It’s a standard-enough plot device in books and movies: a head injury renders someone insane, gives them amnesia, or leaves them otherwise damaged. They go along for years in that state, medical treatment availing nothing, until – Whack! – they receive another blow to the head and wake up cured. Blow #2 has restored them to their pre-Blow #1 state.
On the face of it, the idea sounds utterly ridiculous. Common sense says that repeated head injuries would leave the victim cumulatively more damaged, not less so. Yet, it’s so common a plot twist – is there any basis in fact? Any type of injury that blunt force trauma would possibly fix, even very rarely, that might have been the origin of the plot device?
It’s not based in reality. The more blows to the head, the more the likelihood of serious brain damage.
The only correlation with a cure that I can think of is a blow to the shoulder dislocating it, being followed by a blow to the shoulder to pop it back in. The same could apply to a dislocated jaw.
Pushing on an eyeball may help dislodge a retinal vein thrombosis too, but those usually aren’t traumatic in origin.
You don’t mean to tell me that all of the science that I learned from McHale’s Navy and Gilligan’s Island isn’t accurate, do you? I’d can’t imagine the crack team of science advisers on those shows would let an inaccuracy like that slip.
This was used in a Kids In The Hall sketch a few years ago.
Farmer gets kicked by cow. Farmer suddenly starts reaching for things two inches to the right of where they actually are. Farmer’s kids lead him out to barn, so as to be kicked by cow redux.
Ambulance is shown pulling away. One son to the other: “It always worked on the Flintstones.”
Frankly, it seems intuitive enough to me. I’ve always thought of it as a corollary to the idea of “knocking some sense into” someone.
Well, coulda been worse. Coulda used to been smart.
Heh. My fav KITH sketch
Actually, the ending has the farmer laying in the back of a pickup, with his sons digging a hole, one about six feet deep or so.
As to the question, this was also recently feature on the show “Corner Gas”, with the police officer falling off of a ladder and losing his sense of smell, only to fall again and regain it years later. I think he hit his head again to lose it (for the second time).
[sub]He appears to be havn’ some dificulty in pickin’ up the salt.[/sub]
Also, amnesia doesn’t usually work the way it’s usually portrayed in movies. In the most common form of real-life amnesia, the person retains memories formed before the loss of function, but is unable to form new memories. I’ve heard that this has been depicted in some recent movies, but I haven’t seen them.
