Vsauce, I’m Jake and our vertebral column - our backbone, our spine - is incredibly
important.
It’s what protects the spinal cord, that pack of nervous tissue that connects to the
brain to create the central nervous system.
It’s what keeps us from being spineless, so we can stand up for ourselves, hold our
heads up and not cower...or, as things like Mortal Kombat and Predator have taught me,
the spine is the thing you rip out of someone in an incredibly easy and clean way...which
got me thinking...Could You Rip Out a Person’s Spine?
Let me start off by saying that you could not tear someone’s spine out like they do
in Mortal Kombat.
In the game the severe spine removal seems to be done one handed by grabbing the victim
by the neck and pulling up.
This would just lift the person off the ground by their head and would be kind of awkward.
No not me!
The stunt guys are over there.
Over there!
I’m not sure why we needed that many closeups...that was kind of awkward...So let’s figure out
how we could pull one’s spine out of their body in a single go.
You’d have to use one hand to hold the person down while using your other hand, your murder
hand, MURDER HAND!!, to apply an enormous amount of upward force to the neck.
Now, IF you applied between 5,000 and 15,000 newtons of force...but this is just a demonstration...
the head would just pop off.
Now if we were to detach the head without exceeding 5000 newtons of force, then we could
possibly pull out some of the spine, but it would be VERY messy…The spine isn’t just
some clean, unconnected pieces of bone.
Our vertebrae are connected to a lot of muscles inside the body, and some large sections like
the rib cage and pelvis.
Let’s go through these parts individually.
The lamina, the rear part of the spine, is connected to the back muscles via tendons.
It would take around 1 million newtons of force, the force equivalent of ten high speed
car crashes, to break them all simultaneously.
Instead, what would happen is the muscles of the back would stretch and come out of
the body with the spine.
During this process your spine is still attached to your ribs and pelvis.
..so what would happen to those?
The spine detaches from the pelvis immediately and starts to come out, but the victim's torso
is horribly mutilated in the process.
The ribs snap off at the spine and their connecting muscles also detach.
To actually get a clean break from the spine and all that is attached to it and the body,
you’d have to pull pretty far because muscles will extend quite a bit before breaking.
It’d be like a muscle and tendon rainbow.
Pretty gruesome but let’s imagine an ideal spine ripping scenario where the spine is
firmly attached to the skull AND disconnected from all those tendons and ligaments....what
would that look like if we ripped it out?
Well, initially it would look similar to what we’d imagine from Mortal Kombat or Predator
but then it would get a whole lot worse.
You might have trouble even imagining it...which is why we built a machine to show us everything!
So even with the spine reinforced to the head, the ligaments, and tendons and ribcage disconnected...we
were still only able to get 8 pieces of vertebrae out which is still really impressive.
And as we can say incredibly deadly.
But if anything it shows us that to survive this you don't need a
spine
to be brave.
And, as always, thanks for watching.