I know there are plenty of cases in which someone has survived a shot through the brain, or in which only part of their functioning is impaired, but for the most part, why does a bullet randomly aimed at someone’s head kill them nearly instantaneously? Rather than just losing eyesight or the ability to move an arm or leg. Thanks!
In: Biology
It is amazing what people can survive.
Having part of your brain destroyed is not necessarily always fatal.
Up until a couple of decades ago, lobotomies were quite common procedures.
These weren’t always complicated medical procedures but in some cases amounted to little more than telling a patient to sit in a chair taking an icepick inserting into their skull through their eye-socket and then moving it around until a sufficient amount of brain was destroyed. Afterwards the patient could then simply be walked away under their own power.
The part of their brain that made them the person that they had been may have been gone or at least greatly altered and reduced, but more basic stuff remained.
Lots of people get brain injuries of some kind and lose stuff that in some cases they can at least partly relearn and in others is gone forever.
Of course there are some parts oft the brain that are more vital than others.
The thing about guns is that they don’t just destroy the stuff in their path, but also generate a shockwave that travels though the body and mushes parts that weren’t directly hit.
Also once you have a hole in your head, even if the brain isn’t totally destroyed you still have to deal with blood and other stuff leaking out oxygen no longer reaching the parts of the brain that weren’t destroyed outright and lots of other unpleasant things.
Death is rarely a clean on/off thing but if you do enough damage to soothing vital the transition from alive to dead may be quick enough to look that way.
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