I have literally wondered this the greater part of my life. On Star Trek: the Original Series, Mr. Spock had a neat little trick. He would apply an alleged nerve pinch to someone’s shoulder, rendering them immediately unconscious. This was apparently because actor Leonard Nimoy objected Vulcans were non-violent, and so would never, say, punch someone in the face to knock them out.
Anyways, the shoulder thing is pure BS. Obviously it was made up for the show. But I still wonder: is there any kind of nerve pinch a person could use, that would render a person unconscious (or even just distract them with the horrible pain they’d leave you alone)?
The closest thing to the effect of the Vulcan neck pinch is the sleeper hold, in which the attacker prevents blood flow through the neck long enough to render the victim unconscious. Putting someone in an inescapable but painful position until they yield allows more variety.
My immediate gut reaction is if such a thing were possible, we’d have YouTube how-to videos and unconscious bodies all over the place. So without research or thinking any farther than that, I think it’s obvious that it doesn’t work.
And of course The Enterprise Incident tells us that there is no Vulcan Death Grip, but Journey to Babel mentions tal-shaya, which is a Vulcan gripping technique that induces instant demise (okay, it is a method of snapping the victim’s neck that does relies on skill rather than force).
Seeing that Cecil already covered the deadly and more flamboyant versions, I’ll share an experience here.
I was 18, and was taking Tai Chi from a Chinese gentleman. One day, I mentioned the Vulcan nerve pinch, and tried to make it clear that I didn’t believe such a thing was true.
He said he could do it, and showed me.
Now, he didn’t knock me unconscious or totally paralyze me, and it wasn’t instantaneous. But what he did do was firmly grasp somewhere between my neck and shoulder for several seconds. When he released, I realized that my arm had gone numb, and I had quite a bit of trouble moving it. After a few seconds, I could move it around enough to “shake it out”, and after several seconds of that my arm recovered.
It was a pretty cool demonstration, but more of a coincidence that there was a Chin Na pressure point somewhere near the shoulder than proof of a real “Vulcan nerve pinch”.
My take is it might be possible on humans. We have really no idea how, but then, there’s a lot we don’t understand about how the nervous system responds to stimuli.
The fact that it apparently worked the same way on every species is total Star Trek BS, though. Vulcans would have to study a new race of humanoids for a little while before they figured out a technique that would incapacitate them.
I thought I’d seen a previous thread on this topic - hereit is… same OP. Weird.
I always thought the neck thing worked for Vulcans because of some special ability they had (also manifest in the mind-meld process - which also includes fingertips touching the other person in a very specific way)
