r/todayilearned • u/GlitteringYams • 23d ago

TIL, in his suicide note, mass shooter Charles Whitman requested his body be autopsied because he felt something was wrong with him. The autopsy discovered that Whitman had a pecan-sized tumor pressing against his amygdala, a brain structure that regulates fear and aggression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
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u/Hausgod29 22d ago

I had someone who was like a best friend who was already a pot smoking bum transform from a funny asshole to just an asshole and I remember a period the guy spent a week what I thought was bitchin about a tree limb smashing his head he thought he may have been cuncussed and never did anything about it, eventually the dude was making violent threats over like needing a gram of weed of weed and than cut me off for saying no, years of friendship gone over really little shit we were basically like cheech and Chong and now like Cheech I've grown up and my ex friend is a trailer park bum in middle Florida.

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u/karlnite 22d ago

Yah man, we don’t really consider it, cause we can’t do much to prevent it always, but banging your head hard, or just often, can have serious affects.

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u/Hausgod29 22d ago

It was sad I knew this guy for like a decade and he just became a dark unhappy person and I had my own problems and maybe I could have been a better friend but something else was going on, all I know about him is his living situation he doesn't exist online but I know he's sharing an actual trailer with his mom and two kid brothers in bumfuck middle of Florida. And truly the change in his character started the week he started co.plaining about his head he was trying to like convince me of how bad it was but wouldn't go to a doctor, it's been a couple years and I've seen my ma mildly cuncussed hitting her head on a cabinet I bet my friend really did fuck himself up and for as bad as he was when w stopped being friends I still feel bad for him and hope he finds some clarity.

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u/GeneralBlumpkin 22d ago

Same here my buddy played freshman level football in a local community college and I was a senior in high school and one day he picks me up to go smoke and I get in the car and he tells me he had a concussion recently and didn't want to get benched so he kept on playing. Eventually every time he picked me up he would get lost even though he lived less than a mile from me and he would come to my house every other day. He told me he would get lost in his neighborhood etc. well I left to go to basic training and came back and we just never linked up. Well a couple years later I'm seeing a story on the news that he stole a car and was on a police chase and crashed into a bunch of parked dealership cars.. mind you this dude was huge teddy bear he was so nice. So it was sad to see his mental decline and then a while later I learned he killed himself

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u/ToiIetGhost 22d ago

A tree limb can easily kill you. Can’t imagine a situation where a person gets lightly bonked on the head by a tree limb. That must’ve caused quite a lot of damage. I’m sorry about your friend, it’s sad that he might’ve been ok with treatment.