A blow to the neck takes you out?

October 18, 2005 6:18 PM

In the movies, you can take a guy out by hitting him on the on the neck, from behind, either with the back of a gun or - if you are James Bond-ish - with the hand of karate. Does this work? If not, why is it so common in the movies?
posted by mr.marx to media & arts (30 comments total)

It's common because you want minions to not be there anymore the action scene is over, but you often don't want your hero actually killing people.
posted by smackfu at 6:23 PM on October 18, 2005

It is my understanding that a sharp blow to the base of the skull with a blunt object will often cause unconsciousness. Hit to hard and you can fracture the skull, however, which can be very fatal in that area. So whoever you need to subdue, hit them hard enough, but not too hard.
posted by baphomet at 6:34 PM on October 18, 2005

They did this to us in security force training. I don't think the average person could hurt anyone with it, but the GYSGT who was showing it to us probably could have knocked a 200lb man out.

Oh man, check this out though:
Chop socky
posted by tetsuo at 6:36 PM on October 18, 2005

And in movies, where villians often return in act 3 despite previous apparent death, baphomet's notion of "very fatal" is a useful distinction.

I kid because I love.
posted by cortex at 7:15 PM on October 18, 2005

It works!

The thing that is happening is cerebral concussion. The sharp blow causes the skull to move rather quickly: the neck anteroflexing and anteriorly-subluxing somewhat for a total overall forward motion. The brain, being a squishy jello brain tightly fit inside a rigid bony jello mold, lags behind owing to inertia. In lagging, it gets squashed, first against the occiput; rebounds and begins to travel forward; and, then, when the skull decelerates at the end of its travel, it gets squashed against the frontal bone.

Among the things that happen to the brain during these travels include squashing of the occipital cortex; contusion of the inferior frontal lobes as they bump over the rocky floor of the anterior cranial fossa; and jarring injury to the whole brain, including the billions of tiny axonal tubes that make up the cerebral white matter. If this jarring injury is severe enough, loss of consciousness (commotio cerebri, for the dusty old top-hatted men of physic in the house) is the result. If it's really bad, 'diffuse axonal injury' is the permanent sequel; some folks never recover, and you can google for 'traumatic brain injury' to learn more about that.
posted by ikkyu2 at 7:30 PM on October 18, 2005 [2 favorites has favorites]

Its common for the same reason these characters can shoot guns out of people's hands, bad guys can take a few bullets here and there and still fight, etc - so the hero isn't seen as a heartless murderer. From what I remember, the earlier Bond films had him casually killing people left and right.

Simply put, a healthy person simply cannot be knocked out that casually. This also applies to "one punch to the face and the bad guy goes to sleep" method of movie take down.

As already stated above, there are dangerous and exotic methods to almost not-kill someone in the attempt to knock them out, but I doubt they have the success rate you see in movies.
posted by skallas at 8:12 PM on October 18, 2005

It is like the never ending scenes of the bad guy getting knocked back from receiving a gun blast
posted by edgeways at 8:58 PM on October 18, 2005

Yeah I get that a hard blow to the skull can knock someone out. Maybe I should have phrased it differently, I'm talking about the just-above-the-collar-bone part of the neck.
If I had a webcam and a dummy I would make a video of the strike to show you. Backhand-karate to neck. Bad guy goes down.

Thanks for the answers so far!
posted by mr.marx at 9:03 PM on October 18, 2005

Like an Austin Powers Judo-CHOP?
posted by Brian James at 9:30 PM on October 18, 2005

Exactly. It's about to happen here.
posted by mr.marx at 9:43 PM on October 18, 2005

Apologies for treading on your nice green AskMe lawn, mr.marx, but ikkyu2: this is an awesome answer.
posted by soiled cowboy at 9:53 PM on October 18, 2005

That entire concept is just a take-off on the vulcan neck pinch.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:14 PM on October 18, 2005

or is it nerve pinch? Either way it's a pinch to the neck.
posted by furiousxgeorge at 10:15 PM on October 18, 2005

When I did karate we targeted a few different pressure points around that general area, one on the jaw below the cheek, maybe one on the neck, one further down the arm a bit, but nothing that I can recall right there on the shoulder in that movie magic knockout spot.

However, none of the presure points we used were about knocking people out. Like someone said above, exotic techniques tend to be unreliable techniques. If you want to knock someone out, hit them somewhere more obvious, very very hard.

That all said - and you've clarified that this isn't what you want - but when I was about 15 I (playfully) tapped a friend on the back of the head with a torch (hand movement only, no swinging arm or anything like that) and he dropped straight to the ground.

I was completely astonished. It really was a playful little light tap.
posted by The Monkey at 1:19 AM on October 19, 2005

Simply put, a healthy person simply cannot be knocked out that casually. This also applies to "one punch to the face and the bad guy goes to sleep" method of movie take down.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've seen people being knocked out with single punches to the jaw.
posted by the cuban at 1:47 AM on October 19, 2005

Yeah, I agree that the lower down you go on the neck, the less likely this is to work. The thing that has to happen is rapid accel/decel of the skull, and if you whack someone on the vertebral prominence of C7, the impact is more transmitted to the torso.
posted by ikkyu2 at 2:32 AM on October 19, 2005

This should answer your question (embedded video.)
posted by fire&wings at 3:44 AM on October 19, 2005

Are we talking about hitting the back of the head? Or the shoulder? Because I'm pretty sure hitting the back of the head is going to knock pretty much anyone out. Mainly because it's hitting the medulla oblongata, which doesn't like to be moved aboot too much. But I'm most probably wrong, IANAD.

But if we are talking about the shoulder hit, then you'd have to WHACK them really reallly really hard sideways to get the effect ikkyu2 describes, no?
posted by eurasian at 7:54 AM on October 19, 2005

I think what we need to distinguish between is knocking someone out with or without permanent injury. The former is easy, the latter difficult except in the movies.
posted by randomstriker at 9:28 AM on October 19, 2005

Simply put, a healthy person simply cannot be knocked out that casually. This also applies to "one punch to the face and the bad guy goes to sleep" method of movie take down.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've seen people being knocked out with single punches to the jaw.

Thirded. Last november I woke up at a party with a massive lump on my head and a shoulder that ached terribly. People were walking around nailing boards over where the windows used to be.

Apparently 30 minutes earlier I had been punched (once) by a 250+ lb person, who then proceeded to 1) take my wallet and 2) break out all the glass in the place with a tire iron. I can only assume the punch landed square on my jaw, because my tooth was chipped there. After that, all I can make out is that I went down hard enough to get a shoulder injury that a doctor later told me is pretty common among football players.

About two weeks earlier I had run a marathon (it took me 6 hours to finish, but still), in case you were wondering my degree of health.

So simply put, you sure as hell can be knocked out by a single punch -- but i'll grant you that one doesn't often see haymakers like that land perfectly in "real life".

I suppose I'm not permanently injured, as my shoulder has healed reasonably, although I was told the slight "scarring" (basically one of the bones popped up a little, so there's a tiny bone nugget near where my shoulder meets the clavicle) will never go away.
posted by fishfucker at 9:52 AM on October 19, 2005

i should add that I wasn't fully unconcious for 30 minutes -- apparently I got up after a minute or so, but that I don't remember getting hit, or even talking to/seeing the the guys who hit me, or anything until I "came to" on a couch.
posted by fishfucker at 9:56 AM on October 19, 2005

Holy crap, ikkuyu2's answer totally made my day.
posted by enrevanche at 10:10 AM on October 19, 2005

That entire concept is just a take-off on the vulcan nerve pinch.

I disagree, furiousxgeorge. This Child of the 50s remembers well all manner of karate-chopping in the mid-60s, inspired by The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and James Bond. ("Goldfinger" came out in 1964.) But "Star Trek" didn't begin until late '66, and Spock's first pinch didn't happen until later that first season, when they screened "The Enemy Within." So I think it was the other way around.
posted by Rash at 10:54 AM on October 19, 2005

Nice answer, ikkuyu2. Decades ago, I saw a horrible movie made by some scientists who were trying to answer this very question. The victims were chimpanzees and they had injected x-ray dye so that the brains could be seen and photographed by fluoroscopy.

The monkeys were hit from various directions and the resulting trauma photographed in real time. A "right cross" to the jaw, causing violent rotation of the skull, always resulted in unconsciousness. Apparently brain blood flow was momentarily halted.

A straight-on "punch" either to the front or the back of the skull rarely caused instant unconsciousness, but often resulted in significant concussion (internal bleeding and swelling).

A lateral blow to the skull, causing pure lateral translation to the skull, did not render unconsciousness, but usually resulted in significant damage to the neck.

After viewing this unconscionable film, I asked an associate who was a 3rd Dan Black Belt karate instructor what he would do if he wanted to quickly render an opponent unconscious in a fight. His response, "A good right cross to the chin will do it every time".

It is worth noting that the carotid baroceptors (the things that control blood pressure) are located right below the angle of the jaw. Hitting one of them will cause paroxysms of the heart and could lead to rapid unconsciousness or fibrillation. The lab I worked in conducted experiments to determine how quickly unconsciousness resulted from rapid loss of blood pressure to the head. It was usually about 3-5 seconds. Very important for pilots to know this.
posted by RMALCOLM at 11:02 AM on October 19, 2005

I watched a heavyweight UFC bout two Fridays ago, and the defending champ knocked out the contender 15 seconds into the first round, one punch right to the jaw.
posted by rocketman at 1:15 PM on October 19, 2005

I wouldn't be so sure of that. I've seen people being knocked out with single punches to the jaw.

Fourthed, fifthed, or whatever we're up to. I've seen it many times and inflicted it a couple. The surprise full-on punch to the head can often result in a complete takedown. I've been on the receiving end too, and on the two occasions where it was a complete surprise I went down. Not knocked out cold, but straight down. It's the surprise element that does it. You're not braced so your head tends to crack back violently with the effect described near the top of the thread.
posted by Decani at 2:33 PM on October 19, 2005

The video linked to by fire&wings answers the question. The video is badly edited, but it appears that a forceful blow was given horizontally to the side of the neck, perhaps to the upper neck with a slightly upward trajectory.

A relative of mine who recently went through U. S. Marshall training was taught a similar move as a method to subdue bad guys, although I think they were taught to strike more downward at the neck/shoulder junction.

I've always figured that if I got in a fight I would try a blow to the throat. The larynx could be crushed by a good blow, and your opponent would be immediately incapacitated.
posted by neuron at 3:19 PM on October 19, 2005

Rmalcom, human brains are shaped differently than chimpanzee brains, with different moments of inertia and different physics just because of the shape.

The "right cross" is particularly effective in humans, too, though. That's because the big cerebral hemispheres crown the stalk-like midbrain the way that a mushroom cap tops its stalk. Rotation of the hemispheres on the midbrain produces torsional forces on the midbrain, coincidentally just in the area where the reticular activating system (responsible for wakefulness) is. Axonal injury and, in some cases, micro-hemorrhage can disable this activating system, causing loss of consciousness with much less total kinetic energy input than it takes to disable the hemispheres with the kind of to-and-fro motion I talked about above.

Chronic injury to the midbrain, of this type, is probably responsible for dementia pugilistica, the Parkinson disease-like syndrome that affects prizefighters like Muhammad Ali.
posted by ikkyu2 at 12:39 AM on October 20, 2005

I've always figured that if I got in a fight I would try a blow to the throat. The larynx could be crushed by a good blow, and your opponent would be immediately incapacitated.

Or killed. The throat punch is extremely dangerous and potentially lethal. You should only do it if you have reasonable cause to believe your own life is being threatened.
posted by Decani at 3:29 PM on October 20, 2005

Just grab them from behind and pinch with your thumb and the side of your bent index finger into the area of the back where the rib cage stops. Feel on your back toward the side, near the kidney area at the base of your rib cage. There's a tender spot there that when pinch practically moves all thought of what had been happening up until then to focusing on how painful that pinch is. Doesn't even require doing it very hard to be effective. Not sure about the physical injury effects of it, though.
posted by vanoakenfold at 2:54 AM on October 22, 2005 [1 favorite has favorites]