God Awful Things

We all know that out heart beats without our conscious effort, and even consciously we cannot “hold” a heart beat. Though, through meditation and other such things (i.e.. breathing techniques) we can slow it, debatable whether that is consciously slowing it as opposed to controlling the other apparatuses’, but we certainly can’t stop it and start it at will.

Then we have our lungs, which probably up until this sentence you hadn’t consciously been thinking about controlling your breathing. We can certainly hold our breaths, inhale exhale at any pace we like, but we also know we don’t have to constantly remember to breath. Probably 99.99% of our breathing is done on auto pilot, but why can we control it? and which part of the brain handles breathing, and when we switch to manual control, doesn’t a different part of the brain take over? That’s pretty decent multi-threading.

Here is my guestimation as to why we can turn it on and off.. Driving back to work I thought “well, we have to be able to turn it off to be able to swim”, being our ancestors when they dove down to catch fish or whatever, but that is just silliness, that isn’t why I’m 99.99% certain. The reason why is right under your nose, well, really, your nose itself.. Smelling. Can’t smell if we can’t get the air the pass through the ol’ horn. When we are trying to determine which direction a smell comes from, we lift our nose and take a big deep whiff.

SNIIIIIIIFFF

A few quick sniffs..

Anyway, I couldn’t find anything on the internet to answer this, but I’m also mostly curious about whether we cede power of a certain part of our brain to another, and back and forth as we switch from manual to auto pilot… hit me up