To be a good martial artist one needs.…

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Love the math genius

To be a good mar­tial artist one needs to have a math genius inside them.

But, “I’m no good at math” is the all too famil­iar cry of many mar­tial artists that I have said this to. How­ever, you all have inside you a Little Math Genius wait­ing to get out.

Where is it? Con­sider this:

Someone throws you a punch.

Without think­ing about it a little part or your brain has been set in motion. This little part knows cal­cu­lus, tri­go­no­metry, 3d equa­tions, wind, speed, and mass math­em­at­ics. It works out the rate of move­ment of the fist, what weight it prob­ably is, what spin it exhib­its, what gravity’s influ­ence will do to the path of the arm. It tells your body what move­ments are needed in space to get in pos­i­tion to block, what speed you need to move you arms, open your block and what pre­cise moment you need to close your hand at the weak­est part of the oppon­ents arm! It does this all in real-time, updat­ing its entire set of equa­tions on the fly should the arm, say, bump into somth­ing, and it does all this without you need­ing to think about it.

You just block the punch.

What mag­ni­fi­cence! What magic!

But, you cry, don’t all anim­als exhibit the same little func­tions? Snakes strike, hum­ming birds hover: this is not a human only ability.

True, all anim­als can do this but only humans have learned how it works: high-level con­trol and train­ing. This comes through mar­tial arts practice.

The Little Math Genius (LMG) in humans goes well bey­ond all those seen in nature and affects all the bod­ies’ func­tions of math­em­at­ics. It is the part your brain which can count. It knows from data passed to it from the eye that I have ten 1 pound coins in my hand. I just know this. I know what a coin is and I know that one times ten is ten. This inform­a­tion is not con­tained in the coins them­selves. Take apart a mil­lion one pound coins and you won’t find any­thing that tells you how to add them up. This abil­ity has come from train­ing and con­trol over our human func­tions. All humans LMG start in life as a blank can­vas, we are born with no con­scious know­ledge of math. We can’t tell the time, add up or sub­tract. The aver­age of 16 years of school gifts us this abil­ity. No other animal has evolved such con­trol over this func­tion. We can even use the LMG in an abstract mode: math.

Since I have learned that 1 + 1 = 2 through exper­i­ment­a­tion and rein­force­ment of this idea, I have gained some level of con­trol over the LMG. Com­bined with the input from the func­tions of lan­guage and argu­ment I can express true math­em­at­ical func­tions in words and writ­ing, or even just in my con­scious mind.

Ever asked your­self how you just know the answer to a math ques­tion? The LMG tells you. It does the math for you. This simple part of all anim­als has, in us, developed far far bey­ond its nat­ural level and it is never wrong. When you know some­thing you just know it. Math experts say their abil­ity is to them as music was to Beeth­oven. He said that when it came to music he could just play, he could feel the notes in his head. This too is the LMG. It is the part of you that expresses joy in all math­em­at­ical situ­ations whether they are phys­ical, such as sport, or abstract.

It is the LMG that see all math­em­at­ical pat­terns in nature too. Spheres, tri­angles, are all beau­ti­ful to him. It is he who adores the shapes con­tained in archi­tec­ture and bridges. Again the taste of these objects is defined for you by the LMG.

All of these things are trained reac­tions. The LMG is born blank. It first input comes from the know­ing shape of the mother. The com­fort shape of the bosom (some­thing I have never trained it out of!). From that moment on it is in train­ing. Take spar­ing, so much is going on when you on the mat, but the LMG is there with you. High speeds, dis­tance to objects, and tim­ings. Aware­ness of space around you, in front, and behind. Know­ledge of grav­ity and bal­ance affect­ing you and cor­rec­tional move­ments based on under­stand­ings of your bod­ies lim­its. All handled for you by you subconscious’s LMG. When you first stepped onto a mat these things were alien to you, and you had to learn them. You also had to prac­tice them. This is where the LMG got his train­ing, through the exper­i­ences you had whilst out on driv­ing les­sons, and he never stops learning.

But how does it work?

The oper­a­tion of the LMG is based in real­ity. The fact he needs train­ing shows his oper­a­tion is not inde­pend­ent of the world around you, rather he relies on that for his input. Even when per­form­ing 3d visu­al­isa­tions in your head, such as count­ing some coins in your mind, you are recre­at­ing his input for him. All the clues are there in your mind for him to act upon. His greatest power comes when you don’t give him any con­tra­dict­ing inputs form the con­scious mind and just let him get on with it. This is what in mar­tial arts is called Zan­shin or com­bat awareness.

Take mar­tial com­bat. Two com­batants square off and draw up stances. The fight begins. In com­bat you don’t have time to think or you loose. For example: in fen­cing, one has to let go with ones mind and let the body act on instinct. This instinct is con­trolled by the LMG. He looks as math­em­at­ics data com­ing from the senses and passes this inform­a­tion to other uncon­scious parts of the brain. They pass back what actions to take and the LMG, who is totally groun­ded in the moment and just pro­cessing data like crazy, makes the play. The sword arm moves down and parry’s. Then in one swift move­ment whilst the oppon­ent brings his arm back up to block your reposte, your LMG spots the move­ment and turns your sword arms reposte into a dis­en­gage which circles under the oppon­ents now high block and strikes. All this hap­pens in the merest blink of an eye. If you had thought about it you would not even got the parry in let alone the reposte!

Zan­shin is the con­scious mind put­ting its feet up and let­ting the brain act as an instru­ment of com­bat. The LMG is in total con­trol when the mind is turned off. All the mind does is sug­gest tac­tics, it doesn’t carry them out and it tries like hell to remain aloof from the whole thing, lest emo­tions and fear or frus­tra­tion hamper the per­form­ance of the LMG’s sub­con­scious crew and you loose. This is the mean­ing of the fam­ous phrase:

“Fear causes hes­it­a­tion, and hes­it­a­tion causes all you worst fears to come true”

No won­der the doc­trine of Zen was of interest to the Samurai! Its whole nature is one where the con­scious mind devel­ops a detach­ment to the hap­pen­ings of the body.

The fact that it takes years of train­ing to get any good at sports such as fen­cing or Taek­wondo leads me to reit­er­ate the real­ity ground­ing of the LMG. Even in men­tal sports, such as chess, the mind and LMG work together. The mind, sug­gest­ing tac­tics, and focus­ing both on the men­tal pro­jec­tion of the pos­sible coun­ters to the next few moves together with the LMG passing the data back and forth to the memory. The data is all ana­lysed by the LMG for its math­em­at­ical con­tent, this is then passed back through the memory onto the mind which sees the effect played out as the sug­ges­ted sequence of pieces moves around the men­tal board.

How­ever, the LMG also has much more fun­da­mental and mundane uses: Time keep­ing. It is he which counts the seconds and minutes of the day. He that acts as the alarm clock, telling you that that pie needs tak­ing out of the oven, or that the data from the hypo­thal­amus com­bined with his know­ledge of the hours since you last slept means that your prob­ably a little tired.

But it is sci­ence that the LMG gets his most valu­able use. The math used in sci­ence all comes from the train­ing lav­ished on the LMG. The cal­cu­la­tions whizz­ing around inside the minds of astro­phys­i­cists are almost impossible for them to grasp in one total­ity let alone put down in paper. It is the LMG who does the work­ing out of any math­em­at­ical func­tions needed to pro­cess the inform­a­tion. The speed that he works gives the mind enough input at such a speed that it can “see” the whole idea. Without his speed this would be impossible. Again, func­tion­ing in con­junc­tion with the memory he provides the mind with the math­em­at­ical answers to any ques­tions instantly. Thus the whole equa­tion can be keep in con­stant reit­er­a­tion, chopped up, passed back­wards, paused, speeded up and stopped all because the pro­cessing of the LMG is so quick.

The role the LMG plays in our lives is immense. The train­ing lav­ished on him by many turns him into a mighty engine. Our mind relies on his func­tion­ing to pro­cess such things as art­icles of faith, know­ledge, and even love. He is the tur­bine of our mind.

But is there more?

The ques­tion is can we improve his abil­it­ies bey­ond the nor­mal. Yes, most def­in­itely. Unless you should have a defect­ive brain (many do) where learn­ing becomes impossible the LMG can be sharpened along with the other func­tions of the mind to an almost razor sharp point. A great instru­ment which can look at the stars and count ever single one, work out the func­tion­ing of the world around us and our place in it.

Take relativ­ity, and all other higher level sci­entific the­or­ies. They use the LMG in all instances. They are expres­sions of the LMG’s under­stand­ing of math. It is thanks to him that we have any under­stand­ing of math at all. It is quite pos­sible that some­where in the cos­mos there are beings without any LMG. Ima­gine that, ignor­ant of math in any form. Also ima­gine the idea that the func­tion­ing of real­ity may be dif­fer­ent in these places. One plus one may equal five. That is harder to ima­gine pre­cisely because the LMG is scream­ing at you that one plus one equals two. This may be his only weakness.

Com­ing from the west­ern spiral arm of the galaxy known as Milky Way, human beings have always been sub­jec­ted to the local laws of this area of space. But, as all sci­ent­ists know, our under­stand­ing of these laws is not per­fect. Since this under­stand­ing comes in no small part from the use of the LMG is could be him that is at fault. Or rather our train­ing of him and his evol­u­tion­ary path that he has taken to where he is today.

Could there be deeper under­stand­ings of math lay­ing in wait for the next evol­u­tion of our LMG tool? Could, one day, humans actu­ally know what it’s like to know one plus one equals five?

Per­haps, just tan­tal­isingly out of reach, lays the uprooted floor­boards of the uni­verse that requires us to let go of even the LMG. Or is our small minds input doomed to be restric­ted by what we per­ceive as real­ity? The func­tion­ing of the LMG is the base of all sci­ence. A thor­ough exam­in­a­tion of his mul­ti­tude of tal­ents awaits par two of this document.

Until then: rejoice! You do know math! Whenever you need him he is there! So take the little fella’ out for walks, play sport, sharpen your mind, open you con­scious­ness, allow him to be in con­trol and take in some great music.

Your Little Math Genius will love you for it!

By Basho

Inspired by D.Adams

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