Can your brain handle the beat?

If you come home from concerts with disheveled hair, a leather jacket, and neck pain, chances are you are a headbanging metalhead. Whether you listen to Led Zeppelin or obscure Turkish death metal, headbanging is a form of musical appreciation common for artists and fans. Can rocking too hard cause brain injury?

Crowds are connected through this wild and unruly motion that aims to match the intensity and fast tempo of the metal and rock genres. Despite what the name suggests, headbanging does not involve direct collision to the head and is a full-body motion: moving your body side to side, up and down, or all around. While traumatic brain injuries impact 69 million people a year, headbanging at concerts is not usually what comes to mind as a culprit. 

A review published this year sought to assess concert-goers’ risk. Researchers evaluated 13 cases of moderate-to-severe brain injury in which doctors declared music-associated headbanging as the main cause. None of these cases involved direct collisions to the head. Victims connected by a shared calling from the beat and subsequent trauma included a 15-year-old drummer in a rock band, a 50-year-old Motörhead concert-goer, and a woman who had been headbanging for hours at a religious dancing ritual. 

“While traumatic brain injuries impact 69 million people a year, headbanging at concerts is not usually what comes to mind as a culprit.”

The vigorous back-and-forth motion of headbanging may have been responsible for the tearing of bridging veins in the brain. As a result, hemorrhaging followed in more than half of the cases. In two cases, the repetitive force led to basilar artery thrombosis, or blood clotting. Headbanging also worsened previous conditions. An 11-year-old boy’s colloid cyst ruptured after an intense disco party. While some were able to recover in weeks or even days, others were not as lucky. The study focused on extreme cases but it warns that unrecognized mild traumatic brain injuries might be much more frequent and go unreported. Mild brain injury has the potential to be dangerous when compounded with frequent headbanging. 

Another group of researchers used biomechanical theorization to model the effects of the range of motion in the cervical spine, between the head and neck, and song tempo (beats per minute). Researchers estimated the probability of head injury from these variables using the existing Head Injury Criterion (HIC) in the field. Athletes and car crash victims frequently use HIC to calculate head injury risk based on the acceleration and duration of their collisions. The study recognized the limitations of their model due to the debated relevancy of these criteria for headbanging. Unlike a single acceleration peak caused by a collision, headbanging involves regular sinusoidal peaks without a direct impact. Much remains unknown about these effects.

The study found that as range of motion over 45 degrees and song tempo increased, the theoretical chances of injury also did. The total range of motion of the cervical spine between your neck and head is about 160 degrees up and down. Using their model, the researchers theorized that headbanging 146 beats/per minute at more than 75 degrees of cervical motion could cause a mild Traumatic Brain Injury. Popular songs at tempos as fast as 180 beats/minute like “Kickstart My Heart” by Mötley Crüe in conjunction with a 120 degrees range of motion could have severe consequences that could be avoided by keeping head and neck motion below 45 degrees. This means more of a bobbing motion than banging unless you intend to dance to the slower but still punchy tempos of Celine Dione or Adele. Of course, this model is based on the imperfect HIC model and also calls into question the likelihood of fans’ heads hitting these beats at those angles. However, no true metalhead is yet to be overcome by a zealous crowd of flying hair at these angles.

There is still so much uncertainty on the topic of headbanging, especially in an environment where there is frequent illicit substance use and moshing. One thing is clear, however, traumatic brain injury cases directly linked to music-associated headbanging appear to be rare in medical literature compared to the millions of headbanging fans around the world. 

Further research is needed to learn more about the potential for brain trauma from intense, repetitive motion instead of direct impact to the head. Headbangers deserve to know the answer to the question, “can you rock too hard?” once and for all. Knowing the limits of our brains could help lead to more precautionary dancing forms. Who knows what could be the next staple of rock? Jazz hands are waiting for their comeback.