Predictive movements in martial art

First, look at the video of Derren Brown who “predicts” the movements of some people on the street:

http://videos.wobbit.com/funny~video-derren-brown-amazing-movement-prediction~g-13183.html

Was that funny? What if you could do the same in a martial art or in a real fight on the street? Wouldn’t that be great?! I am sure that everybody thinks that this is rubbish and it’s just a trick. Well, what if I say that you can learn another one, which is more objective and will help you to react better and faster? I’ll come back to that later, but first lets us investigate those “predictive movements” a little.

I relate the term “predictive movements” to movements in martial art which are and can be identified before or right before they’ve been launched. What does this mean? Well, try to imagine an opponent who wants to punch you and right before his attack “you see that movement in your mind” and your reaction is for example going forward to intercept the attack, which was btw the right hook. How did you know that he/she would attack with that hand? Was that an intuitive reaction or just lucky guess? I would say that this was anticipation. There is nothing about that you see the movement in your mind, but you can expect that the movement will happen from the observational cues you’ve got from the opponent and the environment.

The cues could be such as this: you saw your opponent moves right before punch stepping forward with the left leg, or maybe just going back with his right leg and moving just slightly to the side, while the right arm and the shoulder also moved a little forward. Or perhaps the opponent was about to duck under your left jab by stepping to your left side of the body and then tried to launch the punch. There are so many cues that can help you “see” the punch coming and one page would not be enough to write all about them. The most important thing to understand which is common to all anticipated cues is a visual proprioception. I’ve found this definition of proprioception from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/proprioception : “The unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself. “ Visual proprioception : “ …is more directly related to the body schema and involves the subpersonal processing of visual information about environmental motion in the visual field.” (http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~gallaghr/gall&cole95.html).

To understand visual proprioception, first you have to ask yourself a question: Can I see my opponents’ moves and how can I react fast enough to escape, dodge and hit him first before he punches me? If you thought that the answer to this question was anticipation, I must say that you were wrong. It has nothing to with that; it’s just simple, a vision. Let me say something about the vision and how do people percept the objects in the environment. Visual information is delivered to the brain by the two pathways from the retina which is located on the back of the eyeball. These pathways are actually two systems of the brain which differently control our behaviour: focal vision and ambient vision.

Focal vision is a result of personal experience. It’s used for detecting and recognizing objects which are primarily in the center of our visual field. Focal vision is a conscious perception and it declines fast in dim of light. You are using your focal vision right now, when you read the sentences of this page.

Ambient (peripheral) vision is used to determine the location in space and orientation in the environment. It contributes to very fine control of movements without being aware of it. That means unconscious perception and it is not seriously degraded in the dim light conditions. That’s why you can drive a car in the night and do not need to slow down. (http://www.visualexpert.com/Resources/pedestrian.html)

Most of us (martial art practitioners) do not appreciate the value of the ambient system. Many think that there must be something more then just eyes. Well, there is, but our visual information is extremely efficient if we know how to use it. If you can identify the environment and your visual field by using your peripheral vision, you’ll reaction will get better and you’ll be better in movement prediction. There are studies which indicate that ambient vision is used for movement control and is not influenced (as focal vision) by the movement of surrounding objects (http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v5/psyche-5-18-bridgeman.html).

Scientists believe that optic (or optical) flow is one important part of ambient vision and movement control. (http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17428514). The optical flow (or optic flow) is the visual motion of the objects you see as you move in the space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optic_flow). While other say that it takes approximately 200 ms for an individual to process visual information, I believe that you can process the visual information faster. Why would I say that?

There is one particular exercise in Yiquan which teaches you how to use your ambient vision and the optical flow information faster and subconsciously. It’s quite hard to perform if you have never tried it before and I must to admit, it was kind of funny for me to start with. I did not know what to expect from it. My teacher told me that I have to “look” at the objects around me and to “concentrate” as if they were about to attack me. At the same time I had to move my eyes from one object to another as fast as possible, and try not to “focus” on the target. After some time doing all this, suddenly I felt so tired, and I felt extremely pain in my forehead. He told me that I should not be scared, it was just that I did not “use my eyes” before in this manner, and that it was just a matter of practice. I laughed at it and continued the exercise for some days after. Finally, after couple of days he explained me what was all about.

To put all this to the test, I went to a nearest boxer club in my town and tried to spar with someone there. I have never boxed before (btw. I was 33 years old then) and I was like: “what am I doing here, these guys train every day (or 3-4 times a week) and they going to kill me!” To my surprise, I would evade or block all of the attacks they’ve had and I was kind in “control”. Now, I do not say that I am a pro or a good boxer, but just the fact that I trained these yiquan vision proprioception skills for maybe 2 months before I went there, says something about this kind of training. Something has influenced my reactions and movement predictions. I give a credit to yiquan and I think that this is true, because I got the same “explanation” from my other yiquan friends who learned the same skills. I don’t know, maybe we all are just as this guy Derren, good in making the trick happen, or what do you think?