If you’ve watched much TV from the 50s, 60s or 70s, it’s pretty guaranteed you’ve seen this scenario:
Person A enters a room. Person B, standing where A cannot see (often behind the door), coshes A on the head, using a fireplace poker or bookend or heavy ashtray or whatever. A collapses unconscious. B has the time therefore to search for the money, blackmail evidence, gun, or whatever and then skedaddles. Or maybe just skedaddles. A comes to, a bit dazed and likely complaining of a headache, but is otherwise unharmed.
Occasionally, A would swerve at the last moment so that B would miss, whereby A would punch B and then find out what the hell B was trying to do. But if B’s blow landed on A’s head, down A would go.
So how likely is it that getting hit on the head causes a person to black out, but not to die?
(Obviously, no one had heard of CTE back then, so there was no thought that Mannix or Illya Kuryakin or Paul Drake would have ongoing problems.)
I don’t have any documented proof, but I’d venture to say that it’s actually more likely that a person who is hit on the head with a blunt object will blackout and not die, although if hit hard enough they could certainly die from head trauma. Ever hear of a severe concussion? Now if someone is hit on the head with a sharp object that cracks the skull and they start to bleed out, that’s a different story.
What you’re referring to is what used to be called a Grade 3 concussion (before they stopped using that grading system). A blow to the head with any loss of consciousness, no matter how brief. They’re not uncommon; I had one myself (about 45 years ago).
The ridiculously unrealistic aspect of the scenes you describe is the precision of the blow and the black-out. It’s hard to predict what impact will cause unconsciousness and what will cause an, “Ow! What the heck?”
Moreover, a blow hard enough to induce unconsciousness, isn’t always so benign. In the movies, the victim wakes up a little while later to see the room ransacked. There’s no mention of basilar skull fractures, epidural hemorrhage, loss of airway reflexes, aspiration of vomit, etc. In other words: don’t try this at home.
My vomit is lazy. Never had any real aspirations other than laying on the floor in a puddle stinking up the place. I guess that’s something but still… c’mon barf… make me proud!
A better answer to the question you actually posed (how likely is it, etc.) would be that it’s very unlikely.
That sort of concussion happens pretty often, especially on the athletic field. But we’re talking about many thousands of games in schools and other leagues across the country. Often the unconsciousness lasts seconds.
The idea of someone intentionally delivering just the blow needed to knock a victim out long enough to search the room, tie them up, or whatever, but not do them any significant harm, is far fetched.
This happened to me. Out for only minutes but completely unconscious (according to those nearby, I have only vague memories).
Weeks of dizziness and occasional vomiting, headaches, and weird sensations. Near total loss of smell, which only partially returned. Lifelong memory issues and spending most of my life with a small notebook at hand.
I recently re-watched the Mannix series and found myself laughing. Pretty sure he would’ve been a vegetable before the first season was over. Also, TV never covers the injuries from the resulting fall. These can be significant.
A biology 1300 teacher told us that an exhausted person would tend to become unconscious from a blow to the head, say during a fight. Not someone you sneak up on and bang on their head.
The only time I ever saw it on TV addressed realistically (ha!) was in Hogan’s Heroes. Hogan gets the bonk bonk on the head, and when he wakes up, Newkirk informs him “It’s just a concussion. Be right as rain in a year or two.”
My wife had a streetlight fall on her head. She didn’t get knocked out, but she took a long time to be back to normal.
And bonks to the head don’t cause amnesia that can be cured with another bonk, either. Sometimes I wonder if Hollywood writers live in the same universe as the rest of us, what with silenced revolvers, deadly tarantulas and scorpions and black widows, and quicksand that sucks you to your death being such common plot elements.
It’s much more likely that you can be knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, than be able to wake up minutes to hours later, recall what happened (and all the events leading up to it), and have the ability to accomplish anything near-term that requires coherent thought and physical exertion.
Mannix has to be the all-time leader in concussion silliness. Get a bandaid in the ER and he’s rarin’ to go. I should watch all the repeats on classic TV* to see if there was a single episode where Joe didn’t get bonked on the head at least once.
*the ads are too depressing though. A commercial break during one show I caught a part of recently, featured three ads in a row for prescription lung meds and for Navage (the fun way to blow out your sinuses). I pictured the typical Mannix viewer, wheezing and dripping while trying to figure out the intricacies of their Jitterbug phone.
There was even a wink wink reference to that when Mannix was on an episode of Diagnosis Murder and pointed to Dr Sloan as the reason he is in such good heath, considering all the conks to the noggin and “it’s only a flesh wound” slugs he took over the years.
This is not a book I would ordinarily recommend, but Bad Medicine by Christopher Wanjek deals pretty well with that exact topic.
The book may be hard to find, though. A series of “Bad Science” books were planned, and Bad Astronomy by Phil Plait (who used to post here) was the first. It was quite good! I happily bought the second book, Bad Medicine, but it was a tremendous disappointment as it mostly covered ground that was already extremely well trodden (like explaining that homeopathy doesn’t work … gee, ya think?).
However, there were a few chapters in Bad Medicine that were both educational and entertaining, and Wanjek’s explanation of how far off the mark TV is with respect to head injuries was one of the better parts.
(Sadly, there were no more “Bad Science” books after the first two. I was disappointed, as I hoped for future volumes as good as the first. Alas, I think Wanjek’s book was such a stinker that he killed the series. )
Thanks for the good wishes, but it seems the effects are mostly permanent. I was too far from civilization to get timely neurological help and I’ve just learned to live with the (now minor) problems.
Echoing the consensus that it’s not exactly unlikely that a blow to the head could cause loss of consciousness without serious injury, but it would be extremely difficult, bordering on impossible, to hit someone just hard enough to reliably produce that result. It’s actually quite possible you’d end up with serious injury and no loss of consciousness.
I just left my job defending parents accused of child abuse/neglect. I tried a lot of cases involving head trauma in young children. Won some, lost some. One thing I learned from reading so many medical reports and cross-examining so many experts is that the amount of force is only part of the equation. The shape of the object that strikes the head, the amount of hair the person has, the precise location of impact, all have a lot to do with how much harm is caused and whether the victim loses consciousness. We’re beginning to come out of a kind of mini-dark ages of child abuse pediatrics in which accidental short falls were often misdiagnosed as shaken baby syndrome, because it was not well-understood by many how little force was sometimes required to cause subdural or subarachnoid hemorrhage in the brain, and how easily those things could occur from blunt force trauma even without a skull fracture.
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