Obviously you can get “knocked out” but why does your body just go to sleep when you get hit in the face?
In: Biology
Brain damage. When you take an impact to the head, the skull (usually) stops the impact from directly damaging the brain, but all of that kinetic energy has to go *somewhere*. If it’s a minor impact, your skin and bone deal with it and you drive on with a knot on your head. If it’s a biggun, however, the kinetic energy gets transferred *through* your skull and to your squash (we call that a traumatic Brain Injury, or TBI). Get your bell rung hard enough, and it can actually cause your brain to rattle around inside your skull, causing it to bruise (a.k.a. a concussion), and like any bruise it’s gonna swell up, which can cause more damage.
The level of damage your brain sustains directly affects how your brain responds to it. Relatively minor damage your brain doesn’t exactly shrug off, but it doesn’t disrupt your normal brain function too much, either. Getting knocked out, however, is essentially your brain going, “oh, what the FUCK!?!” and it takes a moment to get its shit back together.
Now comes the part where I hate TV and movies. In action flicks and TV shows, you always see people taking a blow to the head and falling unconscious, for anywhere from several minutes to a couple of hours. Then they usually wake up, take some aspirin, and drive on. That’s not what happens in real life, like, at all.
A knockout is something very serious. If you’re knocked unconscious, it’s a HUGE deal and you need to be seen by a doctor, pronto. The good news is if you were only out a few seconds, chances are you aren’t going to have anything TOO serious affecting you for the rest of your life (“every time Katherine would fire up the microwave I’d piss my pants and forget who I was for a half-hour or so”). If you’re out any longer, though that isn’t a knockout; that’s a fucking coma, and you’ll be lucky to live through it and still have the use of all of your motor functions.
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