Sneezing

[Mark of Zorro]

Upfront I want to ask you this question and I want you think about it:

When you sneeze, does much air go through your nose?

In my case, hardly any does. I probably breath harder through my nose than sneeze. So I am a little puzzled by this wiki entry:

The function of sneezing is to expel mucus containing foreign particles or irritants and cleanse the nasal cavity. During a sneeze, the soft palate and palatine uvula depress while the back of the tongue elevates to partially close the passage to the mouth so that air ejected from the lungs may be expelled through the nose. Because the closing of the mouth is partial, a considerable amount of this air is usually also expelled from the mouth. The force and extent of the expulsion of the air through the nose varies.

Sneeze - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I cannot see myself ever sneezing through my nose hard enough to expel anything. I think if I did I could pop out on eyeball.

Do you sneeze through your nose so much? The only way I can get foreign particles out of my nose is to blow my nose. Sneezing is just too forceful, reflective and hard to control for me to think of trying to let it pass through my nose to any degree.

As such, I always thought that sneezing triggered by irritating the nose was simply a pre-emptive measure to keep things out of the lungs, or sort of like a guess by the body that if the nose is getting irritated things are in the lungs already and need to be expelled.

So I am very surprised that the wiki says the point is to clear the nasal cavity and nothing in there about the lungs.

And I am also surprised that it basically seems to consider sneezing through the nose to be natural and acceptable because I think it would be painful and potentially dangerous.