How Could Explosions cause Brain Injuries without Piercing the Skull?

This article is talking about how people can get brain injuries without actually piercing/damaging their skull. An example used was soldiers. Soldiers can get brain injuries in war without actually getting hit by different pieces of shrapnel. They can get brain injuries from the force of pressure made by the shrapnel or other explosives. If an explosive went off in a close distance from the solider, but it didn’t actually physically hit the soldier, he could still have been hit by the waves of the explosive. The force of pressure could have gone straight through his skull and hit his brain. Scientist Willy Moss and his colleague Michael King proved this at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. They made a three-dimensional simulation of a soldier and had it stand less than 15 feet from an explosive. They used data on blast waves from explosives and properties of the human brain, cerebrospinal fluid, and skull to calculate this experiment. Once the explosive went off Moss stated, “There’s lots of oscillation. The skull is ringing. It’s not pleasant.” He states that the skull is actually flexed and the brain is rippled because the pressure of the blast is so intense. Any change in pressure than our normal atmospheric pressure can do this kind of damage. They then repeated the experiment using helmets that had webbing on the inside. This experiment showed that these helmets actually made more damage to the brain because the helmet trapped the pressure inside and focused the blast. They then tried the experiment with recent helmets with padding on the inside. Even though the pads feel soft, they actually stiffen during the blast causing not only the helmet to flex, but the skull to also. This flexure gets transmitted to your skull. Helmets are still needed though because fragments are still coming after you. This has been proven in the lab and will soon be tested in the field.
I think this article was interesting. When I thought of brain injuries, I thought they were made because of damage done to the skull. It’s interesting to see how waves of an explosive can be so powerful that they actually flex the skull. With all the new technology coming out, we could see how others injuries can come about in the body without the body actually being physically injured. It’s cool.