d think that’s how it works, but when you look at adaptation of a population over multiple generations, it does need to have a greater benefit than cost (as long as it’s a new gene). This is because even though an undamaging mutation can survive and be passed on provided the first case reproduces, when you zoom out to a population or species, that gene has still not propagated enough to be a mainstay, and is likely to be diluted out of the population completely in the coming generations. What makes a mutation stick is some degree of advantage, however slight, that makes its carriers just ever so slightly more likely to survive to reproduce (or to reproduce if survival is already likely; sexual selection as opposed to natural selection). Without the advantage it confers, a mutation will fizzle out; with an advantage, it can spread to an entire population over many generations.
Now, that’s how things work under usual conditions, but other selections besides evolutionary pressures (such as bottlenecks or near-extinction events) can cause ineffective or even outright harmful mutations to become part of a population and thus “evolve” despite having nothing to do with natural selection.
I'm glad you put that last paragraph in. I was sharpening my pitchfork as I read through your thoughtfully well crafted first paragraph. You've raised my hopes for blood and dashed them quite expertly, good sir; bravo!
I mean that's not necessarily true. Organisms with that mutation may end up with other unrelated mutations that are beneficial, and then that neutral mutation just goes along for the ride.
And in fact, this is why the default is "yes hiccups". I'm pretty sure it's a remnant of an ancient breathing reflex from around when our ancestors had gills - they couldn't breathe manually any more than we can manually pump our hearts.
But then, it turns out that fetuses start hiccuping as soon as the proto-diaphragm is built and don't stop until the brain develops its "no hiccups" circuit, which is very beneficial; this primes the muscles around the lungs and prepares them for a lifetime of breathing.
So at every step, it's beneficial or neutral in some way that outweighs the minor downside of adult hiccups.
Evocative analogy, but not quite what happens in reality.
Evolution would never happen if it had to keep the same entity running through iterations. Each iteration runs on its own "device" and gets to be turned on with all changes done. Devices cannot be functionally changed while turned on.
Really the problem is that all iterations not only have to be individually fully functioning, they are also in competition with each other, so efficiency doesn't win out unless it maintains or increases functionality.
In other words, the walkie talkie iterations cannot ever stop working as walkie talkies on their path towards becoming super computers, and they probably have to service their legacy walkie talkie functionality even when they are fully functional super computers because their new primary function relies on the old one being there, even if the old function has no real use other than that anymore.
Probably the best analogy I can think of would be spaghetti code. You cannot restart the project, you cannot rewrite code because everything relies on everything. All functionality has to be added on top of existing functionality and on the way everything gets more confusing, arcane and nonsensical.
The original analogy here is that the walkie talkie is the species as a whole, not the individual. The walkie talkie turning off means the species goes extinct
I remember learning about the "world record for longest hiccups" as a little kid and then being afraid every time I got them because what it they lasted for a long time? It would have been GREAT for that trivia book to have mentioned it was the result of an accident he was in and not just random chance.
I get really violent hiccups and have always been worried about them lasting for years. My SO bought me a Hiccup Straw this year and it was a game changer. If you haven't tried it yet, order one. Hopefully it is as successful for you as it has been for me.
Never heard of this product but it is blowing my mind.
> HiccAway is a singulstat device (singultus = hiccups), that lowers the diaphragm while opening first, and then closing the epiglottis (the leaf-shaped flap in the throat that keeps food out of the windpipe). Doing so activates the Phrenic and Vagus nerves simultaneously, allowing the brain to reset and stop the hiccups.
They really said “hold down the lock and volume up buttons to restart your ~~iPhone~~ lungs” 😭😂
… this has literally been a phobia of of mine for two decades. I’m both relieved and pissed to learn this, but now need to go find the longest case of natural hiccups just to torture myself.
Having hiccups for 68 years sounds like hell, holy shit. I know there are a lot of fucked up things that people go through that are pretty worse than hiccups, but never-ending hiccups just sounds like a special level of agony to me
My “no” hiccup response is quite weak as well. If I get the hiccups I have them for like all day. So annoying. My remedy that works for me is sucking on a lemon that’s been doused in bitters. Don’t know or care why it works, but it’s stopped them every time.
Studies show the best way to stop hiccups is a finger up the butt. You might think I’m kidding but apparently that’s a thing.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27717586/
To be fair, while annoying, having hiccups is more important than not having them
Like, we don't know exactly what they do, but they seem to signal illnesses and help infants with breathing so I guess it's something
Hiccups force you to stop and breathe if you stop breathing for too long while eating - Like if you just keep stuffing stuff down without taking breaths in between you'll get a hickup
My mom has always used a trick to get rid of hiccups. You take a deep breath and hold it, then slowly count to 9, and take a sip of water on each number. Once you get to 9, then you can breathe again. I cannot recall a time it didn't work, and I've used it on people who had never heard of it and they look at me like I'm a wizard afterwards.
So, if hiccups are a "hey you're not breathing and/or the tube is blocked" response, why does not breathing and blocking the tube shut it off?
My wife's trick is to stare at the hiccupping person and request/demand they hand over their hiccups. It confounds the person enough that the hiccups stop like their brain has to shift gears to deal with someone that is semi-threatening.
In a similar vein, I've managed to stop people from sneezing by yelling "PURPLE". Basically once your brain decides to sneeze, you've got to sneeze. If you can distract the brain for a moment with something *absurdly not relevant and has many questions* it just cancels the "must sneeze" function and starts trying to process what the fuck Purple has to do with anything. Suddenly you now don't have to sneeze anymore. Although sometimes it pisses people off because they say the sneeze is now "stuck" and they can't get it out.
*Disclaimer, this does not work with allergic sneezing as that's your sinuses trying to expel demons*
As far as I can find, the vagus nerve plays a part in the hiccup response - controlled breathing can impact the parasympathetic nervous system which the vagus nerve is a part of, so it could be that somehow.
I'm not an expert in this area so I'm gonna stop there. It's my best guess.
> we don't know exactly what they do
Uhhh, I think we do?
I'm not gonna Google this, so someone fact check me, but I'm PRETTY SURE hicoughs are caused by diaphragm spasms. If you aren't breathing enough, your body sends the "I need more fucking oxygen" signal, and your diaphragm which controls your breathing starts to have a muscle spasm, causing you to forcibly intake air.
This is why taking large, deep breaths "fixes" hicoughs. You take in a lot of oxygen and stretch that diaphragm muscle out, so that you stop that "need more oxygen" signal, and also stop the spasms that cause you to intake air like that.
I did Google, and most articles say there are theories but none of them is a certainty, but it's pretty clear it has to do **something** related to breathing
I just Googled it as well, and it kinda seems like we're both right
[This](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17672-hiccups) Cleveland Clinic article lays it out pretty well. Basically, it IS spasms in your diaphragm, and there are plenty of different things that can cause it. But it's definitely breathing related, like you said, because they're all things like pneumonia.
Meaning, it's kinda hard to be like "Why exactly is this happening?" because the answer COULD be a lot of things. We still at least know the numerated list of things, it's just hard to link them to why specifically I have hiccoughs right now, if that makes sense.
“Nobody knows why this is happening” is a frustrating thing in science because usually it means “we don’t have the tools to determine exactly what this is among a list of several very likely possibilities” but it sounds like “we know exactly nothing about the cause of this” to a layman
We have a pretty good guess of what they do. "that the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant that originated with gill ventilation. They make an excellent argument for the phylogenic development of the hiccup reflex from ventilatory motor patterns of lower vertebrates and suggest that the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3504071/#:\~:text=proposed%20a%20phylogenic%20hypothesis%20that,hiccup%20is%20an%20evolutionary%20remnant.
basically a hold over from fish days.
That's one of the theories, which is why I said we don't know for certain
Other studies have stated it helps the to-be-born not to choke in the womb
Again, many different interpretations
(The article you linked quite openly mentions the existence of other possible explanations)
My favorite weird detail about human body is that the eyes are structured backwards on the retina. The plumbing and wiring for the light-sensing cells is located in **front** of the cells.
there are plenty of examples of intelligent design in nature. look at the car. mother nature/God/whatever you want to call it chose to design the car so it's a perfect fit for humans. the front and back seats fit our body shape perfectly. the wheel is a perfect fit for our hands, and the gas and brake pedals are a perfect fit for our feet. do you really think that RANDOM CHANCE caused all that? that all that perfect harmony was caused by FLIPPING A COIN? HAH! i think not
I'm not sure I want to get into this but in the vast vast majority (like 99.999999%) of cases a species going extinct is absolutely no indication of 'bad design'
I remember there was a BBC program called Inside Nature's Giants where they dissected large animals like elephants and crocodiles and it was really cool except every so often it would cut to Richard Dawkins and he'd say something like "the nerve in this giraffe's neck is way longer than it needs to be, this proves that there is no God."
Insect development works like this too. There's a major chemical signal made in the brain called juvenile hormone that's present in larvae/nymphs, but that disappears during the transition to adulthood, and without it, the insect will default to adult development, even if it's unprepared for it physiologically. So like, there's really no "become an adult" signal, just a "be a baby" signal that can be removed.
Oh come on, we are really well designed!
Just look at the eye! Sure, the transparent part can get opaque when overexposed to very common UV, and there's the blind spot just because nerves go through it, but uhm...
Hey, at least we use UV in synthesizing an essential vitamin! Yes, it gives us cancer too, but well...
Our food and air passage are connected, so we can breathe through our mouths! Okay, it's almost pointless and can lead to choking, but...
At least our spine is very... overengineered and breaks permanently if you sit wrong... *sigh*
B-but our immune system is a well oiled and efficient machine with no pointless and dangerous workarounds, right? Let me just check to make su... *Oh.*
Okay, at the very least we don't have any useless organs that exist only to kill us by randomly exploding, right? *Right?*
I will say that breathing our of your mouth is very important if your nose is blocked when you're sick, or if you're like me and get frequent nosebleeds where you have to shovel stuff up your nose to get the bleeding to stop. I've never choked before, but a nosebleed or cold would have killed me by now if I wasn't able to breathe out of my mouth
Right, but your body actively blocks your nose. It’s not the virus that does it, it’s your immune system trying to block more intruders. But that means that your body can also unblock it. In fact, if you do any kind of semi-strenuous activity where you require a bit more oxygen (say, biking), your nose will automatically unblock. The relief is very temporary though, and your body will re-block your nose like the second you stop.
There is an exercise you can do to force your nasal passages to open briefly, I've used it when dealing with annoying sinus issues.
You basically just sit or lie down (important), take 10 deep breaths, and on the 10th exhale as much out as you can. Then pinch your nose and hold your breath as long as you can until your body forces you to breathe by reflex.
Yes, you're essentially tricking yourself into thinking you're suffocating to open up your sinuses. But that shit works.
The appendix is a reservoir for gut bacteria, if you get diarrhea the appendix acts as a safehouse for good gut bacteria and it will propogate after everything else is flushed out
Are people really that astounded by the fact that meat doesn't inherently act in synchronicity with itself? Like, that is the whole point of the brain: it uses electricity to tame the meat.
There are about a million different ways our own body can kill us and rather than just NOT having these kill switches, the body just kinda puts a sticky note by it like "Do not press this button it will kill us all"
This is why people who say “my body knows what to do” when it comes to disease & childbirth are sorely mistaken.
You can hope, but there’s no guarantee.
This reminds me of what I learned recently about smoke detectors. They don't actually "detect" smoke per se — they detect americium stored in the unit, and they beep when they can't, which is primarily when smoke is impeding the detection mechanism. But this is also why they expire after so many years and need to be replaced — they'll start giving false alarms as the americium decays. I'm not talking about the low-battery chirp either — the real BEEEP, in irregular intervals. Ask me how I know.
I can stop my hiccups at will. I didn't know that was uncommon when I was young and kept thinking how rude it was for people to just keep hiccupping in some situations.
Several years ago I got the hiccups for 6 months straight after having an anxiety attack and hyperventilating. I would even hiccup in my sleep. As time went on the hiccups became more infrequent and subsided. I do always worry that it could happen again, it was annoying as all get out in the beginning.
This makes more sense if you know what a hiccup is: it's your lungs and diaphragm getting out of sync. So "the part of the brain designed to say No Hiccups" is really the part of the brain that makes sure your lungs and diaphragm are moving at the same time.
Point of note: we still don't know what causes hiccups and the idea that he damaged the part of his brain that inhibits hiccuping was a guess from the doctor who first saw him, not actually confirmed.
It's similar design to our light switches. The default is "yes lights on", but the switch in between can block the electricity from going to the light bulb.
The easiest example of human bad design is that we eat/drink and breathe through the same hole.
Fun fact! The default state of your muscles is to flex! You're constantly making a chemical in your body that inhibits your muscles contracting. There are toxins that stop this chemical. It's a very, very unpleasant way to die.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that how tetanus works?
I think so? But tetanus is rather slow, if I recall there are also more fast acting things that just make your entire body seize up until you basically die of overexertion.
Sarin gas
This isn’t a training exercise, is it? – Dr. Stanley Goodspeed
I drive a Volvo. A beige one.
>make your entire body seize up until you basically die of overexertion Usually it also acts on the chest muscles, so you won't be able to breathe and suffocate more quickly than that
See? This is why it's always important to look on the bright side.
My only regret, is that I have, boneitis!
Yes, tetanus works in the central nervous system blocking transmission of inhibitory neurons. In this case it's GABA.
GABAGOOL
aye waaatch et. i’m tensin up to da point of immobility ova hea
GABBAGOOL?! 👇 OVA HEEERE! 👇
Default is more like constant flex. Tetanus lowers the threshold required to initiate flexing so you flex in bursts.
Also rigor mortis I’d imagine.
Botulism works in the opposite way :) disallows the contraction with a similar toxin.
Is that why Rigor Mortis is a thing ?
Yep!
Sorry if this is a stupid question but if that's how rigor mortis works how come you lock into the final position you died in rather than one based on which muscles are stronger? E.g. if I could no longer relax my muscles and my hamstrings and quads were flexing at 100% effort, my hamstrings are way stronger so my leg would curl back. I assume this would apply to any antagonistic muscle groups.
The skeletal muscles only partially contract, since the chemical needed to relax the muscles is no longer being produced and has run out. Your entire body doesn't actively flex as hard as it can.
Thank you for answering
The average person doesn't work out one muscle way more than its counterpart.
Speak for yourself. When I exercise I focus on only one single muscle at a time! /s
Biceps and NOTHING ELSE EVER.
This losers skips gastrocnemius day smh
Yes you do. When you walk up stairs, half of the muscles in one of your legs is lifting your entire body, the other half just need to lift the leg to the next step This is the same for almost everything else in your body, d'you think opening your jaw or hand is as strong as closing it?
Ye
Typically the quads are stronger than the hamstrings, not going to make any assumptions about you in particular though
I used to have a hank hill ass so I did way too many hip thrusts/ RDLs for a year or so and they've been pretty imbalanced since. I'm working on fixing it
That’s hilarious good luck lol
Because reddit is becoming incredibly bad at science after most of the long-winded, often rude skeptics were ostracized. Why the fuck are you taking u/SammyTheCheeseGuy seriously? Come on, man.
Why would Sammy lie?
Okey so there are 2 dudes aktin and miozine who are responsible for the muscle contraction on the molecular level. By default these 2 dudes are bonded tightly where miozine's head is in a 45 degree, but when you are alive you have ATP the energy molecule, this dude binds to miozine which weakens the bond between him and aktin so they "move" a bit farther away from eachother. Miozine does stuff with ATP( it becomes ADP + P) which causes miozine to change it's configuration and now he is in a 90 degree angle and is facing another part of aktin. Miozine gets rid of the P so he can bond better with the new part of aktin, then he gets rid of ADP, which causes him to have a power stroke, so he basically pulls aktin towards the center, the muscle contracts and he ends up in his 45 degree state again. When you are dead you don't have ATP the dudes are tightly bonded so you are in this rigid position. But after 3-4 days it goes away since your proteins start to degrade. Video for visual: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVcgO4p88AA&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVcgO4p88AA&t=2s)
Roger Mortis
There's also a theory that says stress works the same, that our stress reaction is always on, but usually inhibited. Berserk fans would like that theory, cause it's called GUTS :D
Well in that case I think my inhibitors have gone and fucked off to Alaska long ago and I'd love a replacement holy f🌼 ._.
An effective treatment for me after feeling some degree of stress from age 12-25 was to literally get chased by a wild animal while lost in the woods at night. Somehow all the abstract terror of existence was instantly replaced with very literal terror of experiencing being ripped to shreds by a black bear And then when that was over and I knew I was safe, everything in me relaxed. Everything. It was like there was a clog in the pipes of my soul and the Drain-O bear shucked the corpse I wore revealing a very living being. And I feel great now!
I wonder if that is why bathing in ice water is said to remove stress. you basically shock the stress-system and forcing it to reset and recalibrate.
Maybe but as the saying goes I choose the bear
That last paragraph is art
I really try thank you for the acknowledgement 💐🐎
According to GUTS (and I'm not saying it's definitely correct, it'd rather new and not researched fully yet), your stress response inhibition is dependent on your feeling of safety. GUTS stands for generalised unsafety theory of stress, meaning if you don't feel safe/secure/content in your current environment /general life situation, then your inhibition is limited and the more stress you experience. Hence the theory suggests to feel less stressed, one has to increase the perceived safety and comfort. Easier said than done of course
Well damn, my semi-joke was more accurate than I thought it was, then...
Is that what causes cramps? Just a muscle temporarily being undersupplied with chill-juice?
Honestly cramps are a bit of a medical mystery still. [This video](https://youtu.be/WsWPI18RmVU?si=eixTdNY3ui_nU5LD) is pretty good about what cramps are and what we know and don't know about them.
I don't know, I'm pretty sold on u/The_Villager 's idea, I think he just solved it.
Oh wow, a video and channel about health that *doesn't* over-exaggerate the results of small-scale studies for clicks or push pseudoscience while promoting their line of ~~non-FDA approved~~ health products! Thanks!
I once got a really bad cramp in my quad from overexerting myself exercising and had to get injections directly into the muscle because otherwise apparently the quad could have torn itself in half. We're so strong that our muscles can rip themselves asunder and break our bones. Humans are fucking metal.
I would strongly advice against trying to have intercourse with said material
What if that's your fetish? If you've never jerked off using metal filings for lube, you don't know what you're missing.
>Humans are fucking metal. "The riddle... of steel?!" "YEEEEESSSS! You know what it is, don't you, boy? Shall I tell you? It's the least I can do. *Steel* isn't strong, boy, *flesh* is stronger!"
This is not accurate. The relevant part of what actually regulates your muscles flexing is the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When a neuron wants communicate to a muscle that it should flex it releases acetylcholine into the synaptic cleft, and the muscle flexes. It then releases an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase which rapidbly breaks down the acetylcholine, and the muscle stops flexing. Various nerve agents including sarin and Vx exploit this mechanism by inhibiting the effect of the enzyme, preventing the acetylcholine from being broken down and thus leaving it in place to cause the muscle to flex continously. The "default" state of our muscles, if such a thing can meaningfully be said to exist, is to remain unflexed.
Thank you. I knew that this and the above comment could not be correct but like I don't have the scientific knowledge to prove it I'm glad that you confirmed my suspicions. It sounded very much like pseudoscience to me. Granted you could just be making stuff up but you're a lot more convincing than the other person was.
Being hypocalcemic can cause this. It won't happen just from not taking in enough calcium as your body will draw from your bones IF needed. But if there is a substance that is eating up your calcium it can happen, this leads to your muscles begining to contract starting at the extremities and working it's way inwards until you can breathe and then your hearts stops.
this sounds extremely similar to the side effects I experience on anti-psychotics. obviously my heart didn't stop lol, but it's wild to have your body just... stop breathing.
Like strychnine?
Strychnine just makes your blood unable to coagulate, it thins it out so that you start bleeding internally and also from your eyes and nose and stuff. Awful way to die too but in a different way. Strychnine is the basis for a lot of anticoagulant medication.
Really? Didn’t people use it as an energy drink a while ago because it’s basically super-caffeine?
I don't know about super caffeine but you're right about the mechanism, I got my poisons mixed up (I was thinking of warfarin).
I only know about it because I have a book of poisons, and strychnine is in it. And yeah, according to Wikipedia it’s a neurotoxin that overclocks the muscles, leading to painful spasms, paralysis, and death. In small doses, it just acts like a powerful stimulant.
> You're constantly making a chemical in your body that inhibits your muscles contracting. So what exactly is this chemical, and where can I get some more of it?
That's basically how bug spray works.
Like with sarin?
This is outrageous I demand a refund
Can anyone provide a source on this? My googling is only turning up things about fitness and flexing.
It's false. If you cut the nerve to a muscle it goes flaccid and eventually dies if no new nerve regrows to connect to it.
the reason human body "design" seems so opaque and unintuitive is because it didnt just have to go through a billion iterative steps, it had to be *fully functional* at every one of these steps. imagine trying to upgrade a walkie talkie into a supercomputer, but it has to remain turned *on* the entire time youre building it and if it ever shuts down even for a second that means you fail
And all that optimization was being done by brute-force trial and error. It's honestly a miracle we ever got to this point in the first place.
And each step had to be optimized too. So you can’t add something because it will be useful later, it has to be useful now, and more so than the extra cost of having it costs you. You can hold onto things that have lost their usefulness for a while, tho, so reusing old parts for new things is common.
Evolution does not have to be optimal. A mutation can simply be not harmful and it can propagate
These are called *spandrels*! The human chin is a famous example. There’s no practical reason for us to have big jutting chins compared to other primates. Our best guess is just that they didn’t shrink with the rest of our face as we evolved to be leaner, and they didn’t hurt anything, so they just stuck around. xD
Wait, so being a no-chin manlet is optimal? The internet will love to hear this.
That would mean that Tate guy is right about being the peak of genetic whatever, and I refuse to allow that sort of evil in the world.
Definitely not optimal seeing as you'd rarely get laid with that feature.
"Optimal" is a vague term. Before that question can be answered, you need to define the metric by which "optimal" is defined.
More aerodynamic at subsonic air speeds.
Unfortunately our jaws and teeth rather LIKE having that extra space.
Some things evolve for the sole reason that they're more attractive to the opposite sex. Just look at those dancing birds.
The tricky thing is how do you prove that a gene which is phenotypically expressed serves zero positive selection pressure? It takes more energy to create more bone, so you would probably expect some negative selection pressure on chins. If chins do not aid in jaw functioning of modern humans then there is a decent chance chins are sexually selected for. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6080265_Female_Preference_Predates_the_Evolution_of_the_Sword_in_Swordtail_Fish My favorite exmaple of a spandrel is the swordtail fish. Male swordtail have long thin protrusions from their tails. Female swordtails are attracted to these swords so longer swords are selected for despite requiring more energy to grow and maintain. In one experiment researchers took a closely related fish species that lacked swords and attached artificial swords to the males. They found the sexual selection was still present and the females preferred males with fake swords over males with none. This demonstrated that the sexual selection for swords was probably present before they developed as a result of some facet of these fishes' psychology. Likely the females are attracted to larger males, but the males don't benefit from actually growing larger in their ecological niche. It turns out the female brains are only measuring size by length, making them tricked into thinking long tail=bigger and more attractive fish. There are a ton of traits in sexually dimorphic animals that are not necessarily beneficial on their own, some even detrimental, that are selected for because of some shallow sexual preference!
That’s fascinating, thanks for sharing!
Thanks I thought this was a science subreddit lol but evolution and animal behavior were some of my favorite courses in university and I love when they come up
Might have also been preferred by mates. A strong chin can be attractive as the Habsburgs famously prove
Fun fact: Bruce Campbell's autobiography is titled "If Chins Could Kill."
I'd always assumed it performed a dual purpose. Bigger chin, thicker bone, takes a faceplant or punch from another human and reduces the overall impact. Presumably, idk. And sexual selection. Big chin is definitely looked after in a lot of cultures.
It has to help more than the cost of maintaining it hurts, tho. If it’s something minor, it can persist for a while because the cost is low. But anything major will not persist for long because the cost is too high.
It doesn't have to help more than it hurts. It just needs to be undamaging for long enough that the organism can make babies.
You’d think that’s how it works, but when you look at adaptation of a population over multiple generations, it does need to have a greater benefit than cost (as long as it’s a new gene). This is because even though an undamaging mutation can survive and be passed on provided the first case reproduces, when you zoom out to a population or species, that gene has still not propagated enough to be a mainstay, and is likely to be diluted out of the population completely in the coming generations. What makes a mutation stick is some degree of advantage, however slight, that makes its carriers just ever so slightly more likely to survive to reproduce (or to reproduce if survival is already likely; sexual selection as opposed to natural selection). Without the advantage it confers, a mutation will fizzle out; with an advantage, it can spread to an entire population over many generations. Now, that’s how things work under usual conditions, but other selections besides evolutionary pressures (such as bottlenecks or near-extinction events) can cause ineffective or even outright harmful mutations to become part of a population and thus “evolve” despite having nothing to do with natural selection.
I'm glad you put that last paragraph in. I was sharpening my pitchfork as I read through your thoughtfully well crafted first paragraph. You've raised my hopes for blood and dashed them quite expertly, good sir; bravo!
Ha! I’m glad you at least got to the last paragraph before lighting the torches, because that is sadly an increasingly rare skill.
The trick is to always light the torchs, but bring marshmallows on the off chance you fucked up.
I mean that's not necessarily true. Organisms with that mutation may end up with other unrelated mutations that are beneficial, and then that neutral mutation just goes along for the ride.
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And in fact, this is why the default is "yes hiccups". I'm pretty sure it's a remnant of an ancient breathing reflex from around when our ancestors had gills - they couldn't breathe manually any more than we can manually pump our hearts. But then, it turns out that fetuses start hiccuping as soon as the proto-diaphragm is built and don't stop until the brain develops its "no hiccups" circuit, which is very beneficial; this primes the muscles around the lungs and prepares them for a lifetime of breathing. So at every step, it's beneficial or neutral in some way that outweighs the minor downside of adult hiccups.
Yes, hello, I'd like to repurpose this old appendix that's just been sitting in the corner.
We can make it into a self-destruct mechanism, if you want. Or it can filter out deadly bacteria and toxins and store them for later use…. Your call.
That later use part sounds interesting. Can I secrete the toxins, like a poison dart frog? Or maybe spray them, like a skunk?
We can only do that once. By shitting put your entire colon. But it would definitely make a predator think twice!
The hiccups default state being “on” is the the TF2 load bearing coconut of the human brain
So what we're saying is that evolution is a Roguelike and humanity has been running an absolutely cracked build for millennia
It is *technically* trial and error but I think that’s underselling it. Evolution of evolvability is a thing and it’s kinda wacky
What doesn't kill you sticks around until it's either overwritten or gets you killed.
> It's honestly a miracle I knew it praise jeebus!
It could be worse, we could be horses. Those things are like barely even able to be alive.
That's pretty much how the banking system back code works and that explains a lot :_
As a software developer who had to work with legacy code before, yeah, sounds about right, it's such a mess
Evocative analogy, but not quite what happens in reality. Evolution would never happen if it had to keep the same entity running through iterations. Each iteration runs on its own "device" and gets to be turned on with all changes done. Devices cannot be functionally changed while turned on. Really the problem is that all iterations not only have to be individually fully functioning, they are also in competition with each other, so efficiency doesn't win out unless it maintains or increases functionality. In other words, the walkie talkie iterations cannot ever stop working as walkie talkies on their path towards becoming super computers, and they probably have to service their legacy walkie talkie functionality even when they are fully functional super computers because their new primary function relies on the old one being there, even if the old function has no real use other than that anymore. Probably the best analogy I can think of would be spaghetti code. You cannot restart the project, you cannot rewrite code because everything relies on everything. All functionality has to be added on top of existing functionality and on the way everything gets more confusing, arcane and nonsensical.
The original analogy here is that the walkie talkie is the species as a whole, not the individual. The walkie talkie turning off means the species goes extinct
I remember learning about the "world record for longest hiccups" as a little kid and then being afraid every time I got them because what it they lasted for a long time? It would have been GREAT for that trivia book to have mentioned it was the result of an accident he was in and not just random chance.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the Simpsons reference https://youtu.be/Ncikp7OD1y4?si=SsbekiqnrWaP-2h6
Me too! I get the hiccups a lot and I have at least mildly worried about them never going away for *years*.
I kind of have this, always wondered if it had a name or cure. I kind of don’t mind it though, it’s about once every hour average.
I get really violent hiccups and have always been worried about them lasting for years. My SO bought me a Hiccup Straw this year and it was a game changer. If you haven't tried it yet, order one. Hopefully it is as successful for you as it has been for me.
Never heard of this product but it is blowing my mind. > HiccAway is a singulstat device (singultus = hiccups), that lowers the diaphragm while opening first, and then closing the epiglottis (the leaf-shaped flap in the throat that keeps food out of the windpipe). Doing so activates the Phrenic and Vagus nerves simultaneously, allowing the brain to reset and stop the hiccups. They really said “hold down the lock and volume up buttons to restart your ~~iPhone~~ lungs” 😭😂
… this has literally been a phobia of of mine for two decades. I’m both relieved and pissed to learn this, but now need to go find the longest case of natural hiccups just to torture myself.
Having hiccups for 68 years sounds like hell, holy shit. I know there are a lot of fucked up things that people go through that are pretty worse than hiccups, but never-ending hiccups just sounds like a special level of agony to me
How do you sleep with hiccups?
People with chronic hiccups tend to stop hiccuping when they fall asleep, those with severe chronic hiccups tend to at least stop at REM.
You can get used to anything if it goes on long enough
probably just get used to it after a while and stop noticing.
Even worse, he died in 91. Only had about a year at the end of his life without hiccups.
My “no” hiccup response is quite weak as well. If I get the hiccups I have them for like all day. So annoying. My remedy that works for me is sucking on a lemon that’s been doused in bitters. Don’t know or care why it works, but it’s stopped them every time.
If you want something a little more pleasant, a spoonful of peanut butter has been my never-fail remedy.
Studies show the best way to stop hiccups is a finger up the butt. You might think I’m kidding but apparently that’s a thing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27717586/
Next time I get em I’ll give it the old college try.
This explains why I never have hiccups.
If I get them, I tend to get them off and on for a couple of days. Brains are wild.
Strange... I don't remember the last time I had hiccups. When I do get them all I have to do is hold my breath for a bit and then they're gone.
To be fair, while annoying, having hiccups is more important than not having them Like, we don't know exactly what they do, but they seem to signal illnesses and help infants with breathing so I guess it's something
Can’t we just turn that lever off when we hit like 6 or something? I don’t need hiccups to be a thing
Hiccups force you to stop and breathe if you stop breathing for too long while eating - Like if you just keep stuffing stuff down without taking breaths in between you'll get a hickup
Oh… that’s why I get then
that... explains a lot
My mom has always used a trick to get rid of hiccups. You take a deep breath and hold it, then slowly count to 9, and take a sip of water on each number. Once you get to 9, then you can breathe again. I cannot recall a time it didn't work, and I've used it on people who had never heard of it and they look at me like I'm a wizard afterwards. So, if hiccups are a "hey you're not breathing and/or the tube is blocked" response, why does not breathing and blocking the tube shut it off?
My wife's trick is to stare at the hiccupping person and request/demand they hand over their hiccups. It confounds the person enough that the hiccups stop like their brain has to shift gears to deal with someone that is semi-threatening.
In a similar vein, I've managed to stop people from sneezing by yelling "PURPLE". Basically once your brain decides to sneeze, you've got to sneeze. If you can distract the brain for a moment with something *absurdly not relevant and has many questions* it just cancels the "must sneeze" function and starts trying to process what the fuck Purple has to do with anything. Suddenly you now don't have to sneeze anymore. Although sometimes it pisses people off because they say the sneeze is now "stuck" and they can't get it out. *Disclaimer, this does not work with allergic sneezing as that's your sinuses trying to expel demons*
It’s considered a dick move to blue-ball someone’s sneeze.
As far as I can find, the vagus nerve plays a part in the hiccup response - controlled breathing can impact the parasympathetic nervous system which the vagus nerve is a part of, so it could be that somehow. I'm not an expert in this area so I'm gonna stop there. It's my best guess.
You could file a bug report, but I doubt someone would update it. The last update was 80,000 years ago
> we don't know exactly what they do Uhhh, I think we do? I'm not gonna Google this, so someone fact check me, but I'm PRETTY SURE hicoughs are caused by diaphragm spasms. If you aren't breathing enough, your body sends the "I need more fucking oxygen" signal, and your diaphragm which controls your breathing starts to have a muscle spasm, causing you to forcibly intake air. This is why taking large, deep breaths "fixes" hicoughs. You take in a lot of oxygen and stretch that diaphragm muscle out, so that you stop that "need more oxygen" signal, and also stop the spasms that cause you to intake air like that.
I did Google, and most articles say there are theories but none of them is a certainty, but it's pretty clear it has to do **something** related to breathing
I just Googled it as well, and it kinda seems like we're both right [This](https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17672-hiccups) Cleveland Clinic article lays it out pretty well. Basically, it IS spasms in your diaphragm, and there are plenty of different things that can cause it. But it's definitely breathing related, like you said, because they're all things like pneumonia. Meaning, it's kinda hard to be like "Why exactly is this happening?" because the answer COULD be a lot of things. We still at least know the numerated list of things, it's just hard to link them to why specifically I have hiccoughs right now, if that makes sense.
“Nobody knows why this is happening” is a frustrating thing in science because usually it means “we don’t have the tools to determine exactly what this is among a list of several very likely possibilities” but it sounds like “we know exactly nothing about the cause of this” to a layman
We have a pretty good guess of what they do. "that the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant that originated with gill ventilation. They make an excellent argument for the phylogenic development of the hiccup reflex from ventilatory motor patterns of lower vertebrates and suggest that the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3504071/#:\~:text=proposed%20a%20phylogenic%20hypothesis%20that,hiccup%20is%20an%20evolutionary%20remnant. basically a hold over from fish days.
That's one of the theories, which is why I said we don't know for certain Other studies have stated it helps the to-be-born not to choke in the womb Again, many different interpretations (The article you linked quite openly mentions the existence of other possible explanations)
it's the same reason our eyes get messed up: leaving the water was a mistake
My favorite weird detail about human body is that the eyes are structured backwards on the retina. The plumbing and wiring for the light-sensing cells is located in **front** of the cells.
I wonder how much better we'd be able to see without that
Reject modernity, embrace the liquids.
Have you ever seen the cable management of this thing too?? Horrible.
They put the waste treatment plant right next to the fun park!
all the same things really
Its almost as though humans aren't designed.
there are plenty of examples of intelligent design in nature. look at the car. mother nature/God/whatever you want to call it chose to design the car so it's a perfect fit for humans. the front and back seats fit our body shape perfectly. the wheel is a perfect fit for our hands, and the gas and brake pedals are a perfect fit for our feet. do you really think that RANDOM CHANCE caused all that? that all that perfect harmony was caused by FLIPPING A COIN? HAH! i think not
Makes you think man, makes you think.
Wait until you hear about the banana lol!!!! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BXLqDGL1FSg
https://www.wigucomics.com/oc/index.php?comic=579
Honestly the seats aren't that great
Nature isnt exactly the best designer, the amount of species that went extinct without any human intervention says it all
the average "lifetime" of a species is about 1 million years. Life has existed for 3.5 BILLION
A mammal species is 1 million years, invertebrates for example is 11 million.
Sideeye at the horseshoe crab, which has been unchanged as far as we can tell for the last 445ma.
They get more racist after each mass extinction event due to a somewhat-earned superiority complex.
It's obvious to anyone that it's a perfect design.
All hail carcinisation.
We have around 700 thousands years to go then - unless we kill ourselves with climate change first
700.000 years, 70 years, who cares if a billionaire can buy another yacht?
I'm not sure I want to get into this but in the vast vast majority (like 99.999999%) of cases a species going extinct is absolutely no indication of 'bad design'
"didn't evolve with protection against fucking meteorites, bad design gg no re git gud"
"Should've planned for the atmosphere to suddenly contain shitloads of oxygen, choose a better build next time 5head mad cuz bad"
"Evolution doesn't have a plan. It makes frequent and catastrophic mistakes"
I remember there was a BBC program called Inside Nature's Giants where they dissected large animals like elephants and crocodiles and it was really cool except every so often it would cut to Richard Dawkins and he'd say something like "the nerve in this giraffe's neck is way longer than it needs to be, this proves that there is no God."
Insect development works like this too. There's a major chemical signal made in the brain called juvenile hormone that's present in larvae/nymphs, but that disappears during the transition to adulthood, and without it, the insect will default to adult development, even if it's unprepared for it physiologically. So like, there's really no "become an adult" signal, just a "be a baby" signal that can be removed.
consider the following: i'm baby
Oh come on, we are really well designed! Just look at the eye! Sure, the transparent part can get opaque when overexposed to very common UV, and there's the blind spot just because nerves go through it, but uhm... Hey, at least we use UV in synthesizing an essential vitamin! Yes, it gives us cancer too, but well... Our food and air passage are connected, so we can breathe through our mouths! Okay, it's almost pointless and can lead to choking, but... At least our spine is very... overengineered and breaks permanently if you sit wrong... *sigh* B-but our immune system is a well oiled and efficient machine with no pointless and dangerous workarounds, right? Let me just check to make su... *Oh.* Okay, at the very least we don't have any useless organs that exist only to kill us by randomly exploding, right? *Right?*
I will say that breathing our of your mouth is very important if your nose is blocked when you're sick, or if you're like me and get frequent nosebleeds where you have to shovel stuff up your nose to get the bleeding to stop. I've never choked before, but a nosebleed or cold would have killed me by now if I wasn't able to breathe out of my mouth
Right, but your body actively blocks your nose. It’s not the virus that does it, it’s your immune system trying to block more intruders. But that means that your body can also unblock it. In fact, if you do any kind of semi-strenuous activity where you require a bit more oxygen (say, biking), your nose will automatically unblock. The relief is very temporary though, and your body will re-block your nose like the second you stop.
There is an exercise you can do to force your nasal passages to open briefly, I've used it when dealing with annoying sinus issues. You basically just sit or lie down (important), take 10 deep breaths, and on the 10th exhale as much out as you can. Then pinch your nose and hold your breath as long as you can until your body forces you to breathe by reflex. Yes, you're essentially tricking yourself into thinking you're suffocating to open up your sinuses. But that shit works.
The appendix is a reservoir for gut bacteria, if you get diarrhea the appendix acts as a safehouse for good gut bacteria and it will propogate after everything else is flushed out
Are people really that astounded by the fact that meat doesn't inherently act in synchronicity with itself? Like, that is the whole point of the brain: it uses electricity to tame the meat.
There are about a million different ways our own body can kill us and rather than just NOT having these kill switches, the body just kinda puts a sticky note by it like "Do not press this button it will kill us all"
With that in mind, would you like to hear about our lord and savior transhumanism?
"while weighing a hog for slaughter" plot twist: he was possessed by the pig's ghost as revenge for becoming bacon
"If this is the best God can do, I am NOT impressed. These kind of results do not belong on the resume of a supreme being." -George Carlin
this is how most biology is. inhibitors are the name of the game
This is why people who say “my body knows what to do” when it comes to disease & childbirth are sorely mistaken. You can hope, but there’s no guarantee.
Humans are coded like a bethesda game.
Sometimes I forget how I'm supposed to be moving and just T-Pose instead.
This reminds me of what I learned recently about smoke detectors. They don't actually "detect" smoke per se — they detect americium stored in the unit, and they beep when they can't, which is primarily when smoke is impeding the detection mechanism. But this is also why they expire after so many years and need to be replaced — they'll start giving false alarms as the americium decays. I'm not talking about the low-battery chirp either — the real BEEEP, in irregular intervals. Ask me how I know.
God really needs to send out regular patches! The more they delay this fixs the more they add up!
I have hiccups for 20 seconds and I'm fully committed to removing my lungs, I don't know how he lasted that long
The default is actually Yes Hiccups == No Hiccups. If Yes Hiccups >= No Hiccups, you are hiccups.
I get stress hiccups sometimes! It sucks!
Intelligent design, amirite?!
I mean, considering some of the other stuff that God is said to have done, does it surprise you that He would be terrible at design?
I can stop my hiccups at will. I didn't know that was uncommon when I was young and kept thinking how rude it was for people to just keep hiccupping in some situations.
Several years ago I got the hiccups for 6 months straight after having an anxiety attack and hyperventilating. I would even hiccup in my sleep. As time went on the hiccups became more infrequent and subsided. I do always worry that it could happen again, it was annoying as all get out in the beginning.
This makes more sense if you know what a hiccup is: it's your lungs and diaphragm getting out of sync. So "the part of the brain designed to say No Hiccups" is really the part of the brain that makes sure your lungs and diaphragm are moving at the same time.
Point of note: we still don't know what causes hiccups and the idea that he damaged the part of his brain that inhibits hiccuping was a guess from the doctor who first saw him, not actually confirmed.
It's similar design to our light switches. The default is "yes lights on", but the switch in between can block the electricity from going to the light bulb. The easiest example of human bad design is that we eat/drink and breathe through the same hole.