The Complexity of Movement

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It gives me great appreciation to know that moving normally is such a complex process that is run completely by our brains - unconsciously. When I read about how complex that process is as can be read in the provided quotes I gain an even greater appreciation when humans go beyond the normal movement of life through learning and performing other more complex disciplines like, “Running, playing sports and for us in the karate and martial arts communities - basics to kata to drills to kumite, wow!

Once a practitioner of such complex activities especially when used for things like sports, combat, fighting and self-defense you can appreciate how such supposedly mundane and boring activities such as repetitive performance of basics takes on new meaning and the idea behind the often mistaken meaning in muscle memory that what we do from getting out of bed in the morning, drinking the cup of coffee to the applications of karate and martial arts in the dojo become more amazing. The Quotations:

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The human consciousness is only a small part of the activity of our brains, our actions, beliefs, and our biases are all driven by networks in our brain to which we have no conscious control. ß

The complexities of everyday activities: Drinking coffee: My visual system scans and pinpoint a cup of coffee; my years of experience triggers procedural memories of coffee in other situations; my frontal cortex deploys signals that travel to my motor cortex that precisely coordinates muscle contractions - throughout my torso, arm, forearm, and hand - so I grasp the cup; I touch the cup; my nerves send back reams of information on the cups weight, its position in space, its temperature, its slipperiness and so on; that info screams up the spina cord to the brain; compensating info streams back down, the information emerges from a complex choreography between parts of the brain with names like basal ganglia, cerebellum, somatosensory cortex, and others. In mere fractions of a second, adjustments are made to the force with which I lift the cup and the strength of my grip. Involving intensive calculations and feedback, my muscles adjust so the cup remains level and moves smoothly along its path upward to my mouth. I make micro-adjustments along the way, and as it approaches my lips I tilt the cup just enough to take a sip without scalding myself. 

IT TAKES DOZENS OF THE FASTEST OF SUPERCOMPUTERS TO MATCH THE COMPUTATIONAL POWER REQUIRED TO PULL OF THE ABOVE COFFEE DRINKING EFFORT!!!

The unconscious machinery of our brains is at work all the time, but it runs so smoothly that we’re typically unaware of its operations. 

Touch and the positioning of our limbs: proprioception. A person simply cannot get around without the knowledge of where his body is and that is handled under the hood by our brains through this proprioception. Humans rarely truly appreciate the fact that the feedback we get from the external world and form our muscles makes possible the complex movement we manage every moment of the day. To know where your limbs are: is your left arm up or down? Are our legs straight or bent? Is your back straight or slumped? This capacity to KNOW the state of your muscle is called proprioception!

Receptors in the muscles, tendons and joints provides us information about the angles or your joints, as well as the tension and length of your muscles. Collectively, this gives the brain a rich picture of how the body is positioned and allows for fast adjustments. 

While supercomputers rack up huge energy usage and costs, our brains work out what to do with baffling efficiency, using about the energy of a 60-watt light bulb. 

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Isn’t the brains process absolutely amazing? I have to personally say that until I learned of this, especially after suffering from and leaning a new way of balancing and moving form vertigo, that our brains are truly doing some critically difficult work behind the scenes of every day living. 

I quote, “The intricate details of our most basic movement, all buzzing along at a spatial scale smaller that you can see, and a complexity scale beyond what you can comprehend is mind boggling.” 

Then I had to find out, “How can we, as karate-ka and martial artists for self-defense,” burn our skills into our brains procedural memories with zombie like sub-routines just as difficult and complex as every day movements yet more than everyday movements? 

Note of Interest: Brain waves, delta waves occur during sleep; theta waves associated with sleep, deep relaxation, and visualization; alpha wave occur when relaxed and calm; beta waves when we are actively thinking and problem solving; gamma waves involved in concentrated mental activity such as reasoning and planning. 

How brains take on take on new skills: Achieving serenity a brain at rest, being in a alpha wave band but how to get there with such tasks is the question. Understanding the conscious thought burns energy while a serene state does not, a indicator toward mastery you might say. It seems to come to years of practice of specific patterns of physical connections formed in the brain. You literally carve the skill in question into a structure of neurons that ends up allowing you to expend much less energy performing the skill - a mastery so to speak achieving a certain expertise that produces brain waves in the alpha band making a master seem serene when performing his skills. Your goal is to remove the conscious deliberation from the equation. 

Quote, “Looks at it in the brain as using a general-purpose cognitive software and then transferring the skill into specialize cognitive hardware, what I refer to as procedural cognitive zombie sub-routines.”

“The practice of new skills creates a physical hardwire in the brain, sinking below the level of consciousness that some might refer to as muscle memory but actually it is not stored in the muscles. What is actually happening is the skills practiced are orchestrated across a thick jungle of connections in our brains. That structure changes with years of skills practiced. A PROCEDURAL memory is a long term memory that represents how to do things automatically, like riding a bike or tying our shoelaces.” 

Such coding into procedural memory creates what I refer to as zombie sub-routines store permanently in procedural memory as “microscopic bran hardware” that results in greater speed of action and better energy conservation ergo the alpha wave state of serenity. 

It comes down to a type of strengthening process that actually makes the synapses stronger and stronger so that they burn the skill into the memory circuitry, i.e., like the memory used in computers called RAM, a permanent memory used in computers and maintains the data even when power is off. 

As professionals have learned by hands on and much like memory and encoding of sub-routines in the computer software and hardware wolds, the code used makes a difference how a sub-routine/program run and when it is triggered. It is pretty specific and so is creation of sub-routines for things like self-defense, i.e., if the code doesn’t meet the challenges of any given situation then it runs but the outcome and goals won’t be met. This is why it is critical to train and practice repetitively in ways that are appropriate to self-defense - what I refer to as, “Adrenal stress-conditioned defense methodology driven reality-based training and practice.” 

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