I disagree. I think it’s personally reasonable to post a (as you call it) “you’re teh stoopid” comment when someone asks if baby humans can breathe through their mouths.
Well, perhaps if I’d asked for your opinion instead of a fact-based answer, I’d give a shit what you think. And I didn’t ask that question, so you’re reading skills suck, as well.
**We’ll **done.
“May” as in “may or may not,” right? If I am reading that abstract correctly, they experimented by blocking babies’ noses for 15 seconds, and they found that 40% of the babies responded by breathing through their mouths. Presumably that means that 60% did not.
[Moderator Note]
Actually, since the OP indicated he thought it was unlikely and was basically looking for the source of a common misconception, it wasn’t necessary to be so snarky.
This said, this isn’t an appropriate response either. If you have a problem with another poster, report it.
I’m not making this a warning, but let’s refrain from this in the future.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Or that 40% had “open mouth” as the first response and the other 60% had “try to escape” as the first response. Never presume that whomever wrote an abstract was any good at writing.
I interpreted that as 40% mouth breathed within 15 seconds, and they didn’t try for longer than that. I expect the number breathing by mouth would have continued to rise rapidly over the next 15-45 seconds until it approached 100%.
One supposes that being genetically predisposed to never mouth breath is not a dominate trait in species who get colds. Statistically, it couldn’t be very common as a recessive trait, either.
Perhaps that terminology is the source of the urban legend. “Obligate” gets confused with “obligatory”.
As for the fact that babies can breathe through their noses while swallowing, that is not only correct, but is the norm for most mammals. We hoo-mans have given up that ability (except as infants) in order to speak. Which demonstrates the considerable advantage speech has, since it sets us up for choking while eating. Even if infants had the brainpower to speak, they wouldn’t have the anatomy to make many sounds as their larynx has not descended yet.
Do you have some information on the changes to throat anatomy that allow for this? I’ve never heard that babies can breathe while actually swallowing, and I’m trying to figure out how that would be possible with a human pharynx. They breathe while suckling, sure, but that’s because they gather milk in the back of their mouths for a few sucks before swallowing, and I thought they (momentarily) held their breath during the swallow just like you and I do. And if we had to “give it up to speak”, then how do infants babble?
They don’t have a “human” pharynx, so to speak. They have the more common mammalian anatomy.
They can make sounds similar to what chimps can make. It’s not until they are a few months old that they can start to produce more of a human range of sounds.
Most of what I’ve read about this is in books, but this site explains things a bit. I couldn’t find a good one with pictures.
How exactly do other animals breathe while swallowing, unless they can only breathe through their noses (then how do animals like dogs bark)? There is only one tube after the nose and mouth until you reach the epiglottis. This paper also seems to confirm (“It is well established that breathing and swallowing do not occur simultaneously in infant or adult animals and humans”) that other animals can’t breathe and swallow at the same time, despite the apparently widespread (per Google search results) myth, if it is a myth, that humans are the only mammal that can’t do both at once (I say mammal because there are animals that can’t do either; for example, amphibians can’t breathe at all if their mouth is full of food, much less while swallowing).