HELMET DESIGN INTERVIEW

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/20...r-lowell-wood/

On Saturday, October 24, 2015 at 4:40:47 PM UTC-7, wrote:
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/20...r-lowell-wood/

For an idea man he sure has a lot of it incorrect. Circular acceleration is more likely to break your neck. This is often administered by a relatively minor fall and with the stupid oblong aero shape of a road helmet. Giro presently thinks that they are helping this problem somewhat with a liner that allows the helmet to spin on your head freely so that the oblong shape of the helmet doesn't injure you.

My inspection of this makes me think that it won't be very effective and the increase in cost is shocking. But at least it's a step in the right direction. Though the need would be greatly reduced with round helmets with exteriors that do not "grab" the ground on a landing.

The real cause of concussion is an acceleration of the brain which tears the brain loose from its attachment points in the skull allowing it to bounce back and forth. This doesn't destroy the nerves so much as cellular sections of the brain. This CANNOT HEAL. Or more appropriately, it doesn't heal into NORMAL brain but scar tissue that does not act like brain tissue. The brain can, however, heal its connections to the inside of the skull.

It turns out that most of your brain doesn't have much use and so injuries in these areas aren't of particular importance except for the various hormones released in such injuries to generate the healing process. This hormone release is what causes the temporary effects of concussion: dizziness, nausea and eyesight problems.

The reason that repeated strikes to the skull cause irreparable damage is because the brain is now broken loose from the inside of the skull and can again bounce around inside the skull damaging more brain tissue plus the connections to the spinal cord and the rest of your body.

Concussions of this immense damage are seen among soldiers from nearby explosions that didn't even move the head but the shock wave move into the more aqueous inner structure that is more sensitive to these shock waves and can cause the same sort of destruction without a clear brain blow. This is why modern military helmets try to dampen shock waves and only secondarily head blows or shrapnel as the original tin-can did.

(In my case I can no longer feel the front halves of either foot. And when walking you normally use your toes to detect slight differences in your upright stance - your balance - so I cannot pass a drunk test stone cold sober..

Luckily there is another balance mechanism - your hips - You can watch women with high heels walking and note that they don't fall down despite the loss of feeling in their feet from pointed toe high heels. This is caused by the swaying of the hips.

So I do not have any problems riding a bike since the main point of balance is the hips.)

The problem is this - a helmet that could contain sufficient shock absorbing material that could effectively reduce the rate of deceleration from impact of a real fall would be comically large and would almost certainly interfere with your vision and hearing as well as being too much of a load on your neck muscles and spine.

And without this reduced deceleration no helmet can be of any significant use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HANS_device