Internal decapitation, atlanto-occipital dislocation, or orthopedic decapitation describes the rare medical condition in which the skull separates from the spinal column during severe head injury. This is generally fatal, since it generally involves nerve damage or severing the spinal cord.
The practice of hanging relies on internal decapitation, as it creates a situation where subjects' necks are broken under their own weight. A botched hanging can result in an external decapitation or, if the neck does not break, a situation in which the subject strangles to death.
Read more about Internal Decapitation: People Who Have Survived Internal Decapitation
Famous quotes containing the word internal:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)