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MCAT
Course: MCAT > Unit 7
Lesson 11: Respiratory systemMeet the lungs
Breathing in through the mouth or nose, air travels down the throat, through the Adam's apple or voice box, and into the lungs. The lungs, which look like an upside-down tree, direct air to tiny sacs called alveoli. Oxygen from the air enters the bloodstream, while waste carbon dioxide exits into the alveoli and is exhaled. This process is vital for human survival. Created by Rishi Desai.
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- How can the food travel down into our organs if the diaphram is beneath the heart and the lungs?(80 votes)
- Food, after being chewed in the mouth, is swallowed and goes down the esophagus, which is a tube that runs parallel to the trachea. There is a junction where the larynx forks into the trachea and esophagus, but the trachea is closed off with the epiglottis while eating so that food and water don't fall into the lungs. The esophagus (which connects the larynx and stomach) runs behind the trachea, behind the lungs, and then through a hole in the diaphragm. Since the diaphragm marks the bottom of the thorax, the esophagus also runs into the abdomen, which contains the stomach and the rest of the GI tract.(192 votes)
- WEIRD QUESTION ALERT!
So I honestly don't where to put this question, so I decided to put it here because I'm pretty sure it has to do with the lungs/diaphragm.
What is physically happening when we hiccup? Why do we do it?
Funny but not helpful answers are welcome :D
Helpful answers will be voted UP!(9 votes)- When we hiccup, the muscles in our diaphragm are contracting without our will. This happens when we eat or drink too rapidly, irritating the diaphragm, thus causing the contractions.(31 votes)
- The air we breath contains Nitrogen, Oxygen, Carbon dioxide, and some other gases, right? Now, the Carbon dioxide consists of 2 things - Oxygen and Carbon. When we breath in the CO2, does the body extract the oxygen from the carbon dioxide?(2 votes)
- Why would we do that when there is ready-to-use oxygen around in sufficient quantities ? As you stated the air we breath holds nitrogen(78%), oxygen(20%), carbondioxide(0.04%) and trace gases. So there is much more oxygen around then there is carbondioxide. And : breaking down carbondioxide consumes energy, i'd like to use that energy for other things ;-)(24 votes)
- How does Cigarette smoking or tobacco affects our lungs and How does it cause cancer.(5 votes)
- Tobacco smoke contains more than 70 different cancer-causing substances. When you inhale smoke, these chemicals enter your lungs and spread around the rest of your body.
Scientists have shown that these chemicals can damage DNA and change important genes. This causes cancer by making your cells grow and multiply out of control.(13 votes)
- Isn't the reason it's called an Adam's Apple is because in the Bible, Adam ate the Forbidden Apple?(7 votes)
- Apparently so... Although many may not believe, I have not the authority to impose on you your values and religion. More specifically, a piece of apple got stuck in his throat leaving a lump.
Hope this helped! :)(5 votes)
- What causes the feeling of dread (when your heart "drops") to feel the way it does?(3 votes)
- When you're in a stressful or nerve-wracking situation, your brain releases the stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline. These open up your bloodstream and send lots of blood to your muscles and essential organs, like the heart. This causes your heart to suddenly palpitate, or to quickly change from your resting heart rate to a fast heart rate. This causes the "heart-dropping" feeling. Another thing that causes this is your diaphragm muscles to relax due to the heart beating so much.(13 votes)
- Larynx is another name for the voice box right?(6 votes)
- yes, Larynx is also known as the voice box.(5 votes)
- Where are the alveoli located and how many of them are there?
Why does the oxygen have to go into the blood before going out as carbon dioxide?(5 votes)- The oxygen goes into the blood and is carried around the body to the cells, which use it and produce CO2 as a byproduct. The CO2 goes back into the blood which carries it back to the lungs, where it is exchanged for more oxygen.
There are 300-500 million alveoli in the lungs.(5 votes)
- What if you inhale pure oxygen(4 votes)
- Inhaling high concentrations of oxygen can be ok for brief periods, but interestingly enough it can be toxic at high enough concentrations if exposure is prolonged. Here is a paper that might be of interest to you: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK430743/(7 votes)
- About the Adam's apple thing, it says that "Adam" is a boy's name, and it is called the Adam's apple to remind us that boys/men have the Adam's apple too, but theirs is larger than girl's. But there are lots of boy names, why Adam of all names? Not saying that's a bad name though, it's a great name.(5 votes)
- The name originated in the 1600's, and most likely referred to the Adam found in Abrahamic religions (Adam and Eve, first man and woman). A 1662 text known as Bartholinus Anatomy (or Bartholin's Anatomy) states that the name came about due to a common belief at the time that a piece of the forbidden fruit got lodged into Adam's throat and stuck with men ever since.(5 votes)
Video transcript
Let's say that this is you. You're enjoying
a nice sunny day, and you decided to take a
nice long, deep breath of air. And of course, when
I say air, the part that you probably
care the most about is just the oxygen
part of that air. That's the part that we,
as humans, need to survive. So you take a deep
breath, and let's say that you take it
through your mouth. You take a deep breath
through your mouth. And then let's say you
take one more deep breath, a second deep breath. And you take that one
through your nose. Now you might think, well, these
are two totally different ways of getting in air. That's certainly
how it looks when you look at a mouth and a nose. It doesn't look like
they have much in common. But the truth is that actually. If you follow the air, it almost
follows an identical path. So the air is going to go
into the back of the throat, really regardless of
how you took it in. So here we have air
coming in from the nose. And here you have air
coming in from the mouth. And they meet up in
the back of the throat. And then they go
down, down, down. They go towards this thing
that we call the Adam's apple. I'm going to bring up a
little bit of the canvas so you can see it more easily. But basically, you see this
Adam's apple right here. And actually you can
go ahead and take a feel of your own Adam's apple. It's a pretty cool structure
in the middle of your throat, and everybody has it. That's the first
thing I want to tell you is that everybody
has it, not just men. Women have it too. And the reason it's
called an Adam's apple, it's called an Adam's apple
because Adam is generally a boy's name. And so it's to remind us
that usually men or boys have larger Adam's apples than girls. And if you're trying to find it,
I just also want to point out there's this notch here. And if you can feel the
notch with your fingers, that gives you a nice clue
as to where it's located. But this is it. This is the Adam's apple. And what it does is it helps
you control your voice. And actually, another name for
the Adam's apple, sometimes people call it the voice box. The voice box. And of course, air is passing
through the voice box, and it's kind of the
entryway into the trachea. And so it actually
allows me to (FALSETTO) make my voice really
high, (DEEP BARITONE) or make my voice
very low, depending on how you change the muscles
around in that Adam's apple. So that's actually the
kind of first cool thing I want to point out to you
is that you can actually control your voice. I'm sure you knew this
already, but what you're using is your Adam's apple,
or your voice box. Now air keeps going. Air is just going to keep
making its journey down-- and specifically, of
course, the part of air I said we care
about is the oxygen. It's going to keep
making its journey down into the lung area. So this is now the lung area. It's going down the trachea,
and it goes into the two lungs-- the right and left lung. This is the left lung. I'm going to put L for left. And this is the right lung. I'll put R for right. And immediately you're
thinking, well, wait a second, aren't they switched? I want you to
remember that this is from the perspective of the
person who owns the lungs, so that's why I'm putting
left where I put it and right where I put it. Now we should probably
go ahead and start labeling some of this. You can see that the lungs
actually don't look identical. They look slightly different. For example, this
one has three lobes. The right side has three lobes. We call it the upper lobe,
middle lobe and lower lobe. And the left one
only has two lobes. So that's the first
kind of big difference. And the other difference
is that you actually have this thing in the middle
that we call a cardiac notch. This thing right here, this
is called the cardiac notch. And the reason we
call it that is that it's a little
spot that gets formed because the
heart is literally kind of peeking out here. And as a result, it
kind of makes a notch in the lungs when it develops. So the heart takes up a
little bit of space here. This is our heart. And as a result, it
makes that notch. So this is our heart space here. So on the other
side, you've got, of course, your two lobes--
your upper and lower lobe. And these are two clues, so if
you ever see a lung just kind of sitting by itself and
you want to figure out whether it's the left
lung or the right lung, you can look for
the number of lobes, or you can look for
that cardiac notch. Now around these
lungs, you've got ribs. So you've got ribs here,
and between the ribs, you've got rib muscles. And they are, of
course, on both sides. And below the lungs
and below the heart, you've got a big muscle. Actually it's going
to come through here. I'm going to just kind of
go through the word heart. And it basically
becomes the floor. So the heart and
the two lungs, they sit on this floor made
up of this muscle. And this muscle is
the diaphragm muscle. So this diaphragm muscle
makes up the floor. The ribs make up the walls. So what do we have? We have basically a room. We have a giant room
with walls and a floor. And this entire room we
actually call the thorax. So within this room then,
you have your two lungs and your heart. So far, so good. But I haven't done a very nice
job of actually showing you where the air goes. I've just kind of pointed that
it goes through the two lungs, but you don't actually get to
see where it goes after that. So I'm going to
erase a lot of this. I'm going to reveal
to you what it would look like if you could
slip on some X-ray glasses and look at your two lungs. This is kind of what
it would look like. You've got all this
interesting architecture. And the easiest way to
think about this, probably the simplest way to think about
this, is to imagine a tree. So imagine a tree, and that tree
has been flipped upside down. So you've got all these
branches off that tree. And they're branching
and branching. And if you flip this
tree upside down, you start seeing that
it looks a lot like what we have in our lungs. Our lungs basically look like
a flipped upside down tree. And we even call it that. We even call this
entire structure, we call it a bronchial tree. So when you look at
the lungs and they look kind of messy
or complicated, just think of them as an upside
down bronchial tree, and all of a sudden it'll
look much simpler. Basically in the middle,
you've got this nice trunk. Right? This is our trunk. And then it starts kind
of branching from there. So air goes down this main
trunk, this trachea, and then it kind of starts splitting up. And each of these colored
regions-- the green region or the purple region--
serves a different lobe. So this green region serves
the lower lobe down here. The purple serves
the upper lobe. And on this side, you've got
an upper, a middle, and a lower lobe. Now I know it looks a little
bit strange, because you've got some green branches in
what should be the middle lobe, like right here. You've got some orange
branches in what looks like the upper
lobe, like right there. But what you have to
remember-- and this is kind of tricky
to do and just try to play with it
in your head-- is that what you have is basically
a three-dimensional lung. So you have to imagine
that we are only looking at it from
the front side. But, of course, that
middle lobe does go back. And if it went back, then
you'd make perfect sense of why the orange branches
are where they're at. Now let me continue
the air journey, because I want to make
sure we finish it off. So let's say we take a little
branch like this, we expand it. We keep zooming into
it, zooming into it, zooming into until
it's microscopic. You can't see it with
your eyes anymore, but you could see it
under a microscope. It would look like this. It would basically,
under a microscope, look like a bunch of
little sacs like this. And these sacs, we
call these alveoli. Alveoli. And the air actually kind
of runs into the alveoli. It has a dead end, and
then it comes back around. And then you breathe it out. So that's how breathing works. The air goes all the way
in through your mouth, down to the alveoli, takes a
U-turn, and then goes back out. But before it does
that, before it leaves, very close to the
alveoli is blood. And let's say blood is coming
this way and going that way. And what will happen is
that actually into the blood will go oxygen. Oxygen will actually
go into the blood. And out of the
blood will be waste. So you'll have some
carbon dioxide waste that your cells
have been making. And that waste
actually then gets thrown back into the alveoli. So now you can see how oxygen
gets from the outside world, gets breathed in through
the lungs when you inhale, gets down into the alveoli,
exchanges with the blood, and then you exhale and let
all that carbon dioxide out.