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Lee Salzman wrote:
Is this really THAT profound an idea, though?
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I didn't say it was profound, I suggested it was overlooked in what we SAY we know about such things, intellectually or practically speaking.
Quote:
Lee Salzman wrote:
When put in a violent, uncontrolled situation where events are happening and changing faster than the conscious mind can process, then the barrier to speed of action is conscious thought.
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Actually, I was suggesting that conscious thought is NOT a barrier to speed of action, but conscious thought is a barrier to understanding action taken at such speeds. Resources of the brain are wasted in vain trying keeping up with planning action that is already outrunning it. Mindfulness rather than planning is called for. The reflective mind can use its finite resources either to observe a greater density of the instant or to take up bandwidth with useless predictive modeling. Density of observation is perceived as slow-timing in action. There is still no time for the brain to plan, but there is more detail for the mind to reflect upon and to conform itself and the body to. If added to that, there is a certain form of action that by its nature always "fits" any dynamic presented, well, so much the better.
Because the action was unplanned, it is difficult to to reconstruct consciously. Without a plan there was no construct (and little bandwidth) to attach the typical associational memory data in the interaction. We don;t forget it, we just don't have an allocation table for it. The closest thing there is to a "plan" to help reconstruct is to study that form of action, which if course it is hard to recall without a planned action. If you see the chicken and egg problem, then you have it.
Quote:
Lee Salzman wrote:
The only method I learned for training this is conditioning via automation and association, that movement must be drilled to a point where it can be executed, with reference to an actual observable event (via one of the senses), so that it just happens with as little conscious intervention as possible. ... What other way would there be?
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"That movement" or any linear set of movements -- I may be wrong, but seems to be what Dan et al. decry as "kata." Close order drill has a long and successful martial tradition, too. Boxing combinations do, too. But I think we are speaking of something else. What we are after is not that linear nor planned, even if some set forms give us good reference points on a more complex set of of paths.
The immediate course of contingent action in combat has no predictive possibility, nevertheless there is a spatial dynamic form within which efficient movement occurs --if looked at over the iteration of thousand of such encounters. ( if you know what a chaotic attractor is, that is one.) It is that shape which is the goal -- for any method.