David R. MacIver's Blog

Yes you can hum while holding your nose

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/yes-you-can-hum-while-holding-your.

Please excuse me, I’m about to start the most absurdly specific disagreement about a deeply unimportant subject, both because I thought the topic was interesting, and because the original claim annoyed me in several equally specific ways.

In 50 things I wonder, []{.mention-wrap attrs=“{”name”:“Stephen Long”,“id”:251842242,“type”:“user”,“url”:null,“photo_url”:“https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ce93bfec-06f3-411c-babc-50260b370e37_2048x1365.jpeg”,“uuid”:“43c6027f-b976-4a92-b570-93d2c2df01a9”}” component-name=“MentionToDOM”}, wonders about the following thing:

I wonder why you can’t hold your nose and hum at the same time. We don’t hum through our noses, surely?

Stephen, sorry for the fact that I’m going to spend much of the rest of this post complaining about you. I liked your post otherwise, this one stupid thing just set me off.

The problem is that it’s an interesting observation, with an expression of curiosity about it, coupled with a total lack of basic empirical investigation of the question.

Long story short, here’s a video of me humming while holding my nose:

::: {.native-video-embed attrs=“{”mediaUploadId”:“2a5d8dee-b217-4464-94f5-fa097bc01406”,“duration”:null}” component-name=“VideoPlaceholder”} :::

It’s not that hard! It’s a slightly different sound, and a slightly different action, but it’s still clearly just a humming variant.

Anyway, now for the long story.

The first thing I did when reading this claim is of course that I tried it, and was genuinely surprised. Indeed, when I held my nose I stopped being able to hum. Weird!

Then I turned to the second part:

We don’t hum through our noses, surely?

OK. So what’s going on with the nose?

So I started humming again and put a finger just under my nose. There was a very clear constant outflow of breath. OK, great. Guess we do hum through our nose.

But… do we have to?

Let’s assume there has to be an outflow of breath somewhere to make the humming noise. That makes sense. The way we make noise with our mouths is by vibrating moving air.

So… let’s try breathing out through my mouth while holding my nose and otherwise trying to hum?

Yup, turns out that works fine. You can see the slightly confused look on my face in the video as I mentally switch gears to do that, but once you orient to what you need to do, it’s straightforward. It took me a bit of experimentation, but eventually I even figured out how to do it with my nose open.

I wonder what it means to wonder something if it does not result in you trying the two most obvious experiments that would lead you to resolving it?

Anyway, me being a catty little bitch aside, I think there’s something more interesting going on here.

The first is: Kudos to Stephen, I had indeed literally never noticed this phenomenon before. I’ve hummed a lot, just by virtue of being a 42 year old human and humming being a normal human activity. I’d never noticed this before. I’ve even spent several weeks without the ability to breathe through my nose post surgery and didn’t notice it then! So it’s a good, interesting, observation.

But… There is, what feels to me like, a disappointing lack of curiosity required to encounter such an easily empirically investigable fact, acknowledge it as interesting, and then go “huh, weird” and move on without doing any of the investigation. I don’t think it actually is a lack of curiosity, I think this is what me being good at empirical investigation feels like, but I nevertheless feel disappointed when seeing this and not the immediately seeing the follow on “So then I investigated…”

The other thing that was interesting about this is that the basic skill of trying to figure out how to do something differently is worth practicing. I thought this was easy to figure out, and it probably is for most people, but I don’t know that even three years ago I would have had the reflexive next step of going from observing that I breathed through my nose while humming to thinking about how to do it differently.

I’ve been doing a lot of Pilates over those years. One aspect of that is that my Pilates teacher deliberately does something to mess with us. Here, let me show you: Clasp your hands together, lacing your fingers.

OK. Now, whichever hand has the little finger on the outside, move it up one, so the other hand now had the little finger on the outside.

Probably feels weird, right?

A lot of what I’ve been learning and relearning in Pilates is not the literal physical motions, but also the specific process of taking feedback on a motion I’m doing wrong and realising I don’t even know how to find the muscles that my teacher is asking me to use. This involves rummaging around in my head for a bit until I find where… not exactly where the muscle is, but where the way my mind relates to the muscle.

This always starts from looking at what you’re doing and figuring out how to do it differently, and that seems like an important skill to develop.

This humming trick is, I think, a surprisingly good exercise for developing it, because of how clear the feedback loop is. It either works, or it doesn’t, you can very directly experience why it’s not working when it doesn’t, and after a bit of experimentation, something that first seemed impossible becomes easy.

I wonder how well the experience of doing that generalises.

This, too, is a genuinely interesting empirical question. I’m probably not going to investigate this immediately, because it’s rather a lot more work than I’ve got available to spend on this problem right now, but I would like to invite you to try to learn to hum with your nose closed and tell me how you find it. You might learn something interesting doing it, and I’d enjoy hearing about your experiences.

More importantly though, I would like to invite you to adopt the sort of reflexive attitude I’m pointing at here: If you spot something interesting, ask why it’s like that. If something doesn’t work, experiment a bit and see if you can make it work.

The world is full of weird little details, and it’s worth being curious about them.