Adam Taylor

And again, I think it's pretty incredible.

And horses have an 80-meter long tube inside their epidermis.

I think it's pretty incredible this organ exists.

And yet, again, none of us really probably would have heard of it.

But it's fairly essential for the survival of our species.

Well, they are sort of involuntary.

We can't control them.

But they're sudden contractions of our diaphragm, the diaphragm being the dome of muscle that separates our chest from our abdomen.

And when your diaphragm contracts, air is forced into your lungs so you inhale.

But in a hiccup, the inhalation is suddenly stopped by the rapid closure of something called the glottis, which is the middle part of your voice box or larynx.

And the glottis contract and closing makes the hic sound.

One interesting thing about hiccups is that the nerves that make that diaphragm contract are called the phrenic nerves.

And one cause of hiccups is irritation with phrenic nerves.

Phrenic is spelled P-H-R-E-N-I-C, and it's a mindful word.

It's from the ancient Greek word for mind, phren, P-H-R-E-N.

You'll know phren because it appears in many other mindful words like frantic or frenetic or frenzied or schizophrenia or phrenology, phrenology being the loony sort of pseudoscientific theory that you can tell people's persona from the bumps on the top of their head.

So why is the nerve that contracts the diaphragm named after the mind?

Well, it's because...

This phren was the ancient Greek source of feelings and emotions.

It wasn't in the head.