system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: A quadriplegic loses the ability to control their body from the neck down, how is it that their organs, ie heart lungs etc, are able to function?
gpt
Paraplegics typically experience loss of motor and sensory function, but don't lose the ability to breathe, pump blood, or digest due to the medulla oblongata and division of the nervous system, which is split up into the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) and the peripheral nervous system (nerves in the periphery)

 You peripheral nervous system is divided into two main branches; somatic, and autonomic. Your somatic nervous system is responsible for voluntary movement. Wiggling your fingers, moving your legs, and so on. It is also responsible for receiving sensory input, like when you touch a hot stove or sharp object. It involves typically skeletal muscle and sensory mechanisms in the skin and on the body. Damage to the spinal cord effects these nerves that extend from it, or the ones that travel to it. 

The other part of your peripheral nervous system is the autonomic nervous system; this controls non voluntary function changes such as slowing of digestion, bladder relaxation or constriction, increasing of heart rate, etc. The medulla oblongata is responsible for these parts of the autonomic nervous system. 

The central nervous system, which contains the brain, midbrain, and further the medulla oblongata, contains your respiratory and heart centres that keep things going, keeps homeostasis happening, and keeps you alive. Everybody who is alive has a working medulla oblongata; it's needed to breathe and pump blood and essentially do anything. Damage to the nerves doesn't damage the medulla; it still does its job and that's why those with permanent nerve damage can still breathe and digest and bleed and keep on metabolizing things to live!

Hope this helped!