RESPIRATION

Day 1
The thing about respiration is that it is not a single thing; during evolution, when the body
organization got bigger and bigger, the distance of the cells from oxygen and nutrients became
too large. Remember in the lower species, like the Cnidarians, there was a gastrovascular cavity,
which was just this open space where nutrients could diffuse out of that space and into the cells,
and oxygen could diffuse out of the water into the cells, so the cells on the surface of the body
could get oxygen by simple diffusion. But at some point, when there were more body cell layers,
cells became remote, distant, from sources of oxygen and nutrients, so we developed this
circulatory system that could carry oxygen and nutrients to the entire body, delivering those to
the cells. We needed these other specialized organs whose job it was to oxygenate the blood by
transferring oxygen from the air to the blood, and we also needed specialized regions of the body
that were involved in the digestive processes and then delivered the nutrients into the
bloodstream. Today what we want to talk about are the components of an animals body that
allows it to respire, and these are respiratory membranes.
Now respiration depends on the organism. Some animals, like frogs, can absorb some of
their oxygen through their skin, but a human cannot do that, because the outermost layers of cells
are not alive, they are in fact keratinized to prevent movement of fluids and materials through
them. You cannot use your skin at all to absorb oxygen, so we need a specialized respiratory
membrane. What is a respiratory membrane and where is it? If you are a fish, or a shark, or a
mollusk, your respiratory membrane is a gill, and all a respiratory membrane does is bring the
bloodstream really close to where the gases are that you need (for most animals that is oxygen),
and the respiratory membrane simply brings where the oxygen is really close to the bloodstream

so that oxygen can diffuse into the bloodstream. So the respiratory membrane has to have
physical properties that allow diffusion; eventually, even though your respiratory system includes
very complicated structures like trachea, and bronchioles and lungs, when we get down to the
level of organization where actual respiration takes place, the respiratory membrane is comprised
of one layer of cells, and then the capillaries come really close to those, and remember capillaries
are one layer of cells. Our specialized cells called erythrocytes that have hemoglobin in them
will pick up the oxygen. The respiratory membrane is really two layers of cells: one that is the
respiratory system, allowing oxygen to move from the air, through the cells into the interstitial
space (the space between cells), and then that oxygen moves through the cells of the capillary
into the blood. For us, we cannot carry oxygen in our blood itself because is hardly soluble, the
oxygen is moved from the blood into our red blood cells, and attached to a specialized protein
called hemoglobin. Everything else that is in our respiratory system is to get the air to that
membrane. Everything else that we think about as respiration is simply to get air to this
structure, our respiratory membrane, and the respiratory membrane is called as such because it
has the physical characteristics that allow gas exchange. For us, there are two gas exchanges:
one that takes place with the outside world, where oxygen in the air enters our body, and then
eventually gets to a location, the cells of the body, where the oxygen will leave the bloodstream
and end up in our cells, so the exchange of gases that takes place between the outside air and our
blood is called external respiration. The exchange of gases between our blood and our cells is
internal respiration. For us, there are two gases involved: oxygen, which we need as our terminal
electron acceptor in the electron transport chain, and carbon dioxide, which is produced by our
cells, is exchanged with outside air, leaving out of the body and returning to the atmosphere; we
also have to exchange carbon dioxide between our cells and our blood.

All the complicated organs associated with respiration are involved primarily in
ventilation. The only respiration is the exchange of gases, and that is only in specialized parts of
the body where there is the right type of cellular anatomy, one cell separated from another cell
and simple diffusion. And so we will expire carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere and pick
up oxygen. The whole purpose of respiration is to deliver oxygen to our cells.
For us, the process is as follows: we bring air into our lungs, that is called pulmonary
ventilation; the air in our lungs and the carbon dioxide in our blood is exchanged in the lung,
oxygen moves in, carbon dioxide moves out. Now the oxygen is in our blood; our blood then
transports it to the cells in our body that need that oxygen, and then we need the oxygen that is in
our blood with the fluids in our body, that is internal respiration. When internal respiration takes
place, the blood will also pick up the carbon dioxide made as the cells break down glucose.
Remember glucose is a six carbon molecule made from carbon dioxideplants make itwe
then systematically break those bonds, take the energy from those bonds, and return the carbon
dioxide back to the environment. So the internal gas exchange, the internal respiration, takes
place between the cells of the body and the blood stream, and then we transport it back via the
circulatory system, and then we once again exchange gases in the lungs. So the respiratory
system includes pulmonary respiration, transport of gases, external respiration, and internal
respiration, which is the actual gas exchange.
The respiratory membrane is not on the surface of the body and if it were, it would have
to be submersed into a very wet environment otherwise it would get dried up. Now let us talk
about the respiratory components involved in conducting air to where these membranes are. You
can think about it in the following way: your respiratory system is a tree and you have one big
trunk, which is your trachea, which then divides into primary bronchioles; you have lungs on the

left side and lungs on the right side, on the left side you have two lung lobes, these are your
secondary bronchioles, and on the right side you have three lung lobes, three secondary
bronchioles. You have two on the left because your heart is on the left side and occupies some
space. Once you get inside the lung, the bronchioles divide and divide like a tree, until you
finally get down to the smallest division, and that is where the respiratory membrane is going to
be. Think about a tree, what part of the tree is doing photosynthesis? The leaves, just the leaves.
In the fall, when all the leaves fall, what is left of the tree? Ninety percent of it is wood; only way
out at the tips is photosynthesis taking place, way out at the tips is actual respiration taking place.
Everything else is a conducting vessel. Another example; you live in one little house in maybe
one room of your own, somewhere isolated from where we are right now. To get there, you are
going to have to navigate through a very complex system of roads, ultimately to this very small
restricted space, relative to the rest of the area. The bronchiole system will divide systematically
there are 23 divisions in the bronchiole system, until you finally reach the respiratory
membrane. None of the rest of the stuff that we think about in the respiratory system is really
respiratory, they are only involved in ventilation and conducting air down to where respiration
takes place.
Let us talk about how we get air down to here. It has to pass through a number of
different anatomical spaces where that air is modified. Your nose is part of the respiratory
system; preferentially air should travel through the nasal cavities to reach the respiratory
membrane, because as it does so, that air is humidified and filtered, and the temperature is
increased, so the nose and the nasal cavities are designed best for respiration. The inner lining of
the nasal cavity is mucus membrane, which traps particles of matter; it also has a system of hairs
that trap large particles of matter and then the air then passes down into your pharynx. The nasal

cavity has some other roles too, because the air often contains volatile chemicals: we also have
our olfactory receptors in our nasal cavity. Sometimes we think we smell with our noses, no, we
smell with our olfactory membrane that happens to be in our nasal cavity. It could be on your
forehead; for some animals it is on the end of their antenna, on their forelimbs, it just happens for
us to be in our respiratory system, because where are the odorants that we are trying to detect?
Well, in the air, so we might as well detect them as we are breathing them in. So the nasal cavity
also has the olfactory membrane which allows us to smell, but the primary function is to trap
particles of matter and to moisten and heat the air.
We can also breathe in through our mouths, but our mouth is not going to do any of those
activities. Because our oral cavity and our nasal cavity both connect to the larynx, you can
breathe in through your mouth; it is not preferential, although it is a much bigger opening and
there is less physical resistance. Right now you are probably primarily breathing through your
nose, but if I had you go out and run five miles, at some point in the run you would probably be
breathing through your mouth because it is a much bigger hole, a larger volume of air can fit
through the oral cavity.
The nasal cavity and the oral cavity each have a pharynx. You have a nasopharynx and
an oropharynx, and these structures come together to form the laryngopharynx. Theoretically,
only air should pass through your nasal cavity and your nasopharynx; food or air can pass
through your oral cavity and your oropharynx, and then the two of those come together to form
your laryngopharynx which then goes into your larynx. The pharynx simply brings the nasal and
oral cavity together. When you are swallowing, food should not go up into your nasal cavity; I
am sure we have observed or experienced one of those elementary school milk accidents where
people are shooting milk out of their noses when they are laughing. Laughing is a very

spasmodic activation of the respiratory membrane and so when you are swallowing, the uvula
should cover the opening into the nasopharynx, but sometimes laughing will create this
spasmodic opening of the uvula. Does anyone have a really odd laugh? Some people make
some curious noises when they are laughing; the air will go into the nasal cavities modulated by
the uvula, so it is a very reflexive kind of activity that happens when you are laughing. Your
respiratory muscles are activated without you having any control over it, and some peoples
uvula spasms and air is bypassed, etc. The uvula stops the movement of digestive fluids and
materials up into the nasal cavity, because when you are swallowing, at one point during that
process, the food is now in the laryngopharynx which leads to both the oropharynx and the
nasopharynx, so the uvula should be closed while you are swallowing to prevent you from
allowing food to move back upward.
One thing about the nasal cavity for a second: it is also involved in the tonal quality of
our voice, the resonance quality, it used as a resonant chamber. Some people have a voice that
seems to have a nasal quality, but it is not, it is actually anti-nasal. When Fran from that show
The Nanny is speaking that way, she closes her uvula so that sound does not resonate in her nasal
cavity, and what we consider nasal is not nasal; the noise that she makes is not allowing the
sound to resonate in her nasal cavity. The characteristics of our voices are not exclusively
larynx, they involve the structure of our nasal cavity.
Now we have gone into the laryngopharynx which then leads into the larynx. The larynx
has a lot of responsibilities which we are not going to talk about, but the one that we are going to
mention is that the larynx allows air to move directly into the trachea through an opening called
the glottis, and diverts food into the esophagus when we are swallowing. So when we swallow,
the glottis, the opening into our trachea, is covered by the epiglottis, which blocks the glottis, and

then allows food to move down into the esophagus where we then swallow it and have it enter
into the digestive tract. The larynx is constructed out of multiple plates of cartilage and it acts a
little bit like a traffic cop: it determines which material has access to which tube. Air is going to
move in through the larynx, through the glottis, into the trachea; food is going to be diverted into
the esophagus.
Once we are through the larynx, we are in the trachea. The trachea is the largest
component of the conducting system. Right now, each time you breathe, you inhale about 500
mL of air, but of the 500 mL of air that you have taken in, only about 150 mL reaches the
respiratory zonethe rest of it is inside of the conducting vessels, the trachea and bronchioles,
etc. So 350 mL of what you inhaled never gets to the respiratory membrane, only 150 mL do,
and that is the only air that can exchange its gases with our bloodeverything else is to conduct
the air down to that level and does not participate in respiration. Everything else is called the
conducting zone and the conducting zone, when we breathe, has to create pressure changes in
our lungs.
During the primary process of breathing, which is inspiration, we change the volume of
our lungs, increasing its volume by activating certain skeletal elements. If I had a chamber of
gas that was continuous with the air in this room, the gas inside that chamber and the gas in the
air would be at the same pressure. But, if I keep the same volume of air in that chamber and
double the size of the chamber, what happens to the pressure of the air in the chamber? It
decreases. Now I have a pressure gradient: it is lower in the chamber than it is in roomso what
is the air in the room going to do? It is going to move into the chamber. When we breathe in, we
increase the volume of our lungs, creating the pressure gradient, and air will then move into our
lungs, that is inspiration. When we let those respiratory muscles relax, our lungs go back to their

original dimensions, and now there is more air in our lungs than there was originally; the volume
then decreases, and what happens to the pressure of that air? It goes down. Now that there is a
higher pressure air in our lungs than outside, what is the air going to do? It is going to move out
of our lungs, out to the outside world. The mechanical aspects of breathing actively inspire by
changing the dimensions of our lungs, and we passively expire by allowing those muscles to
relax again. As we are breathing, we are going to expose our respiratory system to these
pressures, so we have to reinforce it. It would be like having a vacuum cleaner; does anyone
have a vacuum cleaner with a hose attached to it? Can you tell it has a wire reinforcement going
through that hose? What would happen if you took the wire out and turned the vacuum cleaner
on? It would just collapse. The negative pressure created by that pump would suck the tube
closed. The same thing with your respiratory system; if I increase the volume of the lung and the
pressure drops down here, essentially it would pull all the air in, it would cause all of our
conducting elements to collapse. If you have ever touched your trachea, what do you feel? You
feel rings of hyaline cartilage that strengthen the tube like your vacuum cleaner hose tube. Those
rings continue pretty far down into the respiratory tree, at least 15 divisions in you still have
cartilage rings inside the bronchioles to prevent them from collapsing. When you get out far
enough, it is kind of like the flow of water through a river. When water gets spread out over a
big enough area the flow gets really slow. When the air gets spread out over the huge respiratory
membrane, by that point the pressure difference is so small it would not be enough to cause the
inner components to collapse. If I took your respiratory membrane and stretched it out, it would
cover the surface area of a tennis court. All the rest of these things simply get the air down to
that membrane.

So going back to the respiratory tree, we have a trachea that leads to the primary
bronchioles, that lead us to the lung, and your right and left lungs are made out of lobes, and then
the lobes are divided into segments (smaller divisions) and the segments are divided into even
smaller divisions called lobules. Each component has its own bronchiole. You cannot go in and
remove part of your heart, the whole heart would stop working, but you can go in and remove a
small part of your lung because it is serviced by its own blood supply and its own bronchioles.
So we get all the way down into the lung and then eventually into the respiratory zone, and when
we get into the respiratory zone, it is really a microscopic anatomy, so we get down to what is
called a terminal bronchiole. The terminal bronchiole has a large surface area, and then it
terminates into a duct; the duct is surrounded by little spherical regions called alveoli. This is an
alveolar sac, just lots and lots of alveoli, and running through the center of it is the alveolar duct,
and all of these individual components all connect together by little pours in between them, so
the air is continuous in this whole system. If I just look at the cellular anatomy of this structure,
the alveoli are one cell layer thick, these are just simple squamous cells and oxygen simply
diffuses through the simple squamous cell and then in through the single cell layer of the
capillary, into the bloodstream, and then gets picked up by our red blood cells. The actual
respiratory zone are all of these structures, because they are, at a cellular level, thin enough to
allow oxygen to simply diffuse through them and end up in the bloodstream.
The alveoli are made of two kinds of cells: the simple squamous cells are called type Is,
and there is another cell, called a type II, which are secretory cells that make something called
surfactant. Surfactant is a detergent, it breaks down the surface tension of water, and because
without surfactant the lung tissue would stick to itself. If this table top was wet and I put a piece
of glass on it, I could not pick up the glass up directly, because of the cohesive force between the

water on the surface of the glass and on the table. The same thing with your lung tissue, without
surfactant, the actual lung tissue would stick together, and you do not enough muscular strength
to create enough negative pressure to suck it apart. Does anyone know at what age a fetus can be
delivered and be able to capable of independent respiration? 28 weeks. The reason for that is
because the type II cells start making surfactant; before that, you can intubate a premature fetus
and pressurize the lung tissue with external air, and breathing is possible, but they do not have
enough muscular strength in their diaphragm or external intercostal muscles to actually
pressurize the lung to inflate it. You should only inflate your lung once in a lifetime, the very
first breath you take, and it should stay inflated for the rest of your life.
Day 2
Last class we were looking at the respiratory system and focusing on the anatomy of it.
One last anatomical concern, before we go on and talk about the physiology of how respiration
works, is a very important part of the respiratory system because without it, it would not work.
If this is a lung, the essential mechanical event that allows breathing is that that lung has to
change physical dimensions; it has to get bigger, then smaller, bigger, then smaller. How are we
going to make it get bigger? It gets smaller by itself, it is called compliant; the lung has a lot of
elastic tissue in it, if you stretch it, it will go back to its smallest possible dimension all by itself;
the question is, how am I going to make it bigger? It has no internal structures that will allow
that to happen, but what there is, is a specialized membrane that surrounds the lung called the
pleural sac, or pleural membrane. The pleural membrane surrounds the lung; remember when
we talked about the heart we said that the heart is surrounded by pericardial membrane, the layer
attached to the heart, the visceral layer. The same thing with the pleural sac, there is a visceral
layer, the visceral pleura, and then, just like the sac surrounding the heart, there is a parietal layer

and in between is fluid, so the two membranes are held together by cohesive force, almost like
suction, negative pressure. If I were to move the parietal membrane, the visceral membrane is
going to move with it, so the two membranes function together, now all we have to do is attach
the parietal membrane to something else that can move, and we move that. What we attach it to
is first, on the bottom, the diaphragm. When you breathe, your diaphragm, which has a hump
shape, flattens out, and the dome part of it moves down, therefore pulls the bottom of the lung
down, increasing the top to bottom dimension. In addition to being attached to the diaphragm,
the parietal membrane is also attached to the inside of your chest wall, so when you move your
rib cage, your ribs when you inhale move up and out, the parietal membrane also moves up and
out, increasing the medial to lateral dimension of the lung. You have these muscles that lie in
between your ribs, and they lift the bottom rib up and out; it is going to pull the parietal
membrane with it, making the lung bigger, from middle to the outside, medial to lateral. Every
time you breath in, you are pulling the parietal membrane out and up, and then the diaphragm is
pulling it down, so the lungs get bigger. When you relax those muscles, everything goes back to
their normal position, and the lungs get smaller. So, breathing requires changing the dimensions
of the lung. To change the dimensions of the lung, you move the membranes that are attached to
the surface of the lung by moving certain parts of the muscular-skeletal system. Does anyone
know what a pneumothorax is? That is the medical term for a collapsed lung. What happens is
the pleural membrane gets damaged. Sometimes it happens in a car accident or a fall, if you
break a rib, because the edge of the rib might cut pleural membrane and all the fluid leaks out,
and now the outside of the membrane is still attached to the chest wall and to the diaphragm, and
the only thing that is keeping the inside of the membrane attached to the outside of the
membrane is that cohesion of the fluid. If the fluid leaks out, the lung goes to its lowest possible

dimension and pulls away. What they do is put a chest tube in, pressurize it with air, inflating the
lung, and holding the parietal membrane close to the visceral membrane until the injury heals.
The actual fluid is being secreted by the membrane itself, and the membrane is connective tissue
so it will heal itself, and the fluid will be created again. Almost every organ is surrounded by the
same kind of membrane.
Let us now talk about the actual mechanics of breathing. How do you breathe? A couple
things we need to know first: because air is going to move as a result of differences in pressure,
there are three different pressures that we are concerned with, 1) the pressure in the atmosphere,
2) the pressure inside of the lung itself, the alveolar pressure, the intrapulmonary pressure, 3) and
the pressure that holds those two membranes together, intrapleural pressure. At all times, the
pressure holding the two membranes together has to be more negative than any other pressure.
You can think of it has the two membranes being held together by a negative pressure; that
pressure has to be more negative than whatever force you apply on it by the lung changing its
pressure.
Let us talk about pulmonary ventilation. There are two phases to it, inspiration and
expiration. Inspiration is the process of bringing air into our lungs. How do we inspire? We
inspire by changing the dimensions of our lungs, and there are two types of inspiration; what you
are doing right now is called quiet inspiration, which involves moving a tidal volume. It
primarily involves activating your diaphragm: the diaphragm flattens out, the lung gets taller, its
superior and inferior dimensions increase, and in addition, you are activating the muscles that are
in between your ribs. If these are two neighboring ribs, the space in between a rib is called the
costal space, you have muscles that lie within that space, called the intercostal muscles. Muscles
generally have two ends, and those ends can usually attach to two different bones; one end of the

muscle is fixed in place, the other end of the muscle moves a bone. The part of the muscle that is
on the bone that is fixed is its origin, the part of the muscle that is on the moveable bone is its
insertion. The external intercostal muscle has its origin on the rib above and the insertion on the
rib below, so when you activate it, it pulls the rib below up, and you cannot really pull the rib
straight up, so it moves up and out, increasing the medial-lateral dimensions of the lung. The
external intercostals muscles are activated during quiet inhalation, and that is what you are doing
right now, that is what you are probably doing 95% of the time or more. Just a total aside: what
are you eating if you eat intercostal muscles, what would they serve you? Ribs. They are
usually smoked and have a nice dry rub on them and nice slathering sauce. If you have ever had
ribs, you are going to be eating intercostal muscles. Since they are active all the time, they are
kind of tough, so that is why you marinate them and slow roast them for 6-8 hours.
The next thing we want to worry about: what happens if we want to take a deeper breath?
We want a forced inhalation. You can inflate your lungs a lot more than you have been, so how
am I going to get that to happen? I have other muscles that can also make the rib cage bigger. To
make the rib cage bigger, you have to lift the upper part of the rib cage up. So there are other
muscles attached to the upper part of the rib cage that are not normally used to move the rib. In
addition, your vertebral column has a number of curvatures in it, and your lungs are sitting in
here, so what you can do is pull that part of the vertebral column posteriorly, increasing the
anterior to posterior dimension of the lung. Has anyone run track? At the end of a difficult race,
all you want to do is just hunch overincreasing the internal dimensions of the rib cage, making
your lungs bigger, and it is the most appropriate thing to do, though it looks pathetic. If you
want to get your ribs bigger, you flatten the curvature of your spine, you lift the upper part of
your rib cage up, and that is forced inhalation.

The other process, expiring, is simply allowing the lung to go back to its normal position.
To quietly expire, you simply relax the muscles that you activate during quiet inhalation, your
diaphragm and your intercostals; the diaphragm goes back to its normal position and the ribs go
back to their normal position. Now the lung is smaller than it just was. When you inhale, you
increase the lung dimension and the volume goes up; now you decrease the lung dimension and
the volume goes down, what happens to the pressure of the air that was in the lung as you
allowed the diaphragm and rib cage to go back to its normal position? The pressure goes up, so
the air goes out. Exhaling is simply allowing the thorax to go back to its normal position,
allowing the diaphragm to back to its normal position; the air gets pressurized and follows the
pressure gradient back out to the atmosphere. But you can also force expiration, forcing out
more air. To do that, you have to make the rib cage smaller, and besides the external intercostals
that lift up and out, you have internal intercostals that pull down and in. In addition to activating
the intercostals, you can also activate the abdominal muscles which pressurize the fluid within
your paratenial space, pushing your diaphragm up to the bottom of the lung. You can also take
muscles like your latissimus dorsi which normally pulls your sternum and humerus posteriorly,
you can use it pull your sternum down, compressing and squishing your rib cage. There are a lot
of additional accessory muscles that you can use to make your rib cage smaller. What muscle are
you eating when you eat abdominal muscles? Bacon. Look at the cross second of bacon, you
can see the three different bundles of muscle separated by adipose.
The amount of air you are breathing moment to moment is called the tidal volume, but
you can also inhale additional air, this is the inspiratory reserve, and you can also exhale more
air, this is expiratory reserve, and there is always air left in your lungs because otherwise they
would deflate, and that is the residual volume. So there are four volumes: there is inspiratory

reserve volume, tidal volume, expiratory reserve volume, and residual volume. For a typical
individual, there are about 7 liters of air in your lungs. Typically you have 2200 mL at the end of
the tidal volume. Tidal volume is about 500 mL, and there is a little less than 2000 mL left in the
lung at all times to stop it from deflating. The total lung capacity is the sum of all of these
volumes. The exchangeable air includes the tidal volume, inspiratory and expiratory reserve, this
is called the vital capacity. The amount of air that you can inspire is tidal volume plus
inspiratory reserve, this is inspiratory capacity; the amount of air that is held in the lung at the
end of a tidal volume is called the functional residual capacity. The total lung capacity is
everything, the vital capacity is all exchangeable air, the inspiratory capacity is the amount of air
you can inspire, and the functional residual capacity is what is left in the lungs after the tidal
volume is exhaled.
The next thing that we want to talk about is the transport of gases in the body. Here is
our atmospheric air, here is your lung, this is the alveolar air, and here are some cells of your
body down here. I am not going to throw the heart circuit in here, I am just going to show a
loop. We have blood and we have gases carried in our blood, we have air that has a mixture of
gases, and the proportion of a gas in a mixture is called its partial pressure. Gases will move
from one location to another based on a partial pressure gradient. If, for example, the pressure of
oxygen is greater in the lung than in the blood, what is it going to do? It is going to move out of
the lung and into the blood. If the partial pressure of oxygen is greater in the blood than in the
tissues of the body, oxygen is going to move out of the blood and into the tissue. In atmospheric
air, the partial pressure of oxygen is very high, it is about 140 mmHg. The partial pressure of
carbon dioxide 0.03 mmHg. We breathe that air in, and mix it with the air we have in our lungs,
and then we exhale that air back into the atmosphere, and what we return is air that has less

oxygen and more carbon dioxide than it did originally. The pressure of the gases in your lungs is
about 104 for oxygen and 40 for carbon dioxide. When the blood leaves the lungs it is going to
have partial pressures that are like partial pressures in the lung, oxygen at 104 and carbon
dioxide at 40. When we get to the tissues of the body, oxygen levels are really low, about 20,
and partial pressure of carbon dioxide are high, about 45. So now this lung, with this
composition of gases, now comes in contact with the fluids that are surrounding these cells. So
what is carbon dioxide going to do? It has a partial gradient that favors its movement out of the
tissues and into the lung. What is oxygen going to do? It has a partial pressure gradient that
favors the movement out of the blood and into the tissues. Our oxygen is going to move out of
the blood and our carbon dioxide is going to move in, then our blood leaves with carbon dioxide
being about 45, oxygen levels being about 40, then the blood comes back and interacts with the
air in your lungs, and then oxygen moves back in, carbon dioxide moves, and we do this over
and over again until we are dead.
As far as the actual movement of gases, we carry oxygen attached to a specialized protein
called hemoglobin, because it is hardly soluble. Each hemoglobin molecule can carry four
oxygens and the oxygens are attached, not to any aminoacids of the protein, but to internal
structures within the molecules called henes, iron based henes. You can carry carbon dioxide a
couple different ways. One, it can go into solution, 25% or so of your carbon dioxide is actually
dissolved in your blood. Sometimes some fraction of your carbon dioxide is actually attached to
your hemoglobin, but not to the henes; there is aminoacid residue on the hemoglobin molecule
that actually attach a carbon dioxide molecule to it. The rest of it is carried in a form called
bicarbonate. Carboxylic acid is formed out of carbon dioxide, and then it dissociates to form
bicarbonate; the important thing about this is that, besides forming the bicarbonate, it produces

hydrogen ions, and we will talk about why that is important later. Carbon dioxide is carried
either dissolved, attached to the hemoglobin, or bicarbonate form.
The last thing we need to talk about as far as respiration is concerned is, why do you
breathe? It is a common misconception that we breathe because we need to replenish our oxygen
in our blood. That is not true. We have plenty of oxygen all the time. We do not unload all of
our oxygen every time it gets to our tissues. If the oxygen leaving the lungs goes through a full
circuit through the body, about 90% of the oxygen will still be left in the blood. We do not
breathe because we need to get more oxygen, but because of our carbon dioxide levels. Our
brain structures that regulate breathing respond to carbon dioxide levels, by responding to pH,
and really what they respond to is the hydrogen ion itself. There are specialized neurons within
the medulla, which is the most ancient part of the brain, and there is a respiratory center in the
medulla called the DRG, which stands for dorsal respiratory group. The DRG creates an
electrical signal called an action potential and then it sends a signal via a nerve called the slankle
nerve to your diaphragm and causes your diaphragm to contract when hydrogen levels increase.
It takes about 2 seconds to inhale and 3 seconds to exhale, so 5 seconds per breath, and 5 into 60
is 12 breaths per minute. Every five seconds or so, the DRG sends a signal to the diaphragm. If
you decide to hold your breath, you can use your upper cortical areas to control your medulla,
but only for so long, because as hydrogen ion levels get higher, they will cause the nerves to
depolarize, reach threshold, and create this electrical signal.