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This involves what can hijack us from our conditioned responses, i.e., how certain aspects of life can hijack even the most serious and best trained professional. It is the trait that governs all species in survival including the human animal, us. It is referred to as the, “Investigatory Reflex.”
In order to survive, all of nature needs to be acutely aware of immediate changes to the environment, investigating and evaluating these differences for the dangers or opportunities they may present. This is hard wired and so forceful that this reflex supersedes all other operations. So, when in the fight or in self-fense practitioners can be hijacked by the use of unknown and untrained situations and events and techniques, etc., that cause what is referred to as the freeze.
Whenever a stimulus registered as a change around us, our attention flies to it. If a predator decides you are a target and they apply: Surprise, a flurry of blitz like pummeling about your head and shoulders, a quick and decisive crowding of bodies along with disorienting unbalancing and instant disruption of your structure you will find your mind, attention, being drawn to such methodologies and if your training, sometimes even with appropriate training, with your attention fully, completely and totally focused on it.
Lets say this, according to research “Rapid Changes in our Environment” tend to have a very potent effect on us. Our concentration can be pulled aside even with such mundane changes like, i.e., ever wonder why you walked into a room and suddenly forget why? It is possible that your recall is not diminishing but rather a possibility of a different and documented scientifically reason for that lapse of memory, i.e., waling through a door can cause you to forget because of an abrupt change in your physical surroundings redirects your attention to the new settings and therefore disrupts your memory of it.
In short, “Our bodily reaction to change is no longer called a reflex. It’s termed the ‘Orienting Response,’ and scores of studies have enlightened us about it.” - Robert Cialdini, Pre-Suasion
Just as another change in thinking, the orienting response extends to things like, respiration, blood flow, skin moisture, and heart rate. Doesn’t that sound familiar, i.e., how adrenal stress-conditions trigger huge changes in our bodies that also affect concentration, perceptions and how we distinguish and act accordingly?
Take a moment next time you are out on the road headed toward some destination when suddenly the traffic flow slows and you find yourself doing the ‘looky loo’ at some traffic incident. You are working off the human species survival instincts of “Investigatory Reflex” and succumbing to our natural survival “Orienting Response.” Personally, I have tried to resist doing the looky loo and find the pull to turn and look at the incident almost irresistible. Herein lies another factoid that says, we are still connected to and driven by our survival DNA even if we think we live in a time and way that eliminated our exposure to death by Lion, Tiger or Bear.
In self-defense or self-fense as I take it from Marc MacYoung’s explanation, we must train to what will cause us to investigate and orient and act, i.e., like explained in the OODA process of Colonel Boyd. Lets use a sport system to help explain and understand, i.e., boxing.
Boxing, like many combative oriented competitive sports, relies on what is termed as, “Feints,” that draw an opponents concentration toward a investigatory reflex of “what the …” so that you are drawn away from one thing to focus on another while that original thing lights you up and knocks you out. I look at it as misdirection similar to what magicians use to fool you attentive processes toward something else while the original process goes on out of your perceptive concentration.
This is also how I like to explain one facet of what karate-ka and martial artist refer to as a sub-principle called, “The Void.” It is that space between actions that can cause a type of manipulation of an adversary’s mind to focus on a trivial matter while a more serious event takes place. It is to shift a situation or perception to something else - misdirection. This use of void, the space between tempo, cadence or rhythms that triggers our investigatory reflex so that the shift goes to some feature, action or thing so that something else gets in before the brain can even experience it, i.e., observe, orient loop blocking a decision and action process.
Boxing feints are this very process where the opponents attention is misdirected toward a danger that doesn’t really exist so as to hide the upper cut or some such that rocks the opponents world, knocking them down and out. The void or space or time lapse from original act to feint is about this very thing. Make sense?
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“In order for any life to matter, we all have to matter.” - Marcus Luttrell, Navy Seal (ret)
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