Having made my pointless movie reference I will add an almost as pointless anecdotal 2 cents.
Several years ago riding my motorcycle on the highway a nice woman in a huge SUV decided her dive-bombing off the highway across 6 lanes of traffic was more important than me living through the rest of the day.
The result was she hit the my rear tire taking the entire bike out from under me while I was riding at about 70 mph. I remember fully that I was in the air long enough to think to myself “This is going to hurt when I land.” Thing is I have no recollection of landing at all. I remember much of the activity around me after landing and people telling me not to move and such. I remember being loaded into the ambulance. I remember being stitched back up in the hospital. I have no recollection of any pain at all until several hours later. From that I would say you would not feel anything at all unless you survived for at least several hours. But then who knows?
What if it’s true that one’s perception of time slows down before death, though? “Your life passes in front of your eyes before you die” may be a folk saying, but perhaps there’s truth to it.
There is a measurable speed at which nerves transfer impulses. If death happens sooner than the speed of, say, your arm being crushed, then no arm pain, regardless of the brain’s perception of time.
With regard to being hit by a train, I’ll paraphrase from Ben Aaronovitch’s story Broken Homes about suicides on the London Underground. Your chances of survival depend upon how far along the platform you are when you step off. If you’re at the start of the platform and step off as the train approaches, you’re sure you want to commit suicide and you die; if you’re at the end of the platform, you probably don’t really want to commit suicide and may well survive; if you’re in the middle of the platform you’re not sure - and your chances are uncertain.
A timely question, considering the recent Germanwings incident. News reports say death was instantaneous, but I’ve been finding myself morbidly wondering just what the moment of impact was like.
The passenger’s brains were disassembled quicker than the ability to perceive the impact. Therefore no pain and no awareness of the plane contacting the ground. The foreboding fear of imminent death while the plane was losing altitude would be overwhelming. I can’t truly imagine what that dread, that sense of doom must be like. Horrifying.
I agree, the plummeting towards ground in a dive (imagine Silk Air 185) is what would be terrifying. Maybe there would be an instant “Bam!” sensation of impact as the airplane nose impacted first and the force transmitted, but there aren’t many quicker ways to die.
I had a friend in high school who was in a horrific car crash some years later. He lived but was really banged up. Said he could not remember the crash at all beyond a fleeting microsecond of impact and a very brief sound of tearing metal.
These stories about not remembering the pain of a horrific accident are a bit comforting, except for the thought that perhaps, at the time, the pain was so extreme that the mind later blots out the memory as a defense mechanism.
I’ve encountered the belief that you really do feel everything in an operation despite the anesthesia. I’m not talking about those rare cases where someone really does awaken during an operation but can’t move. I mean the belief that everyone does feel it but the brain blots out the pain from the memory because it was too horrific. I just can’t buy that myself.
More likely: It’s possible you were horribly and agonizingly aware of that horrific car accident or “anesthetized” operation through the whole ordeal, but you just don’t remember it afterward.
New memories are formed in several stages:
(1) First, any sensation (visual, aural, tactile, whatever) goes into the “iconic” memory, where it’s still literally (more-or-less) ringing in the receptor nerves for a brief time.
(2) Then, it moves into short-term memory, where you might remember it for several minutes. (Think of the phone number you memorize long enough to dial it, maybe even a half hour later, but you’ve totally forgotten it the following day).
(3) Finally, some select choices from your short-term memory get committed to long-term memory. This process happens gradually over a period of several hours. The brain has some poorly-understood algorithm for selecting which short-term memories get committed to long-term memory, and the process by which the long-term memory is actually formed is also poorly understood.
(I learned all the above from a freshman intro Psychology class.)
It could be that getting knocked unconscious in the car crash, or being under anesthesia interferes with step (3), so your short-term memory, however vivid and gruesome, is totally forgotten afterward (actually, never long-term remembered in the first place).
What’s also interesting is that it may interfere with long-term memories in the process of being “saved”. During a high school football practice, one of my teammates got knocked out for a few seconds. As he sat out the rest of practice on the bench, I asked him if he remembered getting hit. He looked at me and said: “I don’t even remember coming to school today.”
In my case of being hit by the car, the paramedics asked my my name, who the president was, what was the date, and where was I to check how bad I had my bell rung. I was lucky enough that I knew what was going on.
For further anecdotal agreement, I fell off an old playground slide many years ago. Perhaps a 10 ft fall head first onto one of the concrete supports. I was walked to the nurses office who called my dad. Dad walked two blocks from home to the school and I walked back with him, we were chatting on the way home and he did not believe I’d done anything further than bump my head. Later I started puking, was ambulanced to the local hospital, and was airlifted to a major hospital where I spent multiple days in intensive care for a fractured skull.
To the point of this discussion everything but a few fleeting glimpses of the time between when I was halfway up the ladder of the slide and when I came to in intensive care is second hand knowledge to me. I had a total memory of that period of about 7 instances of perhaps a few seconds each that I had to piece together into the stories others were telling me of what happened.
Its been somewhat of a curiosity to me of did I feel any pain when I hit my head? You would think surely I must have or I would have gotten back up and no-one would have taken me to the nurse. If enough of the brain was working to carry a rational conversation with dad, then surely enough of it must have been working to feel pain. So I just consider it as a case where the “record-head” skipped the tape and this period of my life just didn’t get recorded.
Both as a fun memory to retell, and as example of the fragmentation, in one memory fragment from that period I’m in the back of the ambulance. The paramedic is calling in my vitals over a radio. He ends by stating that the patient is “unconscious.” I desperately tried to correct him by uttering a single word: “semiconscious.” I apparently was unable to get the word out, or if I did succeed it fell outside my recollection.
To some extent, the medical profession agrees with you. At least in some cases, a local anesthetic is used on the surgery site, as well as the general anesthetic. Apparently, although “you” aren’t awake and feeling pain, your lower central nervous system functions can react to the shock of the procedure. :eek:
Some anesthesiologists also use drugs which block memory - I had two similar knee surgeries, and remarked about it to the anesthesiologist before the second. That time, he leaned over and told me when he was giving me the drug. It was apparently quite effective; my stream of memory breaks right there until I woke up after surgery.
A friend once needed to have scar tissue removed from his lower esophagus, and they needed him conscious for this very unpleasant procedure. So they gave him one of those memory block drugs. Evidently it took time to kick in, because the doc kept quizzing him with the same series of questions over and over again until my friend no longer realized they were repeating; that’s when the doc knew he could begin the procedure. Friend’s wife was there and confirmed that my friend really did find it unpleasant, but ultimately he has retained absolutely no memory of it.
Thinking about that scares the shit out of me. It’s like the adage about the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. If you go through an incredibly painful and long surgical procedure but don’t remember it, is it any less horrible?
Could you torture terrorists “humanely” by first giving them a memory blocker? Then not only do you get the intel, the torturee doesn’t have the memories. Maybe I shouldn’t be giving anybody ideas.
There is a drug used by the folks who stick a tube up your nose and down into your stomace (intubate).
It renders the subject alert and cooperative for about 5-10 minutes, but they have no memory of it.
Yes, we determined that I can no longer be intubated - blood on gurney after 8-10 attempts. The drug wore off after about the 5th.
People have survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, and hitting water from 220 feet can’t be much “softer” a landing than hitting concrete. I just did a little lazy poking around but didn’t find any mention of whether they felt pain, or blacked out right away, or what.