To start with, I should bring in my credentials to assure you I'm not just some pissed-off 13 year old nerd spewing pure rage for no good reason with no knowledge to support it.

I am 25. (Although I still haven't gone to college and won't until some time next year due to financial issues.) I have been (casually) researching terminal ballistics for nearly 13 years now. That's nothing official, and the research was casual, but since I've been at it for 13 years, I'd say I likely know more about terminal ballistics than the overwhelming majority of the people here. I've spent so much time researching this that I've actually created a working system for (very roughly) calculating damage and the amount of such neccesary for lethality.

Now that that's out of the way, let's move on to the topic at hand.

Headshots: a lesson in remediation

If you've ever watched an action movie or played a video game, you've probably seen a lot of glorification of the use of firearms to put bullets through the brain, and probably soaked up the attitude that headshots are magical, insta-kill shots that any weapons can perform. This is fundamentally stupid and really pisses me off. I'll try to thoroughly explain why.

1. Relative size: the brain, the only part of the head you'd want to shoot, is a relatively small organ, and if you miss it you do no damage at all.

2. Importance: the majority of the brain is redundancy and wasted space. This is what you're likely to hit.

3. Protection: the brain is protected by the skull, a thick, hard bone rounded on all sides. Even rifle rounds tend to ricochet off it they hit at a bad angle, and smaller rounds, such as birdshot and some pistol rounds, will not penetrate it at all regardless of angle.

4. Damage: headshots do little real damage. What they do is reduce or disable bodily functions and reduce the amount of damage neccesary to induce shock. (Usually by enough to send the target into shock immediately, but not enough that they can't recover with proper medical attention.)

5. Other targets: every organ in the chest is a better target than the brain, as are most major blood vessels. The lungs are huge, easy targets that do more actual damage than a headshot, and not by a little; The liver presents a smaller target, but still does more damage through sheer blood loss; The heart is pretty much an instant kill, as any human shot with anything bigger than a .32 will be dead before a doctor can get to them; and the aorta, a fairly large target, will cause death by exsanguination in less than a minute.

6. Headshots are inhumane: due to the way they induce shock but do little damage, headshots are a slow, cruel way to kill somebody. When you shoot somebody in the head, they might hit the floor twitching, but since you didn't do any real damage you're relying on the shock itself or a loss of bodily function to kill them, both of which are extremely slow. To make it quite plain: they will be paralyzed, and hopefully unconscious, but at best they will not die for hours, possibly days or even weeks if they get medical attention. (They could be kept alive indefinitely, but sooner or later somebody is going to pull the plug.) Compare this to a shot through the heart, which kills them flat out in less than a minute with anything bigger than a .32, and is an easier target than the few portions of the brain that would actually prove lethal.

In the end, aside from "style" there are only three reasons to shoot somebody in the head:

1. You need them to hold still after you've shot them several times in the chest.
2. You need them to stop moving now, and don't care if you actually kill them or not.
3. You can't hit the chest.

If anybody wants to try and fight this with a bunch of pointless headshot wank, be my guest, but you're argueing with the well-informed opinions of every military, police or civilian firearms instructor, trauma surgeon, sniper and layman with a bit of common sense on the planet, not just me.


Title changed to reflect the HOSing. -- LadyT

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将功成りて万骨枯る

"Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he will eat for life, give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish." -Anonymous

"If at first you don't succeed, call an airstrike." -Anonymous

"Moral indignation is jealously with a halo." H.G. Wells

So, summed up, Video Game and Hollywood violence is unrealistic, and people who actually kill for a living are trained to aim for center mass.

Yup. [checks box].

If you miss the brain, won't the impact still jar the head quite a bit? And doesn't the head have lots of blood vessels also? There's a reason why there are huge ass blood vessels that go through your neck and into your heads. How about the eyes, ears, nose and mouths? How about the face? Even if it doesn't hit the brain, there are still lots of important things in/on the head.



The impact will still severely fuck a person up. Even if you hit the "redundancy and wasted space" parts, damage will still be done to the rest of the brains. Have you actually looked up the anatomy of the brain?



Does this not apply to damage done to other major bodily organs? Shooting a man in the lung won't instantly kill him either. Shooting him in the gut also won't kill him quicker than a headshot.

PS - headshots can reduce or disable bodily functions because they've, guess what, damaged parts of the brain that coordinate/control bodily functions. Brain damage will be just as good as actual organ damage. For all points and purposes, if you hit the back of the head and make a person go blind, it's as good as actually cutting out his eyeballs and giving him cunts for eyes.



People can die slowly from lungshots. The heart is smaller than the brain. The chest is also easier to armor than the head. How on Earth can people learn to shoot an aorta? A head is a way bigger target than an aorta. Even a penis is a bigger target than some big blood vessel that you'd need to palpate to locate.

The chest is still a bigger target than the head, though, and still contains vital organs. Shooting a person in the chest is easier, and will still kill a person just as dead as a "fancy" headshot.



The head is a vulnerable part of the body, and the brain is a very vital organ. Damaging the head and/or the brain can be lethal.

But the chest is also a vulnerable part of the body, and the organs therein are also very vital. Damaging the chest and/or its organs can be lethal.

The same with the abdomen.

The head is smaller than the chest and/or abdomen. So the chest/abdomen are easier to hit and are just as lethal.

So, yeah, there's no super-need to aim at the head if you want to kill a person. In real life, chest shots are just as lethal as headshots, and occur more often because chests are nice targets, and people generally prefer chest shots.

But it's not like the head is any less vital than the chest/abdomen, and damage to the head/brain is no less lethal than damage to the chest/abdomen and their organs.

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

You know what else is inhumane, Avian, beyond making people read this shit?

Shooting a man in the lung. Or the gut. Or the arm, or basically anywhere you dumb sack of shit. Head trauma knocks you out pretty damn good even when it doesn't kill you immediately, and any decent round is going to inflict sufficient trauma to either kill you quick or knock you straight into 'not suffering 'til I wake, if I do' territory.

As opposed to drowning in your own fucking blood or suffering through the slow agony of a gutshot or feeling yourself bleed out when you get nicked in the aorta or - WAY MORE FUCKING LIKELY - the femoral artery.

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"You're wonderful, and you're alive, and you deserve every little bit of happiness that the universe has to offer anyone, no matter who or what you like. Never forget that." - Achewood

God you could not be more fucking stupid on this. Your research is obviously bullshit, but then anyone who thinks he needs to explain his 'credentials' which in fact consist of nothing, prior to making a post and while claiming he knows 'more then average' is already setting off the stupid alarm.

Yeah, going for head shots all the time is dumb in real life because its a hard target, for that reason alone. But the brain and the spinal cord are the ONLY places that a bullet can hit that is a certain instant incapacitation. Your bizarre concept that head shots do 'little damage' is so divorced from reality that its hard to even put it into words how fucking dumb it is. The idea that failing to hit the brain while still hitting the dead does 'no damage' is a fucking lie, I can't even call it stupid. Its just fucking wrong. Now the idea that think a fucking shot in the lungs does MORE damage? You fucking have TWO LUNGS. You can LIVE WITH ONE LUNG, and you certainly can take hours to bleed out from a lung wound even with no treatment at all. You do not literally LOOSE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN MASS from a shot going through a lung. You do from a bullet going through your fucking head. Maybe you should ask this guy how ineffective a headshot is.

Absurdly Graphic Image

You don't know more then average. I'm not too sure you even understand the basics of human anatomy, let alone what projectiles moving at supersonic speed will do too it. This has to be one of the dumbest posts I have ever seen on SDN.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

(Edit: Sea Skimmer and Loomer posted just before me )

Man, are you analyzing people or unstoppable unfeeling killing machines that will keep fighting until their motor functions are completely severed?

Most people just need to feel the shot to be effectively stopped (hence the notion of stopping power), either by falling unconscious, reeling in pain, being stunned, or simply cowering in fear. And, as Shroomy points out, the head is quite susceptible to trauma of any kind, so even if it is not an optimal way to definitely kill a human, it is a very effective way to disable it, since even grazing shots can cause a lot of side effects.

But, then again, I haven't had no formal training whatsoeverbeen reading about headshots since I was 12, so what do I know?

When a person is bleeding to death, one of the complications is that as the body diverts blood flow to the crucial bits like the heart and brain, the kidneys get decreased blood circulation and die. Since the body can't excrete its waste anymore, since the kidneys don't make piss anymore, the wastes build up in the blood and the person dies of renal failure.

Shots to the lung can be fixed by, well, chest tubes to drain fluid/blood/air seeping into the chest cavity?

If a person is shot in the gut, we can cut his abdomen open, find the portion of his intestines that's been damaged, and cut that portion of. We remove the damaged part. With the damaged section removed, we reconnect he undamaged sections together. Hopefully that can stop the bleeding and the person won't die.

Damage to the head might require a neurosurgeon. Brain surgery can last for, like, the entire day. I came in for the afternoon shift once, and I took the spot of my classmate who was nursing at the surgery since the morning.


EDIT:

Avianmosquito really understates the importance of the brains. For all his reading on terminal ballistics, he should also do some research on human anatomies.

EDIT 2:

Even if the bullet misses "important" parts of the brain, the bleeding inside the skull will increase intracranial pressure, compress the "important" parts, and will still fuck a person up. Hell, the bleeding and the blood not getting into the "important" part will also fuck a person up. Hell, the mere impact of a bullet on the brain tissue will cause trauma that will fuck a person up.

Also, the "important" part of the brain is, guess what, the entire brain.

EDIT 3:

I think the OP belongs to some site liek, ugh, TVTropes. I guess we can, lol, subvert the trope of the lethality of brain damage by understating the lethality of brain damage. Lol, is this trope a trope in real life? A deconstructed trope? An inverted trope? An invaginated trope? Let's list all the animes that this trope applies to!

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

Saying you've "casually" researching something since you were . . . twelve, and you're twenty-five now; is almost like saying you pulled it out of your ass. Given how hilariously bad your ideas in biology, weapons design and just about any other field you've touched have been, I hold little hope for this.


And how do you know this system works? For that matter, please describe your research methodology and provide a list of sources you've used in your research.


Most people are aware that life is not like video games. Or movies, but hey, it's your hobby-horse.


I don't know. Being hit anywhere in the head isn't going to do much for you. I mean, even someone as thick-headed as you will, in the very least, go into shock and require reconstructive surgery if you were shot in the face.


The stupidity of this statement boggles the mind. Please don't trot out the "we only use 10% of our brains" statement, in case that was going to be your comeback, as that has been debunked repeatedly by scientific advances.


Some pistol rounds being maybe the .22 CB at across-the-room distances. Even the .22 LR and .25 ACP can and will penetrate the human skull.


Fixed that for you. Clearly, all the well-documented medical records of people killed execution-style with a bullet to the head that have been collected over the years are all bunk.


You're grossly over-complicating the reason why center-of-mass shots are preferred over headshots. The reason one is trained to seek center-of-mass shots is because the center of mass is much easier to hit. If you shoot someone in the head, through the brain, they will die, and will do so quickly.

Also, casual research on terminal velocity ballistics isn't really impressive. Since the topic at hand has actually nothing (or little) to do about terminal ballistics. It has more to do with human anatomy and physiology, which avianmosquito clearly hasn't researched at all.

What do angles of acceleration or ballistic arcs and crap have to do with topics such as tissue damage, head trauma, and shit anyway?

I think avianmosquito is being biased. He is basing it on his own brains, which is a small target, is mostly redundancy and wasted space.

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

God you know I have to change what I said above, this simply is the dumbest all around post I have ever seen on SDN period. Nothing can compete with it that I can think of. I mean lots of shit is just stupid, but this is so profoundly stupid and wrong and avianmosquito is so damn serious about it and so confident that the whole professional world is on his side... its just amazing. The idea that someone would argue that the head is less vulnerable to damage then other parts of the body is just so staggering in its obvious nonsense that I never would have thought someone would do it.

I love all the more how he even contradicts himself so openly and clearly, by pointing out blood vessels as being better targets then the brain, while the brain in fact consumes 25% of all blood flow in the body in the first place and is fed by arteries you cannot put a tourniquet on without causing death. I cant even go further, this is making my own brain and eyes bleed. Luck that shit doesn't matter because its in unnecessary bullet proof skull!

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Four All points:


While you are right that the head is a small target, the brain is pretty large relative to both other organs and the head.
Which doesn't make it a good target, but if you hit the head you can expect to hit the brain, too.


Actually - no.
The whole brain is used - there are no useless parts. Redundancy is created by other parts slowly (months or years) taking over the destroyed functions, not by having redundant parts. And even that won't work if you are dead!


Well - yes, but if you hit the skull with reasonable force, you have a good chance of creating a rupture inside the brain.
And bleeding inside your brain tends to be bad (this also ties into point two).


Well - again, bleeding.
Bleeding inside your brain is pretty damn deadly, since the pressure tends to destroy large parts of your brain. You will also be unconscious within minutes at most.
That assumes that you do not hit something vital, which will just kill you instantly.


By pure size, the brain is not actually a bad target. It's just that you have a much higher chance of hitting something vital by aiming for the torso, which is a much bigger target.


This holds true for a hit in nearly every other organ.
I agree that a headshot can be much nastier - but killing people in general is quite inhumane.



This is obviously true - he has no idea how important brains are.

Another point:

Hey, those are not credentials.
My little sister literary has MORE EDUCATION than you - and she is 16!
And your "casual research" is so bad that i could obliterate it with less than 15 minutes of googling and Wiki-bloody-Pedia!#
Honestly - get some damn perspective! Passing highschool is nothing. Everyone does that. Going to college is no credential - much less planning to do so! Passing college (or at least staying there for several years) is one.


Actually, i think it was never scientifically stated.
It's just that we use about 10% of our brain at specific times (downtimes, most likely) and more when we need more.
Just like you will only use on room of your house at once - but you still use the whole thing from time to time, even the broom closet.

Edit: Damn that new, cheap keyboard. It took me waay to long to type this

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SoS:NBA GALE Force 上智大学に少し奴隷
"Destiny and fate are for those too weak to forge their own futures. Where we are 'supposed' to be is irrelevent." - Sir Nitram
"The world owes you nothing but painful lessons" - CaptainChewbacca
"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." - Wilhelm Stekel
"In 1969 it was easier to send a man to the Moon than to have the public accept a homosexual" - Broomstick

When I saw brain surgeries, a surgeon's delicate and precise sawing of the woman's head open and cutting out of her brain tumor still rendered her unable to move, requiring a tube in her head to drain the blood drainage, and unable to talk or communicate at all and in a pretty unhappy-looking state post-operatively.

And, man, a bullet entering the head and going out the other side, or just staying in the head and bouncing around inside the skull, is somehow going to be as trivial and as non-threatening as that? As delicate as the surgeon's cranium bone-saw? Man.

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

It bears repeating that during the World Wars, an era when body armor for the average infantryman had gone completely out of style because bullet-proof plate steel was too heavy to cover the whole body with, they rediscovered the idea of armor for infantry. But not very much- they couldn't burden men wiht very much weight. Indeed, the only piece of armor soldiers normally wore was a helmet covering the brain, and basically nothing else.

That helmet wasn't there just to keep their hair from getting mussed. Of all the places on the body they could possibly have armored, they chose to put a few pounds of steel over the head. Not the chest. Not the abdomen, even though abdominal wounds that punctured the intestines were near-certain death in World War One, when modern infantry helmets were invented.

No, they put the armor on the head. I wonder why?

Ooh. Lovely. Does it have math? Have you checked it against people with real knowledge of human anatomy or (gasp!) combat experience?

This may not be a coincidence.

Define "use". The tiny pituitary gland in our brain releases all sorts of hormones and without it the thyroid gland in your neck wouldn't secrete the necessary hormones to promote your normal human development and metabolisms, so you'd end up as some Down's syndrome mongoloid. That tiny pituitary gland also secretes growth hormones, and dysfunctions can cause you to either become a circus freak giant or a circus freak midget. The pituitary gland also secretes hormones needed for sexual development, so without it you can't even use your genitals.

I'm a crappy student nurse, so I can't list all the anatomical/physiological functions of the brain. But just because parts of the brain aren't used for "thinking", does not mean that they're useless. Far from it. Because a shitload of the brain meat is used for all sorts of involuntary anatomical processes, basically every damn function of your body is regulated there. Smelling. Seeing. Breathing. Heart beating. Pissing. Dreaming. Remembering. Moving. Thermoregulating. Etcetera.

So the whole "using 10% of the brain" shit is total crap.

EDIT:

Hrm, yeah. Simon.

A blow to the chest from, say, a baseball bat would be very painful. Bruise you. Break some ribs maybe. Knock the wind out of you. Maybe immobilize you due to the pain.

But do that blow to the head? The person is knocked out, and the person may die. Or, at least, a blow to the head will be far more disorientating and knock-outing than a blow to the body. Why? Because the head is more vulnerable. Because the head also has a whole lot of vital functions in the brain that can be impaired by injury that other body parts might endure, and impairment of brain stuff will translate to fucking up body stuff easily.

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

It might be correct to say we only use about 10% of the brains theoretical mathematical computational capacity, but all of the brain is active and alive. That's much different from only using 10% of the brain mass. Not that it will matter either way once a bullet passes through and spills 100% of the brain onto the pavement.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

Don't ask me, all my medical knowledge stems from helping a friend of mine study medicine.
The above is, paraphrased, how she explained that meme.
But if i have to guess, it's simply that some areas of the brain are not all that active if you are not using their particular funtion right now (like your speech center - you won't need it if you are not talking/writing). That doesn't mean it's dead or totally inactive, just not used right now.

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SoS:NBA GALE Force 上智大学に少し奴隷
"Destiny and fate are for those too weak to forge their own futures. Where we are 'supposed' to be is irrelevent." - Sir Nitram
"The world owes you nothing but painful lessons" - CaptainChewbacca
"The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of a mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one." - Wilhelm Stekel
"In 1969 it was easier to send a man to the Moon than to have the public accept a homosexual" - Broomstick

Turns out if my lungs get shot, I can just get a lobectomy or a pneumectomy or a lung transplant. Likewise with my heart. Livers can regenerate themselves and kidneys can be bought and sold off the market. Intestines? Stomachs? They can be cut off, resected, sectioned, and reattached in all sorts of interesting plumbing techniques that require mere dietary alterations or new holes in the belly for shit to come out of.

But that's not really possible with the brains.

I don't get what you mean by the brain's theoretical mathematical computational capacity. Where does the 10% come from? What theoretical computational capacity are we talking about anyway?

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shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!

This thread is shit, and doesn't belong here.

Mov'd.

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Superior Moderator - BotM - HAB [Drill Instructor]-Writer- Stardestroyer.net's resident Star-God.
"We believe in the systematic understanding of the physical world through observation and experimentation, argument and debate and most of all freedom of will." ~ Stargate: The Ark of Truth

No.

The "10%" is literally something somebody just made up.

I don't study the mammalian brain in my research but I TA a course that covers it (the human brain in point of fact). All of it is doing something, right now. Except for avianmosquito's, clearly.

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"I spit on metaphysics, sir."

"I pity the woman you marry." -Liberty

This is the guy they want to use to win over "young people?" Are they completely daft? I'd rather vote for a pile of shit than a Jesus freak social regressive.
Here's hoping that his political career goes down in flames and, hopefully, a hilarious gay sex scandal. -Tanasinn



My blog, please check out and comment! http://decepticylon.blogspot.com

The functions of the brain can be measured the same way we measure computers in terms operations performed per second and storage capacity in bytes. While our detailed knowledge of this is still limited, we know the brain is one fucking badass computer, and it has some really massive capacity to perform operations. We don't think of ourselves that way normally though, because our brains don't have 'open' software the way a computer does that allows it to change the way all of it works on the fly.

Instead the brain gets programed to work a specific way by our physical development and education, which guide the formation of pathways between braincells. So we can never fully exploit the brains power, because you are never going to have totally optimal numbers and routes of pathways for any given task, and the input and output functions are limited by our capacity for reading/writing/seeing stuff ect....

Some parts of the brain are more generalized in capacity, but others are fairly specialized. like the frontal lobs are heavily involved in social skills and critical thinking, but you can loose some mass in that area of the brain and still live. Meanwhile damage in the brainstem, which is specialized in making the heart and lungs work is easily fatal. The shape of damage also matters a great deal. Deep puncture wounds are sometimes less dangerous then wide shallow ones, because it disrupts pathways over a smaller area, and its easier for the brain to work around the disruption. That's why you might hear about people surviving screwdrivers being driven through the brain, while someone smashed in the head with a baseball bat is likely to die.

Now with bullets, the bullet path might be deep and narrow... but the bullet is moving so fast it creates a shockwave which makes the actual damage area much wider. It also greatly increases the damage done by skull fragments being driven into the wound. In cases like that picture I posted, the shockwave is intense enough to just crack the whole skull apart. At that point it doesn't matter that the braincells were all already turned into pudding.

Humans using 10% brain capacity isn't accurate any way you put it (no one really knows the hard numbers) I was just using the number since it was quick and easy to make the point. But certainly the level of use is well below what it optimally could be, its just the optimal is not going to happen. How you measure it in real numbers would depend on the task at hand, since different brains do different things better or worse. Savant Syndrome is particularly interesting because it shows what is possible when the brain does grow in a way which is near optimal for just one thing, like some exceptional musical skill. Downside is the people tend to have almost no other skills to the point that they may not even be able to feed themselves.

But still in the end, you need all that brain mass. Even if every cell is not being used to its optimal end, the pathways count, and widespread disruption to the pathways will be catastrophic. Its like breaking the motherboard on a computer, while the CPU, RAM and hard drive still work. Kids survive and recover from brain damage much more easily then adults in large part because the pathways are still forming enmass, and can more easily work around damage.

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"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956

I think 13 was the youngest I have personally known any girl to get pregnant. So...
25 - 13 = 12 = your age at your oldest daughter's conception


Your financial problem might be 3 kids. I don't believe your credentials.

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• Only the dead have seen the end of war.
• "The only really bright side to come out of all this has to be Dino-rides in Hell." ~ Ilya Muromets

Wasn't that "we don't use 100% of our brain" myth based on the fact tat not all of our brain is operating at the same time? Since you don't need all of the, shall we say, subsystems all at once. For example, if your taste buds are in an idle state, the part of the brain that handles them won't light up on a brain scan.

As for computational capacity, I think (layman here) that it is more related to tiredness and chemical unbalance (being drunk or drugged, for example) than actual lack of optimization (aside from the obvious lack of optimization present on an evolved system that hasn't been properly rebuilt in millions of years).


*reads Jeremy's post* Woah

I was going to amend this to my post but Oskuro killed my edit.

On subject, I know several people who refuse to shoot an animal when hunting unless they have a head shot.
Edgar Rabbets, a soldier in a Territorial battalion, the 5th Northants as a British sniper in World War 2 who generally went for the head:

Found on page 87 of Sniper by Adrian Gilbert c. 1994.

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• Only the dead have seen the end of war.
• "The only really bright side to come out of all this has to be Dino-rides in Hell." ~ Ilya Muromets

How much do you know about actual combat performance of different rounds against different parts of the body?

Now that that's out of the way, let's move on to the topic at hand.



No damage at all? Really. So, if I shoot you in the front of the jaw with my .223 and it shatters your teeth and breaks your jaw bone and fucks up your sinus cavity...that to you is "no damage at all"? Though you're right I did miss the brain.



What are your credentials again on nerology? Anyway, bullets do not simply damage the tissue that the bullet travels through. It damages the surrounding tissue. Rifle rounds can inflict massive surrounding tissue damage. I'm starting to question your experience.

From my source...



They tend to? Interesting. What information do you have to support this and what is your definition of "tend to"? They can if it is a bad angle, but you won't be enjoying life either.



Again what are your medical qualifications and how many studies of actual shooting victims have you participated in or reviewed?



From what I understand the brain also bleeds heavily. Also, the heart is not an instant kill. There have been several documented cases of people fighting after being shot in the heart for roughly 1-2 mins.



Headshots are usually taken if the standard center mass shots are ineffective. (Body armor, hostage blocking shot, etc). However, if you hit within the soft tissue between the eyes and nose it is usually immediately disabling or fatal.

Source



LMAO. If you can't hit the chest then you probably won't be hitting them in the head. Anyway, the other option is that you need to immediately stop the threat and other factors exist that make center mass shooting ineffective or too risky.



I guess all Utah law enforcement is behind the times then...anyway what's your source?

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Milites Astrum Exterminans