Many actions are controlled by autonomic nerves, except some, like breathing, can be interfered by the conscious, while others, like the beating of the heart, cannot. In fact, for breathing, the conscious decision can override the autonomic nerves such as holding your breath until a certain point. It’s like an admin user vs a guest user. But how does such privilege system work in terms of neurons? How does the control alternate between the conscious and the autonomic system?
“You are now manually beating your heart”. Nope, that doesn’t work no matter how hard you try it (except for Buddha monks I suppose), so does this mean there are no physical neuron connections between the conscious and the heart?
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Much of the oxygen you inhale, you exhale right back out. With proper training and conditioning a deep breath can provide minutes of oxygen. Therefore it’s not necessary to have such access control limits on breathing. Especially since there are times when you *need* to arrest respiration.
Also with training you can slow your heart rate, but you cannot stop it completely…and, you wouldn’t want to. Oxygen gets to your brain by your heart pumping oxygen rich blood to it. After your brain stops receiving oxygen your brain cells begin to die. You lose almost 2 million neurons per minute without oxygen. It would be a massive design flaw or evolutionary maladaptation if the host could induce a stroke at will… especially if the heart doesn’t restart as kick-starting the heart is trickier than the lungs.
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