system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If a person breaks their neck and becomes paralyzed from the neck down, how does the brain continue telling the heart and other organs to keep working?
gpt
It doesn't whem it happens high enough. The heart has an intrinsic pacemaker that keeps it beating at 60bpm and below. The sympathetic and parasympathetic innervation is lost so the heart may not speed up or slow down on command. However there are receptors that are chemical, stretch in nature and they do what you think they do. With other organs, you do not have control over them anyway so they function just how they normally would because of receptors and feedback loops through spinal cord. With Cranial 3 and above cord transections, the diaphragmatic innervation and nerve control of muscles of respiration is lost so people will require mechanical ventilation.

The interesting thing is that the body still perceives noxious stimuli and feedbacks it as abnormal response with compensation above and below the level of injury. With injuries to Thoracic 6 and above a patient may suffer from Autonomic Dysreflexia, where a noxious stimuli below level of injury causes vasoconstriction and sweating with sympathetic response above with hypertension, pounding headache, stuffy sinuses.