This thread is your fault, Spooky. From another thread: No reason why we can't have both at once, I'm sure! However, to kick this one off, rather than present something of my own I'm going to steal from an acquaintance of mine in Japan and link to an excellent post he wrote elsewhere on tachinaori hansha. (No, that's not somebody's name -- it's what we refer to as the "righting reflex". ) http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?p=439930#post439930
cool link...in the spirit of the above idea, permit me to share the outcome of an interesting and possibly? relevent meeting at work the other week... i was discusssing the dierction of my research with my supervisor and one of his collegues...an expert in his field. they were each trying to win me over to their different ideas about the most fundamantal (read 'evolved earliest') brain region which is capable of detecting motion from the incoming visual data stream...my supervisor feels it must be the MST region of visual cortex...his collegue that it must be the superior colliculus...i fence sat and offered the view that it could require cooperation between both regions...and then quickly shut up as they glowered at me enough scene setting... the discussion moved on to the role of the limbic system...a very old part of the brain that is thought to regulate and process our emotions... as an aside to the discussion i offered my idea that the role of emotions in the context of neural processing was to provide motivation in the absence of direct sensory stimulus...my supervisors collegue lept on this comment and agreed...saying that he felt that to be the prime reason we evolved to have emotions in the first place. ordinarily, we become motivated to act when we receive sensory data (visual cues can direct our attention to changes in our environment which require us to modify our behaviour...ie...big predator with sharp teeth running in our direction...we turn on our heels and run or throw our spear at him and get the fire going etc) however...if we turn and run...we no longer see the predator...the danger, as far as input sense data is concerned is gone. Without some mechanism to keep us motiovated to keep running...we would stop, and the predator would get a free lunch. So the sight of 'big predator with teeth' must do more than just initiate behaviour...it must initiate both behaviour AND a behaviour motivator...any guesses for evolutions first solution to this problem..? yep, our old buddy and essential survival feature...fear. An animal keeps running away from a predator because the fear response, regulated by the limbic system and fed into the cortical regions keeps the selected behaviour pattern salient or 'of prime importance' I mention all this because I find it interesting that the link above talks about fear being the reason for the arts initial development...and that it seems our brains evolved to use fear to maintain the execution of survival based behaviour for a given period of time AFTER the sensory info which both initiated the fear and triggered the behaviour has stopped being detected. and how does this relate to training...? simple... if we can run we do...that is the primary natural response... if cornered we fight...that is the only natural response under those circumstances... both actions maintained by fear...we keep running because of the fear of being caught... we keep fighting because of the fear of being eaten...(if we stick with the big predator analogy) however...if we train under realistic conditions, we climatise ourself to the fear-response...it becomes something else...instead of it being something which controls our behaviour...we can control ITS motivating effect on us...it is still the same set of limbic inputs...but by training our body, we hone particular synaptic connections in our brain, which in turn feedback into a greater degree of sub-conscious (or natural) control of our actions and reactions... in essence, my current level of understanding is that through training we transform the fear response from a chaotic morass of signals into a focussed stream of signals...thus our effectiveness under normally 'frightening' situations is greatly enhanced.
interesting post. let me raise this question, based on the above snippet... is one fear-inducing situation as good as another for the purposes of getting used to the fear-response? in other words, if we train realistically for a gunfight, would we still be suprised by someone charging us with a chainsaw at full roar (or some other "unusual" or extreme form of attack. maybe a large meat eating predator )? what do you think?
Quick correction -- that isn't what he was getting at. What he said was, "using this 'innate fear' was one of the founding principles of Ninpo Taijutsu." In other words, that one of the foundational or "core" principles of Ninpo Taijutsu is to take advantage of the "righting reflex" in an opponent. This doesn't invalidate anything else you said in your (excellent!) post; I just wanted to clarify that one point. Correct. And this gets to where I take issue with most "reality based" physical self-defense programs that like to drive you into a state of adrenal stress and have you work through it. The premise seems to be that you're going to be in that state when the excrement hits the fan, so fine motor skills will go out the window, so you should work only on methods based on gross movement. Now, I'm all for inducing stress in various ways -- I feel it's absolutely necessary. But I feel that the purpose for this properly should be to help the student learn to mitigate the effects of stress through familiarity. I also feel it's best done by raising the level of intensity incrementally, over time: You don't take some kid who's just gotten his drivers' license, for instance, and dump him onto a high-speed track to race against professionals. While I'm on about "rbsd"-type programs, by the way, allow me to digress a bit to the "gross motor techniques" idea. I've heard many people coming from that sort of background express the belief that the kinds of things they see in a lot of Bujinkan training won't work in real combat, because there's too much "fine" manipulation involved. . .which tells me only that they're looking at, but not seeing, what is being done. Apart from the self-evident fact that our arts, and other koryu, were used for centuries quite effectively to kill people or they'd never have made it as far as the Meiji Restoration, there are two other things they're missing: 1) the abovementioned "familiarization" effect on stress; and 2) the fact that most of what we do is, in fact, based on gross muscle movement -- we're just not necessarily tense about it. "Gross muscle movement" does not mean large movement. It does not mean tense movement. Rather, it refers to the primary use of the larger muscles and muscle groups to do things. Most of our largest and most powerful muscles are in two places: Our legs, and along our spine. And our techniques, when done properly, are done primarily with. . .what? Ah, I'm seeing the light bulbs turning on. . .
It depends. The key lies in being able to perceive a connection between the two. I think training realistically for a gunfight would prepare you quite well for the attempted chainsaw massacre -- provided you had your gun with you when it happened. Because what you're training to do is "neutralize an attack using your gun". Doesn't much matter whether the attack is from someone using a firearm, a chainsaw, a samyoureye sword, or a crossbow. From there, of course, the more familiarity you can acquire with various sorts of tactics and stratagems the enemy might use, the better. And tactics and drills -- we're still talking gunfighting at the moment -- have been developed to defeat those. Neither the enemy tactics/stratagems, nor the countermeasures, are likely to ever match up precisely: there will always be differences in details. But the connection that needs to be made is, "This type of solution has been developed to deal with this type of situation." With that understanding, you can improvise as necessary within the overall structure or "pattern" of the situation. On the hand-to-hand combat level in old Japanese arts, that's what kata training is about.
dale, spot on with the clarification of the intent behind the link, i meant what you said in your correction, if that makes sense? the sentance was badly constructed and should have contained the word 'exploitation' instead of 'reason'...linguistic precision gets more important as the concepts get more 'abstract'...thanks for drawing my attention to it re; lightbulbs...it's been one of those days where they haven't stopped...i spent the day escorting a couple of ladies from Houston around an antique fair while they spent more money than i'm going to see in the next three months on stock for their shop...between watching their backs while they did business, carrying the delicate antiques for them and having to leave them on their own for twenty minutes while i took their purchases over to the shippers vans, and having to track them down again in the middle of large crowds of people (they are cool, they come here to shop, they only have a few hours, and they don't waste a second of the day)...i got the chance to browse some very interesting weapons collections...from WWII de-activated semi-automatics, WWII standard issue katana, through a facinating collection of rifles, a very old katana in a bamboo shiro-saya and three old tsuba's that were going for a steal...i could have spent a small fortune on stock for dojo, but the value (historic as much as monetary) of some these items would have meant we'd be more worried about damaging them than each other then you get my thinking-cap on with that link, and i've just spent an hour with my housemate going over aspects of the lesson he took in the dojo last night, clarifying the things i was struggling with and getting it 'out of my head' and 'into my body'... re; the gross muscle movement line...would i be right in thinking that the reason people seem to think that taijutsu is based upon seemingly...'fine and complicated' movements that would be difficult to replicate in 'real' situations, because they are focusing only on those aspects and thinking in terms of 'technique' instead of movement? where as in reality, those 'finer' aspects that appear to be the focus, are actually just a side effect of refined total body movement that come about when the gross motor skills have been developed to be fluidic and natural...? by this, i think i mean, that the focus should be on getting the gross movement 'right' and leaving the 'fine' movements to develop of their own accord? relating these concepts to fear...if we get overcome by the fear of the situation...i guessing that the first thing to be affected is the 'efficiency' of movement thus any reliance upon the percieved 'fine' movements would leave you open to making potentially dangerous mistakes. regarding stress training, the sort of 'high-stress training' which you described as a bad model, then being employed as methodology for 'real-world training' seems to be approaching the problem backwards...safe environment...stressed indivdual... surely...high-pressure environment...calm individual... is what we should be working towards achieving...?
formatC; good question... fear seems to be a secondary 'learnt' response...our experiences of the world and the behaviour of others 'teaches' us what to be afraid of... considering, for example, knife fights... there is a tendancy for people to glamourise knife-fighting, especially if they have never seen or experienced the effects of them but have learnt a few techniques...the danger hasn't been expereinced or witnessed and so a false confidence develops which is dangerous... years ago a very experienced BB who visits our dojo quite regularly was taking a tanto class. After showing us various methods of disarming an assailant wielding a knife, he said, 'of course, this is last resort stuff, what you should do if someone walks up to you with a knife and asks for your wallet is this...' he asked someone to act being the assailant...and as they walked towards him, threatening him with the knife they said, 'i want your wallet' he responded by putting up his hands, facing forwards and said, 'its in my back pocket' he then moved slowly, maintining a defferential position, mimed removing his wallet and handed it to him. 'if all they want is your wallet, let them have your wallet...however much is in there isn't worth the value of your life by trying to keep it' i was about 8th or 7th kyu at the time and pennies started dropping like i'd hit the jackpot on a slot machine, while it may not pay to be afraid of a knife...it certainly isn't wise to lose respect for a knife. now, regarding 'transferable experiences' and 'learning fear'... i was 19, out on a sat. night in the town i'd been drinking in for the previous year, with people who were locals in the town, and were also bikers. there was a pub with a late licence...there was always a queue to get in...it was a nasty town at times...we never got involved, but then the crowd i'd fallen in with were the local bikers...i was very much the youngest of the group. It always seemed to be the shirts and haircuts crowd that wanted to go out and get primitive and they left people with leather jackets and long hair alone...we just went out and got hammered...i went round the town sober a couple of times...that was scary...you had to be half-cut to not notice the tension...far better to be wasted and oblivious, then your own nervousness (which, when masked, is often perceived as arrogance... and there's real potential danger there) didn't catch the eye of a nut-job scoping for challengers or victims...anyway, as usual, i digress...the bottom line is those days were a good training exercise in what it was sensible to develop a 'fear' of...as this sat. night will illustrate quite succinctly. we got in the pub just before they closed the door. In front of us was a mess of a guy. He was hammered, he was loud and he was looking for it. His mate was behind us in the queue. His mate didn't get in. We ended up next to him at the bar...to be precise, my mates missus was next to him on the right, a random on the left. We were all to the right of her trying to get served. Luckily for us, it was her stood next to him, not one of us. Not so lucky for the guy on the left. She was 'known' by the town. She dressed outrageously and she lived on the estate, people looked out for her and looked after her. As I say, the guy on the left was just a random (like the majority of us are in this world, just before we become a crime statistic). The guy in the middle of them was now angry, he was on his own, he was vocalising about how he felt about his mate not getting in. He got served before us, a bottle. We were laughing and joking, the pub was heaving, the atmosphere was the usual drunken chaos i'd come to know and love. The we heard the smash as the bottle was brought down on the bar. Shortly followed by the scream as the upstroke drove the bottle into the guy on the lefts face. No warning, no provocation, no need. Just one sad, angry idiot ruining someone elses face. One of our lot pulled my mates missus back in the middle of us and the doorstaff were on nut-job inside of twenty seconds. Their response was no more attractive than the assault on the victim. It wasn't the sort of town that had a particularly good realtionship with the police. I don't know what happened to him when they finished with him...he was 'escorted' out the back, the victim was dispatched to A&E and the next track came on the jukebox. I'd never seen anything like that before...but for the order we ended up at the bar, it could have been any of us, like most places like that, ladies don't get bottled, unless it's by another lady. point 1; you can't train in techniques that will prevent an assault of that nature. No intent to pick up...just wrong place...wrong time...although someone with training/street fighting experience may just have the right reactions if their brain recognises 'smash glass sound, right hand side' and an effective 'protect face' behaviour overrides the natural tendancy to look in the direction of the audio cue. point 2; it's when you reflect on it over the coming days that fear comes in...you retro-analyse the event and you mind logs the key points as 'fear salience cues'...thus you learn about a new danger in the world you hadn't considered before... point 3; the memory of witnessing something like that kills any rubbish you might have picked up about knife-fights being 'cool'...your brain doesn't have to leap to far to see that if a bottle can do that then a piece of metal with a honed edge is going to leave less surface damage, but go right into the delicate stuff underneath the skin. it comes down to the difference between focusing on technique and getting to grips with principles... fundamental principles are readily transferable...techniques are as dead as you could be if you rely on them in environments that are as unpredicatable as that one was. i've never stood next to an angry person at a bar since that night, if they end up next to me, i just subtlely move somewhere else at the earliest opportunity...the fear of possibility becomes an awareness of risk.
Right on all points! Yes - someone who has a concept of that kind of thing, and of the kinds of things which will help him to deal with it (whether through survived experience or through training) will have an advantage. Yes. . .YES. . .YES!!! Lordy that was good. Think I'll have me a smoke now. . .
Hi... nice discussion fellas. On a seminar this Summer with a well known Bujinkan padded-weapon maker, he said that Soke says we have to rise above the effects of things like "tunnel vision" when under stress. I experienced "tunnel vison" a few times and taijutsu got me out of it but I definitely didn't break out of the tunnel, just sort of rode it out. For for the likes of you guys who have more experience of these things, what do you think of the idea of possibly overcoming tunnel vision, as opposed to relying on your budo-honed 5+ senses to deal with it? .. or maybe thats the same thing?
a theory of mine, (that alot of people i share it with, disagree with) is that we all have the same capacity for 'intelligence'...it just either doesn't get 'focussed' on or it expresses itself in different ways...when you look at the general tasks all humans perform without effort...for example, moving your arm to pick something up...you realise that it is the 'everyday' tasks that are truely amazing and are the ones that show just how 'clever' our brains are...the 'maths' that our brains perform to control and coordinate movement, to track an object moving accross our visual field, to orient our body in response to sound etc is far from trivial (let alone the stuff we don't even notice...like keep the insides working in harmony under a wide range of operating environments)...if we can all learn to do those things as infants...then there we are all capable of using our cortical regions for 'intelligent' tasks...i'm doing what i do for a living, not because i have any more intelligence than anyone else...just because i worked damned hard to get here...believe me...there have been many days i half-wished i was back in the factory, being a line-monkey assembling video recorders...life was easier back then...but not nearly as rewarding. and having a mental understanding about this stuff and being able to construct lengthy, 'intellectual' prose about subjects like this is a world away from having the ACTUAL skills integrated into your repetoire of movement... weds night at the dojo, i was getting wound up with myself...i could mentally understand what my instructor was trying to get us to do...i could follow his movements and see exactly how he was gaining control of the space and neutralising the attacks... when my uke and i were going slow, with no intent, the movement was there...but as soon as he became more unpredictable and the put some real feeling behind the attacks...i just wasn't able to get out the way...the lumps and bruises on my forearms and ribs were reminding of this fact throughout yesterday... i called my instructor over and said, 'i can't get round him...my heads too switched on (side effect of using these analytic skills for 10hrs a day in the office trying to get your head round how your head gets round stuff)...i'm making all the obvious mistakes...' he broke the class, got us all back to the middle...and got us doing an exercise...i couldn't see how this related to my query and was getting more frustrated...when we paired up again i asked him how this was related to my movement. 'trust me' i did, (begudgingly) and in the last ten minutes of the class started to see a bit of where he was coming from...but then the class was over. so i blagged his head about it when i got in at 11pm last night and he spent an hour extending the idea...and finally, my mind gave up trying and handed the reigns to my body and i started to move more effectively. he moves in with his GF in three weeks...damn it...no more home tuition on tap ps; don't give up sleep...you do your most effective learning when you are asleep...it allows the sub-conscious to absorb and integrate the new sensory experience (and your own analytic and emotional responses to that experience) from your last dozen and half or so waking hours, into your catalogue of experience...the reaction time of someone who has not slept for 24hours is somewhere close to the reaction time of someone who has just drunk a bottle of spirits...the cortex is 'full' and so it is more difficult to get important info shunted round the brain...of course...stay awake for about 72hrs and wierd stuff starts to happen, but then you are really starting to overload your heart as well as your head...good once in a while to 'shake out the cobwebs'...but not a lifestyle choice i can reccomend.
Interesting discussion on the 'righting reflex'. A good expansion on the no balance=no power principle. Interested to see if we can expand this, what practices or techniques have you found useful to improve your ability to prevent balance disruption? Can you think of any drills for striking from what appears to be an off-balance position? On the issue of fear during or before conflict, this is something I confront a lot outside the dojo. So I'll share my strategies. I do a lot of adrenalin sports, snowboarding, surfing and freeride mountain biking. That means I get knee shaking adrenal releases every week. It's exactly the same feeling I've experienced pre-fight. These are the techniques I and my fellow risk takers use to deal with the adrenal surge and can be utilised in training and combat situations: Tense and release: Three deep breaths with full body tension and relaxation resets the body. Utilising the taoist energy orbit and perineum pump is good here. Using the 'corpse posture' as part of daily meditation helps identify and teach dropping physical tension. Visualisation: See yourself doing it succesfully. Repetition of positive statements: An important ongoing reinforcement of aptitude and progression. A trigger phrase like 'do it' can be employed to dissipate stress and prevent freezing up. Mantra yoga is another way of dealing with stray thoughts, it shuts up the jabbering monkey and enables you to flow, not think. The three second rule: Often adrenal release is premature and can be overwhelming. To combat this, give yourself a three count and then do it before the surge hits you. Repetition: When you do something that previously created a fear response repeat immediately. So if you jump off a cliff and land perfectly, do it again immediately to anchor in the physical and mental state. Exposure to stress: With regular doses of adrenalin you learn how to respond to it. It enables you to label it, channel it, and use it as you understand what is happening to your body. You may even become physically addicted to it.. Other than that it's constant training, starting slowly, building good principle and mechanics. It's all taijutsu.
hmm..thats got me thinking again...i wish you'd all stop asking questions that directly relate to what i'm supposed to be doing at work (only joking...this is work) off the top of my head... tunnel vision implies to me that the brain has switched off/is ignoring the parafoveal (or peripheral) visual input data... now, the fovea (region of focus) primarily contain photoreceptors which are tuned for colour and hence detail... the parafovea is composed mainly of photoreceptors that respond to grey-scale intensity and motion (very loose description!!) funnily enough i'd been thinking of something directly related to this last week... although the brain has what, when compared to a digital computer, seems like infinite processing resource...it must have finite contraints on how much sensory data it actually process...indeed, it contains filters which ensure that the conscious aspect of ourselves is only made aware of enough data to get the job done, else it would spend all its time processing data and would never reach a 'decision point'...make sense? unfortunately for us, evolution doesn't always make the right design choices regarding how to cope with an overloaded system...grossly simpifying the problem... we have five senses, all providing a constant stream of input data... we have our limbic system which interprets our internal sensations, combines them with memory and experience and provides an emotional input...i like to think of it as a signal which, 'tones or colours' the info arriving at cortex we have cortex itself...the master 'pattern-matcher' looking at all its inputs and running them against memory/experience data it has previously analysed...looking for salience, for congruence (things fitting together in terms of 'shape and dimension'), incongruence (anomalies or differences which prevent things fitting together) etc nothing hapens in zero time (thats actually quite a nice circular truism a bit of a xen-koan, hehehe...nothing happens in zero-time )...despite the fact our brains are multi-synchronous (they do lots of seemingly unrelated operations out-of-phase with each other, but some how all harmonised to the 'master-beat') they must still be given time to get the info to the right places. now...given all that...what do you think happens if one of those data-systems gets overloaded? say for example, the limbic system is providing a MASSIVE, UNCONSTRAINED fear input... that steals resource away from other areas....cortex can't reduce the fear level...but it is taking precious oxygen molecules to fuel it... the brain has to sacrifice something... it strips sensory data down to a minimum and hands as much control as possible over to the sub-conscious...thus reducing the amount of oxygen used for thinking...don't forget...the brain needs oxygen to keep you breathing and to keep your heart beating...they have absolute priority, no compromise permited. now, the tunnel-vision syndome which occurs under times of stress, leads me to suggest that the brain has evolved to value to foveal, high colour, high detail input over the older, low detail, intensity/motion input from the parafovea... thus the filter gets tuned and the parafoveal inputs don't make it out of the optic nerve into the cortex...or cortex somehow ignores them...or...etc etc so when we are afraid, we lose sensory input data...for an example of how this can happen...look at this visual illusion, not related to directly to fear but will illustrate how things can be right before your eyes, and yet still be invisible... ...cool vision link with lots of fun stuff... (if you want to develop your ability to focus on one task and increase your powers of concentration, remove monkey-chatter etc, practice making the dots stay invisible for as long as possible, when you can 'feel' the impulse behind your eyes just before they reapear you are begining to gain direct experience of how awareness moves like a spot-light around your neural system...go gently though kids...too much of this stuff in one go can be a bit freaky...i'm going to try and develop this illusion in reverse...ie the fovea disapears and the parafovea stays in focus) lightbulbs...? (check out some more of this guys animations...they really are good) so, by training ourselves to become climatised to fear, my guess is we reduce the amplitide (how big and strong they are) of the fear signals reaching cortex, thus we don't waste oxygen molecules in the brain by keeping big signals going... another possibility is that the signal stays the same and we use the 'big strong fear signals' as energy drives in themselves as fuel for the system to re-allocate toward motor resource/higher cortical processing... sort of makes sense of the term 'channel your fear' doesn't it...? i suspect both of the above are possible...depending upon the system you are training in or the level the individual has reached... the other point i just want to let you think over is that point about evolution evolving to the brain to shut out parafoveal signals and bad design flaws... i attribute that tendancy to be a side-effect of the evolution of mind, not the evolution of biology...if biology alone had it way i suspect all higher processing tasks would be the first to go...we got a long way down the evolutionary chain before we got our 'super fovea' and the level of visual processing we enjoy today... the older systems are less refined, but more efficient (only the most efficient solutions survive in evolutionary terms) and thus i suspect that we 'hold on to' our top level processing, because that is what makes us human and we don't like to go backwards...a sort of society-induced error in natural survival terms. especially as i have always been taught to develop my parafoveal (periferal) vision and to use 'soft-focus' to respond more quickly to an agressors movement...the foveal processing takes too long...and by the time the motor commands are activated, you are already wearing a thick-lip or a black-eye edit: i'm away from the PC till monday night at least, so i'm not being rude...just being busy
fun! it reminds me of something I experienced while doing an eyes-open meditation: I decided to focus on one point ( a visual point, part of a leaf or something ) and since the point was very, very small I assumed that if I could keep my eyes centered directly on it, my concentration would improve. it turned out to backfire, as trying to keep my eyes so "still" induced incredible stress and didn't work very well anyway. all of my peripheral vision became blurred and grey and rather shakey. only when I relaxed, and decided to not look directly "at" the point, but rather through or around it did my entire body relax. and ironically, while I felt that I was not "focusing" on the singular point as much as before, I found that indeed I was seeing it more so. I look forward to toying with that animation you linked = )
Bloody Hell that's the last time I suggest a thread Right I'll be back latter after I've read through this lot. Xen hope you got some Asprin handy
yeah, I do tend to avoid angry people every chance I get example: I was at a party once when I was about 17/18 (in a college town after a big rivalry football game) and was just minding my own business, walking around when this rather thick fellow grabs the back of my shirt, stopping me in my tracks. I turn around to hear him say - with a lot of enthusiasm - "I like to get hit in the face!" Swear to god. he looked pretty tanked, but steady on his feet, and I wouldn't be suprised if he'd been hitting and getting hit for most of his life. I actually can't remember what I said in response, but I think I wished him luck in his endeaver, and I most certainly walked away. sorry if that's off topic a bit, but it was definitely one episode where I was exposed to some real life aggression or threat, which is not the norm for me. I'm glad my first reaction was a strong one; GET THE F AWAY from this lunatic! later that weekend it was reported that one young man was killed in a fight at a post-game party in the same area of town. I still wonder if it involved the "hit me in the face" guy, but either way violence was in the air. whew. ok, back to your regularly scheduled thread
