Why does a headshot usually mean immediate “turn off” for the brain?
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A bullet is typically more damaging than a punch in the face, but our brains have a safety mechanism where a sudden trauma can shut the brain off.
If it was a punch in the face, you will eventually wake up with a concussion and a headache. If it was a bullet, you might bleed to death before you have time to wake up.
Of course if the damage is bad enough, the part of your brain that controls heart-beat and breathing will be scrambled.
well when you put a giant hole in something – like a brain- it usually “turns off” cause there is a giant hole where something used to be
Imagine that you have a fusebox full of cables which powers up a home. If you shoot a bullet dead in the center of it, the home goes to a full blackout (death in most cases). Yes, there are a few cables connecting due to the fire and electrical discharge it causes within, when lights could come back for a milisecond (twitching), but it gets fucked beyond reapair.
[It doesn’t](https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/gunshot-wound-to-the-head-not-a-death-sentence-1/)(at least if by “turn off” you mean death), a little less than half of people sent to the hospital with a gunshot or other penetrating wound to the brain survive.
Before I started med school, my first ever clinical experience was a person with multiple gunshots to the head and pieces of white matter dripping onto his face. He still had a pulse. That’s not to say that shots to the head aren’t devastating, they obviously are, but there are plenty of people who have survived a shot to the head, which is to say that headshot isn’t “an immediate” turn of of brain function. It depends which areas of the brain are impacted.
Whether or not you would want to survive with the type of damage that’s often seen in such cases is a different question.
It seems that most people who talk about bullets miss one crucial part- bullet has a spin. So when it enters the braincase, it not only displaces a huge amount of mater in it’s path, but also creates a) air vortex though which more air is pulled it, b)localised bullet expansion which obliterates surrounding tissue. This in turn means that there are no more neural connections, no synapses, nothing. Just mush of biological matter. Similar as to why you couldn’t run Crysis 3 after detonating a hand grenade in your computer case.
As some have mentioned, when there is no spin in object which penetrates human head, the survival chances are much higher- as in the case of Phineas Gage where a proper metal rod was launched by a point blank explosion though his head. IIRC it took out part of his frontal cortex.
The brain is very important to you body working and the bullet usually bounce around inside the skull causing extra damage, that being said 1/10 head shots do not kill immediately.
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