How does the lungs know which is O2 and CO2? We breathe a ton of different gasses daily but what happens to the other gases other than O2 and CO2 when inhaled?
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The body is like a series of buckets connected together by pipes. If you fill one bucket up too high, it’ll flow into another bucket until both are the same. The lung exchanges gases with deoxygenated (high CO2 and low O2) blood. Because there’s more O2 in the air than blood, the O2 will go into the blood, and because there’s more CO2 in the blood than air, CO2 will flow out. Just like the buckets. And then the O2 and CO2 will go to cells as oxygenated blood (high O2 and low CO2) and the cells want O2 and want to get rid of CO2.
Gasses can dissolve in fluids like water, but because we want to carry around more O2 and CO2 than what the water in our blood can dissolve, we use hemoglobin to carry it like a boat in red blood cells. But we don’t have that for other gases. Most of the air is nitrogen, and because we can’t really use the nitrogen in the air, the amount in your blood and in the air is the same so it doesn’t really go up or down.
This is true for most gases but with some exceptions. Carbon monoxide poisoning is dangerous because hemoglobin likes to carry carbon monoxide more than it likes to carry oxygen so it kicks oxygen off the boat and then refuses to drop it off at the lungs. This means our cells don’t get oxygen because the hemoglobin is carrying the carbon monoxide which ends up starving the cells of oxygen and they die.
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