No, you can't crush a man's skull with your bare hands (2024)

As I recovered, I began to wonder if this could actually happen, and I spent part of Monday emailing back and forth with two researchers who have studied the strength of the human head.

Consensus: No way. No chance. Not even for The Mountain, where George R.R. Martin, author of the novels that became the hit series, describes the followingalmost eight feet tall and weighs about 420 poundsof fixed muscles.

Tobias Matteiwho haslooked at how well children's bicycle helmets protect their heads, was eventually included in an email to me. “It would be impossible for even the strongest human to fracture the skull by compressive forces applied in any way (either with their hands bilaterally or by stepping on them) in any part of the skull,” he wrote.

Cynthia Bir,a biomedical engineer at the University of Southern California, said in an email that her "convulsive response is that there is no way to 'explode' the head by applying pressure from the eyes." You should create pressure in the skull. Even if you could generate pressure by squeezing the outside of the head, once the skull is fractured at the opening where the optic nerves enter, this pressure would be greatly reduced."

OK and.

Now let's look at the details.

Mattei, who helpfully noted that "fresh cadaver skulls are much more resistant to crushing/fracture than formaldehyde-preserved or dehydrated skulls," said that the thinnest part of the skull bone is about two inches above and in front of the tips of your ears. . Like where your temples are.

I asked Mattei, a neurosurgeon at InvisionHealth's Brain & Spine Center in Buffalo, about the eye hole strategy. “Extreme pressure on the eyes would lead to rupture of the bulbs and leakage of their contents,” he replied. "But it probably wouldn't be exciting for TV fans, as it would just result in a clear fluid leaking between the warrior's fingers. There would probably be a small break in the lower orbital wall – the thinnest part of the orbital wall (this is a common fracture called a "blowout fracture". No explosion would be seen. The victim's eyes would be pushed back a few inches. That was it."

For the record, I asked Mattei about the strength of the human skull compared to other materials we know – wood, steel, etc. The standard for this kind of elasticity in solid materials is called"Young Module"and it is measured in GigaPascals. (But you already knew that.) It turns out that the human skull can withstand a pressure of 6.5 GPa, while oak can withstand 11, concrete 30, aluminum 69, and steel 200. At the top of the graph is the graph that Mattei described as"a monolayer lattice form of carbon,"at 1,000 GPa.

Finally, I just had to know if any amount of pressure could cause a man's brains to blow the top of his head off. (Because that's just how I'm wired, okay?) Once again, Mattei showed why he never wants to work in Hollywood:

"I would say it would be almost impossible... to 'inflate' the top of the head from the inside (even if you hooked up a fire water pump to it) because both the base of the skull and the plate... are formed part of the temporal bone... would blow out (sideways) first.'