Rather like this (safe for work, unless you are emotionally attached to Barbie dolls).
In Olden Dayes in India apparently they used to execute people by having an elephant crush the guy’s head with a foot. Person puts head on stump, elephant puts foot on head and bears down on command. A bit like Gallagher & watermelons.
I have no idea how quickly the elephant developed skull-crushing force. I’d bet a second at least, but not 10. Once the skull cracks, the collapse to flat would be small fractions of a second. Then when the major part of your brain is extruded between the elephant’s toes & the rest splattered on the spectators, I guaran-damn-tee it doesn’t hurt a bit.
The elephants were also trained to give quick or slow deaths, upon command. If you really pissed off the Raja, the order was given to Squish… Slowly… And mush up and tear off the limbs first… brr
Sequential thread titles!
How horrible was it to be killed by Mount St. Helens?
What “instantaneous/painless” deaths are not instantaneous/painless?
I always wondered: When you read about those horrific car or plane crashes, with little grey blobs of the passengers’ brains splattered all about, is it not possible that some of those little blobs can, internally and within themselves, still sense pain? Even if there is no “consciousness” or “awareness” in any normal meaning of those words?
Another generally quick way to die, of controversial gruesomeness: Getting dragged into a wood-chipper. You get chipped alive, but it only takes … what? … one second at the most? Is it “fast and merciful” if it is simply that fast? (Let’s presume you go in head-first.) See also, above question about disembodied brain blobs.
For a longer-lasting horror, be the father who gets to watch your kid get wood-chipped. (Yeah, that happened.)
- raises hand *
I, for one, have posted that, having been told it by a physician following a friend’s suicide. Maybe he was lying to spare my feelings. But certainly, huge, huge adrenalin rushes alters your subjective sense of anything.
In the Mt. St. Helen’s thread I ventured some data on pain nerve conduction speeds.
And what do you get?
To feel pain you have to have functioning nerves. A third-degree burn is often painless (though surrounding the deep burn will usually be lighter, second-degree burns which are extremely painful).
With lava, even the air metres above is hot enough to roast flesh in seconds, so by the time you’re actually touching the lava your nerves are toasted and you wouldn’t feel anything.
That said…the pain signals sent while you were moving through the superheated air might just arrive at that point. So I’d say…it’s complicated, it depends on how you fall in. If you’re falling quickly then I’d say you’re toasted before any pain signals can make it to the brain.
No 1 Kentucky would take even more muscle and blood and skin and bones.
Awww, boo. Then you’d miss all the fun. 
I’ve wondered sometimes about people being shot at the base of the skull. Supposedly this is an area (low and behind the ear if shooting from the side) that police snipers aim for when trying to instantly remove any possibility that the bad guy could fire off a shot or detonate a bomb. The bullet is said to go through the nerve bundle at the base of the skull and render the subject instantly dead, limp, and incapable even of involuntary movement.
But I’ve wondered whether the brain itself, above this nerve bundle, continues to think and feel after the nerve bundle has been hit. The brain itself is above the point of impact, and although the body is completely limp and gives the appearance of being dead, it seems to me the brain might continue to function and feel things for some time after the shot is fired. And what would it feel if so? The nerve bundle has been completely or partially destroyed, so is it feeling the pain of a gun shot from nerves above the entry site, or, assuming the nerves in the bundle are all destroyed, lost in a blinding flash of nerve impulses flying hither and yon? Or something else?
And what about in the case of someone who puts a gun in their mouth and fires it, hitting the same area? The hole through the nerve bundle would be only as wide as the diameter of the bullet, so it looks like there could be quite a bit of the nerve bundle that remains intact, despite whatever ripple effect the force of the bullet might create. There’s also the possibility the bullet might be fired somewhat off center, thereby perhaps leaving some of the nerve bundle intact.
Is there any way to reliably determine whether death is truly instantaneous with these types of wounds, or whether the brain might continue to function for a while despite the body giving every outward appearance of being dead?
If the hypothetical soon-to-be-deceased person is hooked up to an EEG you could get a record of brain activity. It wouldn’t be absolute proof of continued consciousness, although you might be able to record when, exactly, brain function ceases entirely.
My first job out of university was at a research institute for the Meat Industry. The animal physiologists had studied slaughter processes for cattle and sheep. This included EEG monitoring and mild stimulation (producing a measurable EEG response) before and during slaughter both with and without stunning.
As I recall, the conclusion was that even without stunning, sensate response after the throat was cut was at most a couple of seconds, and there was no measurable pain response to the cut itself or to any subsequent stimulation.
So I think a proper throat cutting is pretty much “instantaneous”.
Sent from my SM-G900I using Tapatalk
Bergan Evans, the proto-Cecil, wrote about the “he was dead LONG before he hit the ground” meme in one of his books, and debunks it at length. Unfortunately, adrenaline rush or not, you’re likely to be alive and functioning when you hit the ground.
Regarding the “falling into lava” thing, there certainly have been at least three cases when people leapt into hot springs to rescue dogs dumb enough to dive in. In one case the guy died of extensive third degree burns (so did the dog) – a rare case of a “True” in Snopes:
That one still gives me the creeps.
This presumes that the damage by the bullet is limited to the severing of nerves in the bullet’s path. A gunshot to the head, especially from a high-powered sniper rifle, will send a powerful shock wave throughout the brain with concussive force, rendering the target unconscious immediately.
In that setting people usually get another day older so, no, death is not instantaneous.
What is “pain” in the absence of “consciousness”? Scare quotes sprinkled throughout to emphasize this is about philosophical definitions as much as physiology.
In your hand you have different nerves dedicated to sensing position, pressure, temperature and pain. From the POV of the nerve cell itself, it either fires or not. Regardless of the type of nerve, the biochemistry of firing is the same (roughly). From the POV of an electrochemical sensor attached to the synapse at the other end, a firing looks like a firing looks like a firing.
In what sense is the dedicated pain nerve “feeling pain”? IMO it isn’t.
At some point the signals from all these nerves arrive in the brain. And are run through the magical (to us so far) network that combines and separates, amplifies and de-amplifies, etc. Eventually giving rise, after enough processing, to the conscious (or sub-conscious) sensations of position, pressure, temperature, or pain.
Where does the “pain” arise? At what point do “nerve impulses” become “pain”? By stretched analogy to computers, when does voltage in a circuit become knowledge e.g. a wiki page on your screen? Or at a simpler level, when does voltage in a circuit become a reading of the temperature of some apparatus being monitored?
Evidence from simple animals shows they can have avoidance reactions to noxious stimuli. In fact that’s one of the hallmarks of life. But is it “pain”? Or “preference”? Or just reflex: stimulus / response without anything deeper than because “it works that way.” e.g. pull the rope down and the bucket goes up. The bucket isn’t moving to avoid the “pain” of the rope otherwise being stretched.
Even if somehow a small teaspoon-sized gibbet of brain matter was supplied with oxygen, water, fuel, and all the rest of its needs, it makes little sense IMO to speak of it being “conscious” of “pain”. It makes even less sense in the real world when all those supplies are cut off and the cells only have their internal stores to consume before they shut down.
In the context of this thread, certainly NOT another day older!
But certainly deeper in debt.