How does hitting your head kill you? (Specifically those that hit their head and are immediately dead etc). What causes this to happen and how?
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The brain isn’t secured in the skull. Assuming the blunt force doesn’t just splinter skull pieces into the brain, you aren’t ‘safe.’
When your head gets hit hard, your head moves. Your skull moves and your brain has inertia. It doesn’t move until hit by the skull, pushing it back. Then when your head stops, your brain doesn’t and hits again. These images can cause bleeds, swelling, and other extreme amounts of damage. If that damage is sudden enough, or hard enough, it can be fatal damage.
One of two ways:
1: They break their neck hard enough to sever connections between their brain and things keeping them alive like their lungs and heart.
2: They slam their skull so hard that their squishy brain “keeps going” and it collides with the inside of their skull hard enough to cause the brain to fail, like when someone is in a car crash without their seat belt and are killed when they’re sent flying into the windshield when the car suddenly stops. If the hit is *really* hard it can just simply break through the skull and destroy the brain directly.
Concussions and sub-concussive trauma both cause short term damage to the brain, but they may also result in long term damage such as CTE or Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. https://youtu.be/k7BdLyB-Duc
Your brain has no room to expand in your skull so if there is leaking from broken blood vessels (caused by the trauma from the impact) the brain will swell causing pressure that cuts off the oxygen supply. Without oxygen the tissue will die. Sometime the pressure will push the brian down through where the spinal cord enters essentially strangling the brain tissue.
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