Sensory Recognition Development

Through frequent and realistic training we could use the power of recognition to respond to a threat more efficiently. By recognition we mean that we're familiar with what's happening in context is a key method to develop skills and have those skills transferred to the context in which you need to use it. Recognition can be further broken down to what you're seeing and what you're processing and also with what you're detecting through your kinesthesia. Kinesthesia means what the contact feels like when you're engaged with a threat. So we've all seen the football player who's a veteran and is able to read, say he's a linebacker, and he reads an offensive play. He puts himself in a position of advantage so he could respond sooner. He gets in, sees the play, and as soon as they hike the ball, before they even pass the ball to the running back he's through the offensive line and is able to get to the defensive back. He recognizes that play. On top of that, when he gets in contact with the running back he doesn't have to think about where's his weakest point of balance. Once he's in physical contact his kinesthetic neurons kick in, and he could feel which direction will give him the better opportunity to make the tackle. Similarly, we can develop those types of recognition skills with key training methods. Again, recognition can be broken down to your acute vision. When we use our visual stimulus we're looking at the circumstances and we're processing those circumstances. That is a cognitive function. That's directly tied with your acute vision. When we're looking at, say, in basketball, we're looking at the broad circumstance. And then when we go to take a shot, we go into a narrow circumstance where we're zeroing our attention on that specific aspect. The challenge with the visual systems is that it's directly connected to your cognitive function. That means that what you're directly looking at with your acute vision, there's a cognitive step of processing what you're seeing before you take an action, before the brain decides that you need to do something. And the peripheral vision is what detects motion, and that's much more intuitive. It takes what's called the short pathway. So under stress you're gonna look directly at, say, a knife that's being presented. As a survival positive you're gonna process that information. What happens is there's gonna be other movement. Maybe the guy's using his arm to reach for something else. You're gonna be able to detect that. What we're gonna demonstrate here is a method for you to experience how your acute vision and your cognitive function creates a delay and how you respond to motion. So we're gonna bring Omari Broussard in as a demonstration for an exercise so you can experience this disparity in reaction time at home. You can set up. I'm actually gonna have you step over here. And we could do this kind of an objective evaluation of reaction time. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have my hand up. I'm gonna move as little as possible from the elbow, and I'm gonna touch his forehead. What I'm gonna have Omari do first is look directly at my hand. And what his task is is to prevent my hand from touching his forehead. I want you to pay attention to how my elbow is moving and the speed at which my arm is moving in relation to his reaction time. So I'm gonna put him in a position of advantage where he is pre-staged. So he has a short distance to travel to stop me from touching his forehead. He's looking directly at the hand. He's gonna try his best to swat it away. Can you go faster? Mmhmm. Go as fast as you can to stop my hand from touching your forehead. Can you go faster? I want you to be a ninja and go as fast as you can to stop my hand. I'm moving relatively slow, and you could see the difference. My motion is slower than his motion, but he's reacting relatively delayed. So now I want him to focus his eyes. Say I have a knife in my hand here. So his eyes are fixated on this threat. His hand is gonna be in the same staged position. And you're gonna do the same thing. I want you to go as fast as you can to stop my hand from touching your forehead. As fast as you can. So two things that you'll see is that he has a higher success rate, but his reaction time actuates sooner than when he used his acute vision. That's because your acute vision is directly connected with the cognitive function, where there's a path, the long path where you have to process what's happening before you start to actuate. So when you saw him, he kind of stuttered a little bit. That's anticipation. He's anticipating what's about to happen. And he's trying to think and time it and more often than not, you'll get that stutter. When he was looking here his cognitive function was available to process the scenario and everything else that was happening. And it's actually your peripheral vision that detects motion. And that takes the short pathway. He recognizes the motion without having to think about it, and he's able to respond. That's another reason why we don't look at our reloads under a high stress is that there's that disparity that needs to process information. And you only have so much cognitive bandwidth to execute whatever skills you need to execute. So much like the baseball player who is able, he's major league baseball, and he's able to read the pitcher and anticipate what trajectory is gonna be based on the body language of that pitcher. He can hit home runs all day. If you take a softball picture, completely different body language, they have a propensity to strike out because the context is different. So understanding that play of peripheral and acute vision, where he's, baseball players don't actually look directly at the ball. They're looking at the pitcher and they're utilizing their peripheral vision to track and index that baseball before they knock it out of the park. But when you change the context with a softball pitcher and a much bigger softball they tend to strike out because the brain is not familiar with the body language or the trajectory, because the nature of it is very, very different. So the recognition systems is what unlocks the skill of swinging the baseball bat. And that's a problem we see with martial arts techniques. A lotta people train techniques and without context it may not translate well into actual application. So going back to the football analogy, where you make physical contact. If this is a personal defense situation, and I have a knife and I go to stab Omari, there's gonna be a lot of different information happening here. And he doesn't have to think, if I'm starting to grab his neck he intuitively is able to detect that. He doesn't process, oh, he's got my neck. I need to get into a better position. So Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wrestlers have a much more significant ability to recognize kinesthetic feedback. And the way that works is we've all heard of the term an acquired taste. The old myth of the tongue being divided with different taste receptors has been dispelled. What actually happens when you try something new, the chemical makeup of that food or drink, when you're not familiar with it, you're unable to detect it so it becomes distasteful. The more you taste and drink it your tongue actually recruits physical taste buds. It actually develops new sensors. And over time you learn to appreciate it. Similarly, with kinesthetic feedback and proprioception, which is familiarity with where you are in space, that becomes more enhanced with the more contact that you expose yourself to. For recognition to occur you need to be exposed to stimulus for you to become more familiar with it. So Omari and I is gonna go into an exercise. It's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu drill for an armbar. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how that helps you enhance your sensory recognition systems. So we use our hands every day, so we have a good amount of awareness with how our hands feel. We're able to use our arms 'cause we bump into things with our arms. To some degree, we're able to pick things up, and those neurons are always firing off. Sometimes the fight ends up on the ground. Some people take a Brazilian jiu-jitsu class. Other people might take sambo or wrestling. And in the beginning of these kinds of continuity or flow drills, as they're called, it may look very clunky, 'cause they're using their cognitive function, and their neurons aren't familiar with moving in this way. They don't have a sense of feeling with what their legs are doing, what their torso doing. They're very blind or tone deaf to the physical feeling of what's happening. So go ahead and execute. In this armbar drill Omari's using his whole body and making as much contact as possible. And with the feedback, with the pressure that's being sent in his femur and his thighs and his torso, it's firing off those neurons. And over time he'll become more aware of what his body's doing. And it will become much more fluid over time. Cool, thank you much. Doing flow drills such as that will allow you to become more familiar with their body. So you'll find these kinds of flow drills in all types of martial arts. Now, to be clear, these aren't fighting drills, although it might look like an armbar, it's not defensive drills. We put it under the category as fitness. Fitness helps, but it's not gonna teach you how to defend yourself. So this is specifically sensory recognition development, where when you do drills like this you'll become more familiar with how your body feels. And what your body is doing, you're able to detect what's happening. If you have ever rolled in Brazilian jiu-jitsu with someone of a higher belt, you think you're in a position of advantage, and he's in front of you. Somehow it gets to your back and in a rear naked choke. That kind of ninja reflex, that's with a matter of recognition. You don't recognize the pathway that he's taken. Whereas someone that's more experienced has a recognition system that's far more advanced and they're able to know what you're gonna do before you even do it. In training, we do all that we can to get in shape and to train in context and develop these skills. A way that sensory development can help you is that you can recognize what's happening sooner, and it'll put you in a position of advantage to respond much more quickly, sooner than what the attacker knows what they're gonna do. So sensory development training is something you should definitely add to your body of training.