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Cameron Vale ponders and bleeds.

I, I must remind you that the, uh, scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nosebleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, nausea.

Purely mental battles are hard to show with special effects. Sure, you can have the characters sweat, strain, or show veins swelling on their forehead. But when a character with Telepathy or other Psychic Powers pushes them to the limit, or when a character is under mental attack, nothing quite exemplifies the true state of affairs like a thin trickle of blood oozing from their nose.

Exactly how much damage this implies varies from place to place. Exaggerated versions of this include blood from the eyes, or eyes and nose simultaneously. Within nodding distance of Truth In Television, as rupture of the capillaries inside the nasal membranes is a recognized (albeit rare, and usually only seen in people already in poor health) symptom of dangerously high blood pressure, such as that caused by extreme emotional stress, physical strain, or — presumably — intense psychic effort. Sudden nosebleeds under stress have been known to precede strokes.

An early example of the trope was the film adaptation of Stephen King's Firestarter, where it was used in place of the original book's far-less-visible "tiny cerebral hemorrhages". However the first actual depiction can be found in the film Scanners (pictured above) (1981), which came out a few years prior.

Polite Dissent, a comics blog written by a physician, regularly provides examples of Psychic Nosebleed Zen.

Only occasionally related to Blood From The Mouth.

Examples:

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