Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Another one:
I think CTE is kind of a fake or exaggerated concept. It might have some relevance to boxers or NFL players, and even that seems sketchy to me. But it's vastly exaggerated how much getting hit in the head in casual ways by ordinary people is going to hurt you long term. It just doesn't add up when you consider how common getting punched in the head in a fight, or falling off something, or playing some form of tackle football, or fighting in a war, or getting thrown by a horse was throughout history. While everyone has always understood that a sufficiently hard kick to the head by a donkey will make a man retarded, there's no enduring folk wisdom of head shots making men change over time.
I tend to think it's an easy medicalized explanation for how men who are selected for their utility at violence are increasingly out of step with the world.
That's funny. My low-key conspiracy on CTE (and brain damage more broadly) is that it's actually far more common than anybody really wants to admit.
Around me, nearly everyone has stories about the normal guy who got a little "funny" over time. A lot of them are veterans or guys who work jobs that officially require hard hats but they don't wear them. I can't rule out things like PTSD or late onset schizophrenia. However, when the arty guy who got out of the army and immediately started working as a framer eventually loses the ability to remember what he had for breakfast or pronounce "penance", I can't help but think something somatic is involved.
Not a conspiracy theory (well, sort of).
TBI is shockingly common (especially in the military) and not shockingly...it is very bad for you.
TBIs aren't CTE, but damage to personality, substrate, and function from injuries is a known issue in the military and elsewhere.
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When I consider it, I think that you wouldn't fight that often, and when you did, it wouldn't emphasize knockout blows; that while you would fall often you would naturally mind your head; that casualties of fights in wars were fewer than casualties on the march. In fact I suspect that there was no folk wisdom of head shots making men change over time because there was no career where you would intentionally put yourself in the way of many blows to the head and survive that for long enough.
(Anecdotally, Lermontov's The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov specifically describes a formalized fistfight at the city fair. The titular merchant, his wife disgraced by the tsar's official, deliberately strikes him in the head and kills him. It can be assumed that head shots were forbidden or at least heavily discouraged - he is tried for manslaughter, as opposed to the outcome being judged an unfortunate but natural outcome of the fight).
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