Hiccups are among the body’s strangest interruptions: a sudden muscle jerk, a breath cut short, and that unmistakable, involuntary sound. Most of the time they’re a passing nuisance, gone as quickly as they appear. In rare cases, though, hiccups can linger for weeks, months, or even decades, turning a minor reflex into a daily ordeal. Despite how familiar they are, scientists still don’t fully agree on why hiccups exist at all.
When hiccups refuse to stop
Few stories capture the bizarre potential of hiccups better than that of Charles Osborne, an Iowa farmer whose life became inseparable from the reflex. In 1922, while weighing a hog before slaughter, Osborne was knocked over when the animal fell on him. Something about that accident triggered hiccups that simply never went away. For roughly 68 years—from 1922 until 1990—he hiccupped almost constantly, a record later recognized by Guinness World Records as the longest hiccup attack ever documented.
Estimates suggest Osborne hiccupped hundreds of millions of times. And yet, astonishingly, he still married, raised eight children, and lived a largely functional life. His case remains a striking example of how resilient people can be, even when their own nervous system seems to be working against them.
A very different kind of attention surrounded Jennifer Mee, a teenager from Florida who made headlines in 2007. At around 15 years old, Mee developed hiccups that struck up to 50 times a minute and lasted for more than four weeks. The relentless rhythm made eating, sleeping, and speaking difficult. Her condition drew widespread media coverage as doctors struggled to explain what had gone wrong and how to stop it.
Together, these cases show just how extreme hiccups can become. For most people, they fade within minutes. But these outliers hint at how deeply rooted—and stubborn—this reflex can be.
What actually happens when you hiccup
A hiccup begins in the diaphragm, the broad, dome-shaped muscle beneath the lungs that drives breathing. Under normal conditions, the diaphragm contracts smoothly to pull air into the lungs and relaxes to let it flow out. During a hiccup, that smooth rhythm breaks. The diaphragm suddenly spasms, triggering a sharp, involuntary attempt to inhale.
Almost instantly, the vocal cords slam shut. This closure seals the glottis—the opening that normally allows air to pass into the lungs—cutting off the incoming breath. The collision of these two events produces the familiar “hic” sound. The entire sequence unfolds in a split second, but it can repeat again and again in a maddening loop.
This reflex is controlled by a network linking the diaphragm, the nerves that regulate it, and parts of the brainstem that manage breathing. Once that loop is activated, it can keep firing until something disrupts it. In everyday hiccups, the cycle breaks quickly. In rare cases, damage or abnormal signaling can lock the system into a pattern that persists for years.
Everyday triggers we all recognize
Hiccups often arrive after something irritates or stretches the stomach. Eating too quickly, drinking carbonated beverages, or swallowing air can all distend the stomach and stimulate nerves connected to the diaphragm. Large meals or gulping food without chewing thoroughly are common culprits.
Emotions can play a role too. Bursts of laughter, sudden stress, anxiety, or excitement can alter breathing patterns and muscle tension, making spasms more likely. Even rapid temperature changes—like drinking something very hot or very cold—can jolt the nerves involved in the reflex.
Most of the time, these triggers lead to brief, harmless hiccups. Occasionally, though, persistent hiccups signal something more serious. Irritation or damage to the phrenic nerve, infections, tumors, certain medications, or disorders affecting the brain and nervous system can all be underlying causes. That’s why doctors take hiccups seriously when they refuse to go away.
A reflex without an obvious job
Unlike coughing or sneezing, hiccups don’t seem to serve a clear purpose. They interrupt breathing rather than improve it, blocking air instead of clearing a passage. From a practical standpoint, they appear pointless.
That mystery has long fascinated evolutionary biologists. When a reflex has no obvious benefit, it raises an obvious question: why hasn’t evolution gotten rid of it? Some scientists suspect hiccups are leftovers from an ancient past. Others think they once had—or still have—a subtle function, especially early in life.
Two main ideas dominate the debate. One traces hiccups back to our distant amphibian ancestors. The other links them to feeding in mammals, particularly nursing in infants.
Echoes from an amphibian past
One prominent theory suggests hiccups are a vestige of early vertebrate evolution, from a time when animals were transitioning from water to land. These early creatures often had both gills and primitive lungs and needed to coordinate two very different ways of breathing.
Modern amphibians, like tadpoles, offer a glimpse of this dual system. They rely on rhythmic movements that pump water and air, using rapid gulps and closures to move fluid across gills without flooding their lungs. Researchers have noted striking similarities between these motor patterns and the neural activity seen during hiccups in mammals.
In this view, hiccups are a vestigial reflex—an ancient program once used to manage gill ventilation and protect early lungs. The sharp intake would draw water across gills, while the quick closure of the glottis would prevent liquid from entering the lungs. As vertebrates evolved into fully land-dwelling animals and lost their gills, this reflex lost its function but remained wired into the nervous system.
Clues from human development support this idea. The neural circuits responsible for hiccups appear early in fetal life, before the systems that control mature breathing are fully developed. That timing suggests hiccups may arise from older, more primitive respiratory circuitry—an evolutionary echo that still surfaces today.
A reflex built for nursing?
Another camp argues that hiccups aren’t useless leftovers at all, but a specifically mammalian adaptation. True hiccups are largely confined to mammals, which points toward a function tied to something mammals do differently.
One uniquely mammalian behavior is nursing. Infants drink milk rapidly and inevitably swallow air along with it. Excess air in the stomach can cause discomfort and interfere with feeding. According to this theory, hiccups may function as an efficient way to move swallowed air upward and release it safely.
The diaphragm’s sudden contraction could help push air toward the esophagus, while the closed glottis protects the lungs from aspirating milk. In effect, hiccups may act as a specialized burping mechanism, especially useful in early life.
This idea fits several observations. Hiccups are far more common in infants than adults and even occur before birth, when fetuses swallow amniotic fluid and practice breathing movements. As people grow older and feeding patterns change, the reflex may become less important, explaining why adult hiccups are usually brief and incidental.
Why evolution hasn’t erased hiccups
If hiccups can be painful, disruptive, or even debilitating, why do they persist? One answer is that natural selection only acts strongly on traits that significantly affect survival or reproduction. For most people, hiccups are rare and harmless. Occasional discomfort isn’t enough to drive a reflex out of existence.
There’s also the issue of wiring. The circuits involved in hiccups overlap with those that control essential breathing. Eliminating the hiccup reflex without interfering with respiration may simply be too risky, evolutionarily speaking.
Human bodies are full of compromises shaped by history rather than perfection. From awkward nerve routes to vulnerable joints, not every feature is optimized. Hiccups may be another example—a harmless glitch preserved because it isn’t dangerous enough to remove and too entangled with vital systems to easily untangle.
Folk cures and modern medicine
When hiccups strike, evolutionary theories offer little comfort. People just want them gone. Over time, countless remedies have emerged: holding one’s breath, sipping cold water, swallowing sugar or peanut butter, breathing into a paper bag, or relying on a sudden scare.
Most of these methods aim to disrupt the reflex by altering breathing, stimulating other nerves, or shocking the nervous system into resetting itself. Some people swear by them. Others find nothing works.
Scientific evidence for these remedies is thin. Hiccups often stop on their own, making it hard to know whether a trick actually helped. In stubborn cases, doctors may prescribe medications that affect nerve signaling, but even those are hit-or-miss.
For now, there is no guaranteed cure. The hiccup reflex is deeply embedded, triggered by many different pathways, and still poorly understood.
A small reflex with a long story
Annoying as they are, hiccups offer a rare glimpse into the deep history of the human body. They link everyday experience to ancient evolutionary transitions and early development. Whether they’re remnants of amphibian ancestors or tools shaped to help mammalian infants feed safely, hiccups remind us that our bodies carry traces of their past.
Extreme cases like Charles Osborne’s or Jennifer Mee’s reveal how powerful this reflex can become when it goes awry. Ordinary hiccups—after a fizzy drink or a burst of laughter—are gentler reminders that even the most familiar bodily functions still hold unanswered questions. Somewhere behind each abrupt “hic” lies a story millions of years in the making.
