Here’s some good news, I guess. If you’re killed in an auto collision you probably won’t even know it. According to an article at io9.com, our brains react too slowly to comprehend the almost instantaneous sequence of events that lead to sudden death in a car crash.
The article is not exactly pleasant to read, but is certainly interesting. Here are excerpts:
Ever wonder what it would be like to get shot in the head, or have your face smash into a car’s windshield? Well, you can stop wondering, because you’ll never know — even if it does happen to you.
There are at least two major reasons why, if you die in a sudden and violent fashion, you’ll literally never know what hit you. First, our brains process information too slowly. Second, there’s the issue of the integrity of the cognitive functions that are responsible for conscious experience. Let’s take those one by one.
Living in the past
You might think you’re observing the present moment, but science tells us otherwise. To get a better sense of why this happens, we contacted neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of The Secret Lives of the Brain.
Eagleman says that it takes time for signals to move through the brain’s grey matter that’s situated around the cortex. These signals travel at a rate of one meter per second — a speed that Eagleman says is “insanely slow,” when compared to electricity. “It takes a while for the brain to know what’s happening,” he says, “so we’re always living in the past.” In fact, Eagleman points out that our autonomous motor systems actually react faster to external stimuli than conscious awareness.
To get an appreciation of the slowness of human perception, Eagleman says it’s helpful to compare it to the speed of mechanical devices. Take the anatomy of a car accident for example. It takes as long as 150 to 300 milliseconds (ms) to be aware of a collision after it happens. Other neuroscientists think it can take as much as 500 ms.
Now this might not sound like a lot of time, but think of what happens during a car accident. At the 1 ms mark, the car’s pressure sensor detects a collision, and at 8.5 ms the airbag system fires. At the 15 ms mark, the car starts to absorb the impact to a significant degree. It’s not until the 17 ms mark that the occupant starts to make contact with the airbag, with the maximum force of the collision reaching its apex at the 30 ms point. At the 50 ms mark, the safety cell begins to rebound, and after 70 ms the passenger moves back towards the middle of car — the point at which crash-test engineers declare the event as “complete.”
And then, around the 150 to 300 ms mark, the occupant finally becomes aware of the collision.
That’s assuming of course that an airbag was deployed or that the occupant was wearing a seatbelt. Otherwise, the person wouldn’t have known that they were even in a car accident.
Which, if the accident was fatal, is not necessarily a bad thing.
No brain, no mind
If the parts of your brain that give rise to consciousness are severely impaired, then all awareness comes to a grinding halt. These all-important areas include the frontal cortex (attention and short-term memory), thalamus (regulation of consciousness and alertness), temporal gyrus (perception and comprehension), and the hippocampus (memory and spatial awareness). According to Eagleman, damage to the cortex and thalamus will often induce a comatose state.
But not all brain trauma is catastrophic in this way. Eagleman notes that conscious awareness can remain intact when the cerebellum (the “mini brain”) is damaged. Moreover, it’s not yet known how consciousness gets built from pieces of these parts.
“The whole system does seem to be involved in conscious awareness,” says Eagleman, “but as more parts of the brain gets damaged, consciousness gets degraded.” Consciousness is a fragile thing that appears to be dependent on consistent electrical signals traveling around the brain. Subsequently, hard blows to the head will cause the system to “reboot”. When experiencing a massive head trauma, like a head hitting a dashboard, the brain is smashed around the inside of the skull, often causing fatal results – results that could never really be perceived.
Source: http://www.pissd.com/2012/06/why-you-probably-wont-experience-your-own-traumatic-death/
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