eli5: How come you can auto-breathe when you’re not thinking about breathing, but you can only manually breathe when you’re thinking about breathing?

Question

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In: Biology

Answer 1

Because there are situations where holding your breath is useful, such as being under water, or hiding. It’s likely that all air breathing vertebrates have the same ability,

Controlling your heartbeat is not that useful, but some people can control it (by controlling their breathing rate, seen as a mostly harmless medical condition), but nothing will kill you because your heart is beating.