I’m doing emergency rescue for work and learnt that inhaling a few times at below 10% oxengenated air will leave you pretty much immobile, but I can hold my breath for at least a minute, so shouldn’t I be able to go without 02 for a similar amount of time? Sorry if this is smoothbrained, I tried googling it and couldn’t find an answer for this specifically.
In: Biology
Pretend your lungs are a restaurant. Your blood cells are the patrons, and the oxygen you breathe is their food. If you breathe in, the buffet fills with food. For as long as you’ve breathed in, blood cells can take food from the buffet until it runs out. This takes about a minute to run out, but that’s not something you need to worry about generally. Even though they can only survive without eating for a little while, you breathe frequently enough and deep enough there’s enough food to go around. When you breathe out, that’s like management throwing away the leftovers at the end of the day so there’s room for fresh food the next day.
If you breathe in a no oxygen environment, the patrons show up at the restaurant to empty plates and they begin to starve since they have no food. That’s when you start to rapidly lose cognitive function.
If you were to hold your breath in an oxygenated environment and move to a low oxygen environment, you would be fine until you exhaled since the buffet patrons still have food to eat for a while. When you exhale though, all of it is thrown away and replaced with empty dishes and the “starvation” clock starts up and you have just a few moments to function since nobody is being fed anymore.
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