a question of experience and depiction

[calimac]

I don't want to go into what brought this question to mind - it was a random mental association, not anything that's physically happened to me lately - or prejudice responses by revealing my own answer first, but I have a question to which I'd like as many responses as possible:

You might be familiar with how, in (old-time, mostly, I guess) comics and cartoons, if a character gets hit on the head, or falls over heavily, that person then sits or stands dazed for a moment while tiny birds suddenly appear and fly chirping around the head. Then they vanish.

My question is, do you consider those chirping birds to be just some peculiar convention of cartoon storytelling, or do they reflect something that actually happens to your perception when you hit your head?

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A slight temporary tinnitus, perhaps - nothing as pleasant as birdsong. But my experience of being hit on the head is, thankfully, limited.

[(Anonymous)]

I've wondered once or twice about where the cartoon notion came from, but never thought that head trauma actually conjured visions of birds.

-MTD/neb

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Having been knocked into walls or against the furniture or onto the floor by my dad when young, I knew immediately what the birds meant: the flash of tiny lights, the dizziness, the eeee! of tinnitus.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Er, not that i knew the term. But I do remember asking my mom early on what the noise was, and demonstrating it, to be told that nobody else heard it, and I was imagining things. It troubled me vaguely for years as it came and went, and no doctor could explain it, until I finally read about what it was. (And now I have it all the time, probably due to those early head traunas, wheee!)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

It's a long, long time since I hit my head. But I think I'd say that to me they're somewhere between an artistic convention and a metaphor: I'm having intense sensations (pain, primarily) and I'm not tracking. It's about as realistic as the light bulb coming on for an idea.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

The stars make more sense to me than the birds. I don't recall any aural sensations, just the twinkling lights.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

At first blush I believe the birds are just a storytelling convention, but having seen cabbage roses and film of the karst sugarloaf hills of southern China, I'm also prepared to believe that the pictorial representations have their origins in some actual experience that I, personally, have not yet had.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

Cartoon storytelling convention.

Whenever I've hit my head or anything, all I do is feel blank and rather woozy. No birds or little fairies or anything else have ever appeared. It might have been more fun if they had.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I can understand the convention: Like birds, the various internal sensory stimulations come and go quickly and are hard to pin down.

I don't really have an aural component to getting hit in the head this side of "ow". I occasionally see phosphenes or other flashes of light, probably due to shutting my eyes heavily more than any concussion-related damage. I personally "see stars" as a better metaphor than "chirping birds", but in a cartoon the internals must be interesting to externals (ie us watching).

Still, your random question prompts me to ask another: do the chirping birds go clockwise or counterclockwise? Or widershins. No, I don't think the answer is important, but now that you have put the visual in my head, I'm wondering what the convention is.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

As others have said -- I've hit my head and seen what looked a lot like stars. Birdies, not so much.

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

Just a convention of cartoon storytelling.