Why can’t people let go when they’re being electrocuted?

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Why can’t people let go when they’re being electrocuted?

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9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The electrocution itself causes the muscles to tense and grip. Normally when you use your muscles, nerves send electrical signals as action potentials.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Normally your brain and nervous-system activate your muscles.

External sources of electricity also will activate your muscles, even if your brain doesn’t want to.

Generally the electricity tends to ‘tell’ all your muscles to tense up.

Your ‘close hand’ muscles are stronger than your ‘open hand’ muscles, so they’ll win this fight and ‘succeed’ in closing your hand.

Your brain has no say, really, because any orders it gives are overpowered by the external source of electricity.

Anonymous 0 Comments

They are usually too shocked to do anything.

Esentially all signals in your brain and muscles are due to electricity. This much triggers them all and causes them to contract.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When I was a kid we were told that if we needed to know if the electric fence was on to touch it with the back of a hand so your arm would pull away if it was live.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The signal from your brain that tells your muscles to squeeze *is* electricity. When you squeeze all the muscles in your arm, your hand closes tightly.

So when you’re electrocuted, all your muscles are just getting the SQUEEZE signal from all that electricity, louder than your brain has ever sent it before. So your muscles squeeze like crazy, locking your hand closed.

And if you try to let go, your brain’s own weak electric signal saying “let go” is WAY weaker than the electric jolt yelling SQUEEZE. So you squeeze.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If the current is DC, the current causes all muscles to contract. This closes your hand and prevents you from letting go.

If the current is AC, the muscles spasm, and you probably will let go.

In power stations and such, high-voltage direct current is common, and a short can electrify almost any piece of metal. To protect themselves workers brush the back of their hands against metal objects before using them. This way, if the muscles contract, they will violently remove your hand from the object, not grab it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Muscles are told to fire by the electrical impulse that comes from the body’s own nervous system.

The electricity coming from the electrocution source is more powerful than the body that any impulse to open is not received.

The hand in particular has a design which favors the closing motion and not the motion to open. Both sets of muscles are stimulated at the same time by the electrocution source but the closing muscles hold the object in the hand.

Anonymous 0 Comments

your muscles are contracting depending on how hard you’re being shocked, so you cant let go

Anonymous 0 Comments

Electricity forces your muscles to contract, Which means whatever you are holding you cannot let it go whilst it is running through you still. It’s involuntary.