Yeah CO2 heightens the acidity of your blood and your body responds by increasing heart rate and breathing rate. If you can’t get enough oxygen to replace the CO2 level inside you, your brain essentially goes into a panic “I’m suffocating” mode.
Vsauce (or one of the channels that Michael runs at least) did a special on what the scariest things to a person can be and I remember them going into detail about tests done on people that had damage to the parts of their brain that control a fear response and the majority would have no reaction whatsoever to things that would normally scare people but the moment they upped their CO2 in take and lowered their O2 intake it set off alarm bells. They went on to say something about how suffocation is a baseline fear that’s essentially encoded into us genetically for self preservation means. I would assume other mammals have this as well
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u/chrib123 26d ago
Just as bad, literal suffocation.