According to most relevant movies and TV shows I’ve seen, it takes maybe thirty seconds. But I know plenty of people who can easily hold their breath for thirty seconds or more without even passing out, let alone dying.
Asked purely out of morbid curiosity, not any sort of nefarious scheming.
Best username/post combination ever!
Just a WAG, but I imagine it might take awhile to die, but that significant damage from strangulation that would lead to certain death could be inflicted very quickly.
A crushed wind-pipe, damaged arteries that supply blood to the brain and et cetera, for example.
While it may take a bit before your brain is “technically dead” I imagine you would be rendered unconscious and “mortally wounded” pretty quickly if someone had the right grip on your neck and applied the right pressure (I imagine there’s even the chance of a broken neck and such, as well.)
Edit–Also, I wouldn’t think of strangulation so much as the same thing as simply being deprived of breathing, most of us can go for a small bit without breathing. It’s actually more like someone trying to crush your throat, which will incidentally deprive you of oxygen, possibly destroy key arteries, break bones, et cetera.
The instructor at the First Aid class I took Monday said that irreparable brain damage occurs after 6 minutes without breathing, for an average adult. The smaller the person, the less time they have. Also, increased activity/panic will use up the oxygen in the blood quicker.
I’m guessing that this is a maximum and that death could occur more quickly.
Wouldn’t strangulation involve cutting off blood flow to the brain, not just breathing? When not breathing there is still oxygen in the blood (although in diminishing amounts). Are you talking about suffocation?
I just recently saw David Blaine set the world record for holding his breath (on an episode of Oprah). IIRC, he held it for 19 minutes! And, although some may say he seems a little deranged to begin with, he was no worse for the wear after the feat.
I don’t have an answer to the OP, but it is my understanding that death by hanging is the result of a broken neck, and not from lack of oxygen. Not that anyone here has argued otherwise, but I thought I’d put that out there.
It seems to me that we have to agree on terminology. I’ve heard that strangulation differs from choking in that you cut fresh blood off from the brain while choking is when the airway is cut off directly. If that’s true then I have no trouble believing that strangulation can lead to a very quick death. Simply having your airway cut off is a much less hasty death.
Granted, I got this from acquaintances who might not know a damn thing.
Well, just my WAG, but I think this is what’s generally going on. It’s not that the victim isn’t getting oxygen into their lungs for thirty seconds, it’s that they aren’t getting oxygen to their brain for thirty seconds. I imagine that’s the goal of chocking someone, and why lots of pro-wrestlers had a “sleeper hold” of some kind. Sure, they were fake, but they were based off what can actually happen. The biggest problem with how it’s portrayed in TV/movies, though, is that I’m pretty sure the average person, even after passing out from not getting oxygen to the brain, will just start breathing again on their own once you let go of them. So after they lose consciousness, you’d have to keep pressure there, probably for several minutes longer, to ensure they won’t just wake up again with nothing but a sore throat.
After the Nuremberg trials some of the condemned prisoners were deliberately dropped in such a way that their necks didn’t snap but they died of strangulation. (Hermann Göring committed suicide largely because he suspected this would be the case and knew that as the “star” of the proceedings his own death would be the worse.)
Alfred Jodl, the Wehrmacht Chief of Staff, is recorded as having lived for 18 minutes, and Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel (a 64 year old heavy smoker) was still alive after 20 minutes (he was cut down at 24 when doctors no longer found a pulse). Some legal hangings in which the condemned died of strangulation took longer. They weren’t conscious for that long and may even have been brain dead long before that time, but that’s how late they were still getting a pulse, and keep in mind that these were men who were being choked by nooses with their own body weight acting as force against them (i.e. more forceful strangulation than most humans could deliver to another).
I think I remember Richard Kuklinski saying that it took him “a couple minutes”, or “a few minutes” on one of those A&E specials. I’m also pretty sure he described the act as putting a rope around the victims neck, and then slinging them over his shoulder to essentially hang them.
I would imagine your average person wouldn’t have much luck in doing that though(Kuklinski was 6’5, 300lbs.).
In the movies and TV, of course, it would borrrrrrring to watch seven minutes of strangulation, so it all goes by very quickly… in much the same way that the death of Camille from consumption (TB) usually only takes about two hours.
If you do it right, they won’t have a sore throat at all. Pressure is applied to the jugular, IIRC, to keep the deoxygenated blood in the brain. If you apply pressure to the throat, the person feel they are in more danger, causing them to resist more strongly. It’s quite possible to have a sleeper hold on somebody without them fighting very hard to keep your bicep and forearm off said veins.
The symptoms when waking up are similar to waking up from a hangover. Disorientation, perhaps some nausea, and almost always a headache on the top/sides of the head.
People get choked into unconsciousness in submission grappling or mixed martial arts competitions (Ultimate Fighting Championship, etc.). Usually they’ll tap out if they know they’re caught, but people getting choked unconscious doesn’t seem particularly rare. (Of course the fight is stopped as soon as the ref sees they’re out.) I’ve never heard of anyone being killed or permanently injured by a choke hold in such a competition, so I’m guessing it’s fairly hard to cause permanent damage choking someone with your bare hands.
Then again, it’s possible that there are more dangerous choke holds that are banned from these events. And as far as I know, strikes to the throat are almost always banned.
I looked this up, doubting its veracity, but it looks legit. 17 minutes 4 seconds. Holy crap.
edit: I should add, he was allowed to dope up on pure oxygen before going for the record.
I did mean strangulation, but I’m kind of an idiot and momentarily forgot about the whole ‘cutting off blood flow’ thing, which would indeed seem important. But from what’s been said I doubt there’s any single, specific answer, as it would depend on who or what was applying the pressure, and probably to a certain degree the person it was being applied to.
Would not struggling (pretend it’s possible) increase survival time? Part of me wants to say it would, but I’m not sure why.
The terminology we use in martial arts is basically what Ganryu Kojiro outlined earlier: strangle = cut off blood supply to the brain; choke = cut off air.
Forensic terminology is not quite as exact about the mechanism, I believe, since pathologists are generally dealing with people who aren’t as precise and knowledgeable about what they’re doing. In forensics, strangulation is used to mean both cutting off blood supply and air, while they make a distinction about how the pressure is applied: manually (by hand, with no artificial aids) or through ligature or hanging.
Movies almost never show either how long is actually needed to kill someone from strangling, nor how violent a life and death struggle is. Naturally, they’re more concerned with story-telling than in showing realistically all the aspects of the killing.
The short answer to how long to die is: about 10–15 minutes, but you’ll get unconsiousness in as little as 10–15 seconds.
If you wanted to show realistic action, the movie killer should primarily cut off the blood supply, and only secondarily think about the airway. To to be sure the victim is dead, you’d need to keep pressure on for at least 3–5 minutes with a good (martial arts terminology) strangle that more or less completely shuts off the blood supply to the brain. This is enough time to cause cessation of pulse and respiration, and is around the time needed for brain death.
If you’re talking about strangling with a cord or rope, or by manual strangulation, your killer should make sure pressure on the victim’s neck is maintained for for 10–15 minutes after unconsciousness. Less time than that is not going to be 100% sure to kill someone.
If the airway wasn’t crushed, it’s possible for someone who looked “dead” to come back from being strangled. Unless the killer held the pressure on for several minutes, it’s unlikely that the person would actually be dead, though as earlier noted only about 3 minutes of severe oxygen deprivation is enough to cause brain damage, even if the person doesn’t actually die from it.
With strangulation using a ligature, or in a hanging, it’s an either/or/both mechanism, depending on where the rope or cord ends up, where the knot is, how it’s tied or pulled, how far the person falls, how much pressure there is being applied, etc. As Gfactor cited, short drop or suspension hangings will probably (though not always) produce fairly quick unconsciousness from arterial compression, but actual death from asphyxiation could take a very long time.
In fighting, strangles get fast results. You can put someone out in seconds if you’re right on target, almost certainly in under a minute. Even when we were being careful and considerate of our partners in the dojo, and not really cranking them on, we’d sometimes get narrowed vision and haziness after only about 5–10 seconds. Strangles are very effective if properly applied, and are not usually lethal or even particularly damaging, since you’re not tearing or crushing tissue.
The problem with using them for self defense is that very occasionally you’ll get some nasty feedback from stimulating the vagus nerve and depress or stop cardiac activity. If you don’t actually want to kill the person, this could be quite awkward. In the question the OP is asking, you shouldn’t count on this to produce a dead body.
Chokes (martial arts terminology again) involve closing or crushing the airway. You will always cause more trauma with a choke than a strangle. The way the trachea is built, if you crush the cartilage that supports the airway it will close down and stay closed. (This is when you’d need to do an emergency tracheostomy if you don’t actually want the person to die.) It’s also possible to crush or rupture the larynx, or break the hyoid during a choke. This is actually very likely with a pure choke since the person will be conscious and struggling for some time.
If you’re trying to stop a nasty fight quickly, wrapping a cord around the neck will compress both arteries and airways, putting him/her down pretty quickly, while simply choking across the throat with no wrap will do nothing much to cut off blood supply and the person will be conscious and extremely active and agitated for quite a long time, which is obviously less than ideal (in the clawing, kicking, biting, bucking, throwing you around sense of that term).
A rule-of-thumb that I remember from a long-ago first-aid course was:
lack of circulation/pulse - 30 seconds
lack of oxygen - 3 minutes
lack of water - 3 days
lack of food - 3 weeks
I don’t know if those are precisely accurate, but they seem to be in about the right range.
This terminology isn’t universal among martial arts. For instance, in Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu there’s a technique called a rear naked choke which (as typically applied) actually cuts off the blood rather than the air.
Oh.
That’s cheating!
-FrL-