Let’s say you jumped off a 10 story building and your knees were the first thing to hit the ground. Would you feel the pain or would the impact be so fast that your brain wouldn’t have time to register it before you were dead? Just curious, not suicidal.
Seeing how when you drop, say, a jar on your foot it takes the pain around 1/2 seconds to get to your brain (YMMV), you wouldn’t feel anything.
1/2 second, dumbass.
I don’t think it takes nearly as long as .5 second for a pain signal to reach the brain. Got a cite for that?
I expect you would feel it, but only briefly before death, unconsciousness, or shock caused you to stop noticing it.
I knew a guy who was first at the scene when a skydiver landed without benefit of a parachute. He said the guy was apparently conscious, trying to breath, and his skin had turned black. Sounds quite painful.
I think, once having fallen, you’d be best off landing brain first, (preferably on a pointy, acid-covered landmine.)
Your stupid survival instinct would probably kick in, though, and make you struggle to survive the landing.
Well let’s think about this a second… You’re not dead until your brain is dead (i.e., no function - debate there) So your brain will keep working until it’s no longer capable (massive trauma) or until it no longer recieves blood etc. and shuts down (which takes a bit longer).
So knees hit first, approximately 1.3 meters from the brain. According to this, “nerve impulses such as pain signals travel… at 0.61m/s”. Lot of variable on the speed on impact (example of egg dropped from Empire State Building)… so lets assume it’d take over a second for “pain” to get to your head, but it’d only take your head 0.5 seconds to hit the ground. Pain not felt.
And what if the brain, miraculously, isn’t badly injured? You might be “aware” of pain on some base level as the lights are turned off. (Like the reports of decapitated heads of the guillotined blinking etc.) I’m thinking that you wouldn’t feel it - but you might want to fall head first to be sure.
Interesting question. Let’s assume you hit something unyielding so that you’re pretty sure of dying. People have survived falls from high places and you can be pretty sure that if you do survive the fall, you’ll be feeling it the next morning.
High school physics indicates that you’d be falling for about 2.5 seconds (ignoring air resistance). That’ll get you up to 80 feet/sec. Assuming your knees are about 5 feet from your brain, you’d have 5/80 seconds for the signal to propagate. That would be 0.06 seconds. Comfortably less than reaction time. And certainly not a long time to suffer (although the preceding 2 and a half seconds might be emotionally stressful). Of course, as the collision proceeds, pain impulses from the rest of your body will have less distance to travel, but it looks like the speed of impact is still going to be faster than the propagation.
But…there are complications. Your body is fluid filled and frangible and can be expected to act as an air bag, increasing the time of impact and reducing the g-forces on your brain, possibly enough to allow a tenth of a second or so of agony. I think you’d have to do some crash test dummy tests to figure out exactly how the deformation takes place.
does it really matter? he’s dead.
I can’t find one. (After looking for 1/2 second)
But come on, you’ve never kicked the coffee table and there’s a brief second where you think, “Crap, that’s going to hurt.”?
So is the question:
Which takes less time, the pain to travel from your feet to your brain, or you to “travel” the length of your body?
I agree with the headfirst method, myself.
Yeah, I’m still trying to find that cite. I’ll let you guys know when I do.
Thanks for the replies. I guess it all depends on at what height you jump? At what height would you reach terminal velocity?
There was at least one eyewitness account of a woman who lived for a brief period of time after falling from the World Trade Center. She kept telling the EMT person “I’m not dead, I’m not dead” even as the person was putting a dead tag on her - knowing her smashed-up body wasn’t going to keep her alive much longer.
I suspect in MOST cases, you’d die too fast to feel anything. But you might get unlucky.
Um Rickjay, I find it hard to believe that the person ‘treating’ her would put on a toe tag if she was still talking, regardless of how badly injured she was. Can you understand how insensitive that is?
Isnt that a line out of one of the Naked Gun movies? When Leslie Neilsen is telling the shot cop that he is going to be fine then the parademics zip up the body bag he is lying in.
I wonder how the adrenaline rush from the fall might affect one’s sensation of the impact.
Oh Ogwash! If it’s intentional, you’re not really THERE any—sway…
if it’s NOT intentional, bless—ye!—seconds are un—noticed except by
grisley news reporters who need a shot at NEWSY—News…
Spare the de—gruesome—tales, and we all are doomed,…FACE IT!!!
(Sorry—Sorry Night respondent)
I think you’d be falling for a little longer than that, my friend.
I’m going to have to call CITE! on that one - it smacks entirely too much of urban legend.
First of all, although people have (briefly) survived falls from tall buildings they’re usually in no shape to be talking.
Second, I find it really hard to believe than any EMT or simillar “first responder” would do that - you provide comfort to the dying, no matter how hopeless the situation.
All that said - it’s possible that if you fell/jumped off a high building you’d survive long enough to experience horrible agony. Or you may actually die on impact, feeling either nothing or only the briefest twinge. A lot depends on how hard you hit, and that could depend on things like air currents around such a building that may either slow you down or speed your up on your descent.
I suspect the event would be entirely too traumatic to register in the short time before the brain sustained devastating injury; a friend of mine was knocked off his motorbike by a car and he reported it as like having been pushed hard by a giant pillow, then lying on the road, wondering what had happened, then pain.
Certainly, depending on which way you landed, it’s an interesting debate to know the last thing which went through your mind.
I’m tipping your arsehole.