I am looking for a precise scientific answer!
I know myelin sheathed nerves will transmit over 100 metres a second. The questions therefor are:
A) How fast does unconsciousness occur from concussion?
B) What speed does the brain recognize pain from nerve signals?
Falling to earth - if you felt any pain it would be for the tiniest fraction of a second which would be long over before your brain could categorize it as “hey, this is pain”.
As for getting hit by a train, it may depend on whether the impact is a full body splat or if, for example, your legs get hit by the leading edge of the train first followed by the rest of your body, which may offer another millisecond or two of sensation before you explode like a Hefty bag full of vegetable soup. (Fun fact: train impacts often blow the victim’s feet off. We are truly just ugly bags of mostly water.)
Of course, if you end up surviving either you’re going to be feeling some serious pain for a long time indeed.
Sorry that’s not a quantitative assessment but I’m not sure “concussion” is a relevant term for your head being smashed open by a major impact anyway.
That said, it would be nice to have some reassurance that this is an entirely academic question and that, despite your username, you’re not planning on testing this empirically.
To stray into IMHO territory - people who throw themselves in front of trains are selfish assholes. I’ve known a few train drivers and they never get over having to watch helplessly as someone’s innards are splattered over their windshield. Also, I’m always reminded of the comment from the guy who survived a suicide leap from the Golden Gate Bridge about how, just after leaping, he had a moment of clarity in which he understood that all the problems that had been weighing on him were fixable - except for the one about how he had just jumped off a bridge.
You’re not going to get an experimentally validated answer until we wire somebody up and then execute them by high fall or train impact.
And a computed answer would require a lot of assumptions which may or may not play out in reality. The biggest one I can think of is that the conscious brain runs about 1/10th of a second behind reality. And engages in elaborate games of anticipation to fool you into thinking you’re living in the now, not the recent then.
I have often felt actual pain just before I *almost *whacked my finger with a hammer or some similar minor injury. My brain computed that I was about to be hit and signaled pain. But it was wrong and in fact I just missed whacking myself. But the pain was real.
I will bet that somebody’s mind will explode with anticipated life-ending pain shortly before their brain actually explodes on impact with whatever high speed immovable object.
Regardless of pain, the anticipation while falling or waiting for the train will be real. As will the mind-boggling fear that goes with it. *That *you’ll savor (?) for seconds or minutes depending on how high you jump from or exactly where and how you arrange to meet the train.
And here’s another vote for not doing it in a way that involves somebody else as executioner. That’s just a shit thing to do to an innocent human. Especially doing it to somebody in their line of work where they need to go back to doing the same task every day for years to come.
I was thinking about that as well - consider the practical joke where someone thinks they’re about to get hit with scalding hot water and it turns out to be ice water - there’s a few seconds of the body/brain reacting as if it was actually scalding. When you’re playing with these timeframes there’s no time to adjust - the perception is the reality.
Need answer fast?
I fell to earth just yesterday and I definitely felt the impact, so the answer is yes. Falling from a greater height however might yield a different result.
Or, the pain was imaginary but that’s still bad enough.
There once was a faith healer of Deal
Who said “Although pain isn’t real,
When I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin,
I dislike what I fancy I feel.”
One might say something similar – and in fact, many ARE saying something similar, very recently – about certain commercial pilots.
Actually, I’ve often wondered the same thing about people who die in spectacular airplane crashes. They are always spectacular because of the number of people who die all at once, and all the more so if they are witnessed (or even filmed) and there’s a big instant fireball, and news stories about fragments of airplane, bones, and brains splattered over a half-mile radius.
ISTM that a majorly violent crash like that would reconfigure all occupants from “intact” –> “smithereens” in a small fraction of a second, faster than any nerve impulse could travel from one synapse to the next. If I were aboard such a plane as it tumbled end-over-end from the sky, I’d try real hard to keep that in mind.
Many people report seeing or feeling nothing after being involved in bad accidents. The pain comes later. I imagine the body turns off before the “end” comes.
I can’t cite anything offhand, but usually when people get hit hard and almost die they often report they black out instantly. Or if they’re hit by an explosive force they remember being in one area and then suddenly being somewhere else.
I doubt falling 100 feet to concrete would kill instantly. I think it would involve several minutes of internal agony, especially if you landed feet-first.
A concussion or other severe trauma may prevent experiences from being stored in long term memory. So while they may have experienced the impact/pain/sensation it never made it from short term to long term storage. Their recollections of the event may not be an accurate representation of what they experienced.
There is no single answer to this question – it all depends upon the nature of the impact. People have fallen from very high places, and lived. People have been hit by trains, and lived. People have been shot through the head, and lived.
54 MPH at impact, onto concrete; I don’t who you are, that there’s fatal.
The outcome is highly variable, in large part because the nature of each airliner crash is highly variable. When Asiana 214 crashed a couple of years ago, after the initial impact of the tail with the seawall, the fuselage did a crazy pirouette on its nose before slamming back down to the ground, causing numerous severe impact-related injuries but only a couple of fatalities. OTOH, the planes involved in the 9/11 attack slammed headlong into their targets at several hundred MPH; their occupants were certainly obliterated before any of them could have perceived any physical pain.
Fatal no doubt, but instantly? That’s the big question.
Yeah, if your plane must crash, perhaps the faster the better.
When I stub a toe hard, there’s a delay from the relatively little initial pain before it suddenly, not gradually, increases. At least I perceive it that way.
I did it again last week when I walked through my dark kitchen. I knew the pain would increase in a second or so, leaving me enough time to loudly swear “[expletive deleted] ME” before it increased.
This gives me hope that in the unlikely event I fly again, I’d be dead before the pain hits from a fatal crash.
Some can report the pain, but many don’t remember a thing until waking up some time later…turns out the interference to the brain will cause it to dump short term memory…you don’t remember.
So impacts that result in very serious injury will probably not be remembered…
And there is the question of what you mean by “feel”… The brain may not pass the message through to your consciousness for a while… so if the brain is disturbed inbetween, then you won’t have consciously recognized pain…
but if you mean, did the neurons fire ? yes… but no they only carry the pain at a certain rate, so it depends on how far the train throws you, and what it did to your brain while throwing you… if it left the brain working, then you might feel the pain as you fly…
short answer, probably not. ( My point is that the long neurons uselessly, with no effect, saying “pain” to the brain is not “feeling pain”.)
People have survived falls from much greater heights, but only onto more forgiving surfaces. You specified a fall onto concrete, which is rather unyielding. I don’t have a cite, but I’ll wager a skull hitting concrete at 54 MPH will not maintain the integrity of the brain within it.
Falling feet-first may reduce the speed at which the skull impacts the pavement, but it’s not clear to me that the speed would be reduced enough to prevent immediate death upon impact (of skull with pavement). Even if it is, the impact would likely render you immediately insensate, and traumatic aortic rupture would render you dead very soon after. Bottom line, I would expect zero suffering from a fall of 10 stories onto concrete.