Our noses, along with our eyes and mouths, are the facial points of our appearance and – in many ways – our identity. The nose is prominently visible from the front and side, and in many cases, we can determine ethnicity from the size and shape of the nose. The critical life functions that our facial organs perform may seem pretty obvious. Yet, when it comes to the nose, there is more than meets the eye.
Here are surprising facts about your nose:
1. Your nose is the main route for breathing
The nose and mouth can serve as the pathway of air entering and exiting the lungs. In normal breathing, the nose is the primary pathway. Even with aggressive exercise where mouth breathing becomes dominant, some air continues to pass through the nose. Despite the fact that the mouth is a bigger tube, people feel remarkably uncomfortable if their noses are plugged or congested
This nasal breathing role is critical in newborns, who must breathe through their noses almost all the time. This is a unique feature related to the configuration of their throats that allow them to breathe and suckle at the same time without choking. This cannot happen in older children or adults who have to stop breathing to swallow.
The nose plays another important role in breathing. There is a reflex neural mechanism that connects the nose to the lungs, called the nasal-pulmonary reflex. As the nose closes up, the lungs become more closed, and as the nose opens up, the lungs open up. Although it is difficult to know how big a factor this is, it may be important when there is difficulty breathing or when there is a high volume of breathing with exercise. This may be why some elite athletes use nasal strips to open their noses during exercise.
2. Your nose humidifies the air you breathe
The nose processes the air we breathe to prepare it for our lungs and throat, which do not tolerate dry air well. As the inhaled air passes through the nose, it is moisturized and humidified, thanks to a complex multiple layer structure called turbinates.
Now you know why your throat feels dry when you’ve been breathing a long time through the mouth: The inhaled air didn’t get humidified in the nose.
3. Your nose cleans the air you breathe
The air we breathe has all kinds of stuff in it – from oxygen and nitrogen to dust, pollution, allergens, smoke, bacteria, viruses, small bugs and countless other things. The nose helps clean that air. On the surface of the nasal tissues, particularly the turbinates, are cells with small hair-like appendages called cilia that trap much of the bad stuff. Once captured, the bad stuff sits in the mucous and gradually is pushed into the throat, where it’s swallowed. Our stomachs tolerate bad stuff much better than our lungs.
4. Your nose regulates the temperature of the air your breathe
Just like our throat and lungs do not like dirty air, they do not like air that is too cold or too hot. The passing of the air through the nose allows the air to become more like body temperature, which is much better tolerated by the tissues. Warming cool air is more common than cooling warm air, as humans spend much more of their time in environments below body temperature — 98.6 degrees — than above it. One clear manifestation of the warming and humidifying effect is the runny nose we get in cold weather, which is related to condensation of the moisture in the nose when exposed to cold air.
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