an answer I require
Mar. 27th, 2012 03:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIn this entry I asked whether the chirping birdies that fly around cartoon characters' heads when they bump their noggins reflected something real or are just a convention of cartoon storytelling.
The answers I got ran the gamut, from yes, "the flash of tiny lights, the dizziness, the eeee! of tinnitus," to so emphatically nothing of the kind that they can't imagine that the convention reflects anything real at all.
That confirms what I've always suspected, that there's a physiological variation among humans here. Because my own response is close to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vgqn in the middle: I "see stars" - points of light that drift around and vanish, caused by pressure on the optic nerve - but there's no aural effect. So I wondered where the chirping birds come from, while occasionally hearing remarks in response to the cartoons suggesting that the speaker thought the whole thing imaginary.
This was one of those questions that's drifted in the back of my mind for many years, possibly since childhood. What brought it to mind when I was sitting at the computer ready to write an LJ post was an entry at the Comics Curmudgeon mentioning how odd it is for a comic strip character to talk about her shoes when "we almost never get to see her below the solar plexus," and I was wondering, what exactly is the solar plexus anyway? And when I looked it up, I found references to the phenomenon of "getting the wind knocked out of you," which I'd always thought was just a phrase for the oof of being hit in the stomach but apparently is more than that. And that made me think of my old question of "seeing stars" and the chirping birds.
The answers I got ran the gamut, from yes, "the flash of tiny lights, the dizziness, the eeee! of tinnitus," to so emphatically nothing of the kind that they can't imagine that the convention reflects anything real at all.
That confirms what I've always suspected, that there's a physiological variation among humans here. Because my own response is close to
vgqn in the middle: I "see stars" - points of light that drift around and vanish, caused by pressure on the optic nerve - but there's no aural effect. So I wondered where the chirping birds come from, while occasionally hearing remarks in response to the cartoons suggesting that the speaker thought the whole thing imaginary.This was one of those questions that's drifted in the back of my mind for many years, possibly since childhood. What brought it to mind when I was sitting at the computer ready to write an LJ post was an entry at the Comics Curmudgeon mentioning how odd it is for a comic strip character to talk about her shoes when "we almost never get to see her below the solar plexus," and I was wondering, what exactly is the solar plexus anyway? And when I looked it up, I found references to the phenomenon of "getting the wind knocked out of you," which I'd always thought was just a phrase for the oof of being hit in the stomach but apparently is more than that. And that made me think of my old question of "seeing stars" and the chirping birds.
