Paying Attention

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• Why would paying attention be a post in karate Self-fense?
• In general, what do I mean by pay’ing attention?
• What results from the process of paying attention?
• How does cognitive functioning work in regard to paying attention?
• Can we multi-task?
• How does choosing what we are attentive of effect our paying attention?
• How do we redirect the attention of someone?
• How can we utilize such information for training, practice and applications? 

In the English language, we are said to “Pay” attention, which plainly implies that the process extracts a cost. Regarding cognitive functions: when attention is paid to something, the prince is attention lost to something else. The human mind appears able to hold ONLY ONE thing in conscious awareness at a time, the toll is a momentary loss of focused attention to everything else. 

In the cognitive functioning of our attentive minds there are always multiple “tracks” of information available, we consciously select only the one we want to register at that moment. Any other arrangement would leave us “Overloaded” and “Unable” to react to distinct aspects of the mongrelized input. For humans to handle multiple channels of information is to “Switch back and forth among them,” opening and closing the door of mindfulness to each in turn. 

Although it may seem that humans are concentrating on more than one thing simultaneously, that’s an illusion, we are just rapidly alternating our focus. Just as there is a price for paying attention, there is also a price for switching it. Each time we switch we lose about one half a second of focus, we experience a mental dead spot, called an “Attentional Blink”, when we can’t register the newly highlighted information consciously. 

When you can tell one is engaged in another task it shows that the a partner in communications is willing to lose contact with the information one party is providing to make contact with the other information, i.e., trying to talk to you and text at the same time. It tells us that one persons input is considered relatively unimportant. 

What we “choose” to attend to or away from reflects what they value at the time. The point of the influence process: whatever we can do to focus people on something - an idea, a person, an object - makes that thing seem more important to them than before. If someone leans forward (gets and moves closer), into the information - an embodies signal of focused attention and intense interest is perceived. Reducing the distance to an object makes it seem more worthwhile. 

Understanding how our attentive functions work helps explain a good deal of what works in martial disciplines as well as it is applied in self-fense. Another aspect is how attentiveness and its traits and effects and obstacles can be utilized to speed up our OODA looping in self-fense. Since we are unable to actually be attentive to more than one stimulus at any given time we can use such information to explain how tells work, how the feint can misdirect an adversary and how we can overwhelm an adversary’s mind to allow us a dominant position in self-fense. 

Information is power, knowledge is power and Understanding is the ultimate power because it is knowledge, understanding and the ability to apply it toward self-fense in karate and martial disciplines that makes for success, progress and continued growth. 

Bibliography (Click the link)

“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)