No controlled trial has ever tested whether saying “I am not a fish” reliably stops hiccups, but the phrase has circulated online as a folk cure for years, and the reasons it might actually work are more interesting than the trick itself. The phrase sits at the intersection of several real mechanisms: cognitive distraction, deliberate breath control during speech, and a genuinely surprising evolutionary connection between hiccups and fish. Whether you stumbled on this remedy in desperation during a hiccup bout or heard it as a joke, the science behind it touches on everything from ancient gill-breathing reflexes to how your brain’s motor cortex processes the word “not.”
What a Hiccup Actually Is
A hiccup is an involuntary spasm of the diaphragm followed almost instantly by the snapping shut of the glottis, the flap of tissue at the top of your windpipe. That abrupt closure is what makes the “hic” sound. Recent observations using high-speed imaging confirmed that the characteristic noise comes from the glottis slamming closed, not the epiglottis as older textbooks sometimes suggested.1BMJ Open Gastroenterology. What puts the ‘Hic’ into Hiccups? The whole event is governed by a reflex arc with three parts: sensory nerves (including the vagus and phrenic nerves) that detect irritation or other triggers, a processing center in the brainstem, and motor nerves that fire the diaphragm and the muscles between your ribs.2Journal of Neurogastroenterology and Motility. Hiccup: Mystery, Nature and Treatment
Because the reflex arc runs through the brainstem rather than the conscious parts of your brain, you cannot simply will yourself to stop hiccupping. This is why every hiccup remedy, from holding your breath to drinking water upside down, works by indirectly disrupting that reflex loop rather than by conscious control. The “I am not a fish” trick fits squarely into this category: it doesn’t command the hiccup to stop. It sneaks around the reflex by engaging other neural circuits that compete with or suppress it.
The Surprisingly Real Fish Connection
The phrase “I am not a fish” sounds like a random absurdity chosen for its shock value, and that randomness is probably part of why it works (more on that below). But the fish part is not arbitrary from an evolutionary standpoint. One of the leading hypotheses about why humans hiccup at all traces the reflex back to the gill-ventilation patterns of ancient aquatic vertebrates.
The idea, first proposed in a widely cited 2003 paper, goes like this: animals that breathe with both gills and lungs, like modern tadpoles and certain fish, use a motor pattern where they inhale water through the mouth and then snap the glottis shut to keep water out of the lungs while routing it over the gills. That pattern, a sharp inhalation immediately followed by glottal closure, is essentially identical to a hiccup.3PubMed. A phylogenetic hypothesis for the origin of hiccough The hypothesis suggests that hiccups are not a malfunction but rather the accidental triggering of an extremely ancient motor program that once served a real respiratory purpose. In evolutionary terms, you are briefly doing something a fish would do.
So when you say “I am not a fish,” there is a layer of irony the phrase’s inventor may not have intended: during a hiccup, your brainstem is, in a loose sense, running a program inherited from fish-like ancestors. Declaring that you are not a fish is a factual correction your nervous system apparently needs to hear.
How Fetal Hiccups Support the Ancient-Reflex Theory
If hiccups are a leftover from an ancient respiratory program, you would expect them to show up early in development, before the more recent lung-breathing circuits have fully matured. That is exactly what happens. Fetuses hiccup frequently, and they start doing it well before they take their first breath of air. Studies in fetal baboons have recorded hiccups as a distinct, high-amplitude pressure pattern in the trachea, clearly different from fetal breathing movements, occurring roughly two percent of the time they were monitored.4PubMed. Fetal hiccups in the baboon Human fetuses hiccup too, and many pregnant people feel them as a rhythmic tapping distinct from kicks.
One additional hypothesis proposes that fetal hiccups serve a specific purpose during the first half of pregnancy by helping move amniotic fluid into the developing gut.5Elsevier / PubMed Central. Hiccups and amniotic fluid regulation in early pregnancy Whether or not that turns out to be correct, the sheer prevalence of hiccups in the womb fits neatly with the idea that they represent a primitive motor pattern that gets less useful as lung-breathing circuits come online. Adults hiccup much less than fetuses do, but the old program never fully goes away.
Three Mechanisms That Might Make the Phrase Work
Since no researcher has run a trial on this specific phrase, we have to reason from what we know about hiccup remedies in general. Three plausible mechanisms stand out, and the phrase likely engages all of them at once.
Cognitive Disruption
Saying something bizarre forces your brain to shift attention. The statement “I am not a fish” is semantically odd enough that processing it requires genuine cognitive effort, not the kind of effort that makes you sweat, but enough to momentarily pull your brainstem’s hiccup circuit out of its rhythm. This is the same principle behind the classic “name five bald men” or “think of three vegetables that start with the letter B” remedies. The hiccup reflex, while involuntary, can be disrupted by competing neural activity. Animal experiments have shown that stimulating specific brainstem regions can both trigger and suppress hiccup-like responses, suggesting the circuit is not as locked-in as it feels.6Neuroscience Research. GABAergic inhibition of hiccup-like reflex induced by electrical stimulation in medulla of cats You are not electrically stimulating your brainstem when you say something weird, but you are flooding it with competing signals from higher brain centers.
Controlled Breathing
Speaking out loud requires you to regulate your breathing in ways that conflict with the hiccup spasm. You need to exhale steadily to produce sound, and you need to keep your glottis open to vibrate your vocal cords. Both of these actions directly oppose what the hiccup reflex is trying to do, which is to make you inhale sharply and snap the glottis shut. Research on CO₂ and hiccups has shown that raising the level of carbon dioxide in the blood can suppress the hiccup reflex, and breath-holding remedies work partly through this mechanism.7PubMed. CO(2) retention: The key to stopping hiccups While speaking a short phrase does not hold your breath long enough to build up significant CO₂, it does impose a controlled breathing pattern that competes with the spasmodic inhale of the hiccup. If you are concentrating on getting the words out clearly, you are also unconsciously stabilizing your diaphragm.
Pharyngeal Stimulation
Speaking engages the muscles of the throat in a complex, coordinated way. This matters because stimulating the pharynx, the back of the throat, is one of the oldest documented methods for stopping hiccups. A 1967 study reported that pharyngeal stimulation could interrupt the hiccup reflex, and the proposed mechanism was that nerve impulses from the throat block or interfere with the signals traveling through the vagus nerve that sustain the hiccup loop.8JAMA. Treatment of Hiccups by Pharyngeal Stimulation in Anesthetized and Conscious Subjects Talking activates the pharynx more gently than, say, swallowing a spoonful of sugar or pulling on your tongue, but the neural overlap is real. Saying “I am not a fish” while focusing on articulating each word gives the pharynx a small workout that may be enough to throw a wrench into the vagal loop sustaining the hiccup.
What Your Motor Cortex Does With the Word “Not”
There is one more layer to this that gets into genuinely fascinating neuroscience. When you read or say the sentence “I am not a fish,” your brain does not simply skip the concept of “fish.” Research using brain stimulation to measure motor cortex activity has shown that when people read sentences about actions, the motor cortex fires up even when the sentence is negated. In other words, reading “I do not kick the ball” activates the leg-related parts of the motor cortex just as much as “I kick the ball,” at least initially. The inhibition comes later, if it comes at all.9Neuroscience. Negated actions are simulated within the primary motor cortex
What does this mean for the hiccup trick? It means that saying “I am not a fish” does not let your brain cleanly ignore the fish concept. Your motor system briefly simulates something related to “being a fish” before the negation kicks in. This is more cognitive processing, not less. The negation itself adds a layer of complexity that demands additional neural resources. That extra processing could contribute to the disruptive effect, pulling more of the brain’s bandwidth away from the simple brainstem loop driving the hiccup. This is speculative, since nobody has measured motor cortex excitability during a hiccup cure, but the principle aligns with what we know about how negation works in the brain.
How This Compares to Remedies That Have Been Studied
The hiccup remedies that have the strongest evidence share a common theme: they simultaneously stimulate multiple branches of the hiccup reflex arc. The most studied approaches target the vagus nerve, the phrenic nerve, or the brainstem itself, ideally more than one at once.
A specialized drinking straw called the Forced Inspiratory Suction and Swallow Tool (FISST) illustrates this well. It requires you to suck hard, hold your breath, and swallow simultaneously. The hard suction engages the diaphragm via the phrenic nerve, the breath-hold raises CO₂ and stabilizes the chest wall, and swallowing stimulates the vagus nerve through the throat. Together, these actions hit all three legs of the reflex arc at the same time.10PubMed. Forced inspiratory suction and swallow tool (FISST): an automation of Valsalva maneuver variants for therapeutic interventions Clinical observations have confirmed that combining these elements provides rapid relief for ordinary hiccups.1BMJ Open Gastroenterology. What puts the ‘Hic’ into Hiccups?
Saying “I am not a fish” is a much gentler intervention. It hits the vagal/pharyngeal component lightly and adds cognitive disruption, but it does not create the strong diaphragmatic engagement or the CO₂ buildup of holding your breath or sucking through a resistant straw. For a mild, transient case of hiccups, that lighter touch may be enough. For a stubborn bout, you might need something more physically aggressive, like the classic combination of holding your breath while swallowing water.
Why Weird Remedies Spread Even Without Evidence
The internet is full of hiccup cures that sound absurd: “think of three bald men,” “say pineapple three times,” “name the last person who annoyed you.” These survive and spread for two reasons. First, most hiccup bouts stop on their own within a few minutes regardless of what you do, which means almost any remedy tried during a bout will coincidentally precede the hiccups stopping. People remember the cure and forget the times it did not work. Second, remedies that are strange, funny, or embarrassing to perform tend to be more memorable and more sharable than “just wait five minutes.” The social dynamics of cure-spreading favor entertainment value over effectiveness.
This does not mean all weird remedies are useless. As described above, the act of speaking a phrase does engage real mechanisms, and a sufficiently bizarre phrase adds cognitive disruption on top. But you should not expect “I am not a fish” to work every time or to handle anything beyond an ordinary hiccup bout. It is a low-stakes trick that can reasonably work through mild pharyngeal stimulation, breath regulation, and distraction, and it has the added benefit of being funny enough to relax you, which may help on its own since anxiety and tension can perpetuate hiccup bouts.
When Hiccups Need More Than a Phrase
Ordinary hiccups last minutes to hours and respond to simple physical maneuvers. But hiccups that persist for more than 48 hours, or that recur frequently over weeks, are a different clinical entity. These persistent or intractable hiccups sometimes signal an underlying problem. Brain imaging studies have found that some patients with intractable hiccups without an obvious cause have abnormalities in the temporal lobe, the cerebellopontine angle, or areas consistent with demyelinating disease.11American Journal of Neuroradiology (AJNR). Intractable hiccups: the role of cerebral MR in cases without systemic cause Other causes include irritation of the vagus or phrenic nerves by tumors, infections, or metabolic disturbances.
For intractable hiccups, treatment moves beyond folk remedies into pharmacology. Drug selection depends on the individual patient and the underlying cause, and no single medication works universally.12PubMed. Pharmacologic Interventions for Intractable and Persistent Hiccups: A Systematic Review Non-drug approaches like nerve blocks and acupuncture have also been used with varying results.2Journal of Neurogastroenterology and Motility. Hiccup: Mystery, Nature and Treatment If your hiccups last more than two days or keep coming back, that is a conversation for a doctor, not an internet remedy.
Nasogastric Tubes and the Extreme End of Pharyngeal Stimulation
One observation from the medical literature puts the pharyngeal-stimulation mechanism in a more dramatic light. Researchers noticed that inserting a nasogastric tube, a thin tube threaded through the nose and down the throat into the stomach, could interrupt hiccup attacks in adults. The same kind of spasmodic inspiratory response was also triggered in premature infants during tube insertion.13Frontiers in Physiology. Reversal of functional disorders by aspiration, expiration, and cough reflexes and their voluntary counterparts Nobody is suggesting you thread a tube down your nose to stop hiccups at home. But this finding confirms that strong stimulation of the pharynx and esophagus can override the hiccup reflex, and it helps explain why milder throat stimulation from speaking, swallowing, or drinking cold water sometimes has the same effect at a lower intensity.
Thinking about it on a spectrum, nasogastric tube insertion sits at the extreme end of pharyngeal stimulation. Sipping water through a resistant straw while holding your breath sits in the middle. And saying “I am not a fish” sits near the gentle end, where the stimulation is subtle but supplemented by cognitive effects. Where you need to be on that spectrum depends on how stubborn the hiccup bout is. For the average case that started because you ate too fast or drank something carbonated, the gentle end is often enough.
Other Phrases People Claim Work
If “I am not a fish” is not your style, the same principles apply to any phrase that is cognitively unusual and forces you to speak deliberately. Variations that circulate online include “purple elephants are climbing the stairs,” “my hiccups are gone” (repeated as a mantra), and simply reciting a tongue twister. The common thread is forced attention and deliberate vocalization, not the specific words. A phrase that makes you laugh or feel absurd might have an edge, since laughter changes your breathing pattern dramatically and engages the diaphragm in ways that compete with the hiccup spasm. But there is no magic formula. The phrase is a delivery vehicle for the mechanisms that actually matter: breaking your attention, regulating your breath, and gently stimulating your throat.
That said, the fish version has a charm that the others lack. Knowing that hiccups may genuinely trace back to fish gill ventilation gives the phrase a satisfying internal logic. You are not just saying something random. You are, in a very loose and unscientific sense, telling your brainstem to stop running a 370-million-year-old program. Whether the brainstem listens is another matter, but at least the joke lands.