Clarke’s Third Law:
“Any technology when sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic”
Now that I have got your attention, I will endeavour to keep it. Welcome to this month’s look intothe abyss of the mind where I will be stepping into the world of illusion, exploring how a little cross training in magic tricks can give us the edge in hand to hand combat.
As well as practicing martial arts, I have, for many years, been practicing magic, specifically the more nebulous area of mind reading!
I expect this statement may have evoked an abrupt response in your emotional trajectory, perhaps followed by some likely self reassurance that your mind could not be read by a mere mortal like me….. Please take a moment to enjoy the irony.
I digress, so what exactly is mind reading? Is it some special power or is it something far more mundane, something we all use everyday without ever realising it. The answer, sadly (depending on your point of view), is the latter. The expression us scientists use to define our ability to unconsciously mind read is called theory of mind. This is an ability exhibited by higher forms of life whereby actions other than verbal are interpreted and used to construct a notion of the other person’s actions and intentions giving us empathetic insight into their thinking without them having to literally spell it out to us. For example a half hearted smile used to punctuate a statement like “yes I like it” is probably better read as something less pleasing than vocalised.
This activity is not something we are always conscious of though we can develop skills to learn to read people on a more conscious level. A professional poker player, for example, will look for reads on his opponent as will an experienced fighter. This is hardly broadcast news but there is a flip side to this that I want to explore here.
Magicians are all to aware that people are continuously trying to figure out what they are doing and anticipating what they are going to do next and it is precisely this train of thought that we hijack and steer away from what we actually want to avoid showing them. We literally steer their thinking the wrong way at the right time. We call it misdirection, not to be confused with distraction!
Contrary to popular belief, the hand is not quicker than the eye so how does a magician get something to vanish in his hands if you’re looking directly at him. The answer lies in how we construct our reality. To most of our understanding what we see is what is there and there is no reason to believe otherwise but the mind is perhaps the greatest illusionist of them all. The fact is we take in massive volumes of information every millisecond and our ability to take all this information and consider it is limited so the mind in all its brilliance offers a compromise. Instead it takes bits of information and composes a kind of best guess scenario. So our reality is more of a guesstimate than an exact blue print of our environment and in order to facilitate this, our brains have to
take an awful lot of shortcuts. The brain doesn’t always wait for reality to finish its sentence. In fact once it has enough information on the event it simply assumes the rest based on what it expects from previous experience. So we don’t watch the magician place the coin in his hand and look to quantify every little detail as our minds believe they have seen enough at the outset of the action and compose the rest subconsciously for us. So just a little gesture of passing the coin into his hand is all the magician needs to allude to the fact that he did just that as our brains took care of the rest.
So whether or not the coin was actually placed is not really relevant as the brain has already assumed it was, composed this in our reality and moved on to see what happens next. Much as we might try to focus our attentions on the detail we are hardwired to compose based on intuitive observation of the event and move on as soon as possible to get the next bit of information.
Trying to slow down the intake is counterintuitive and it is this fact that magic exploits. Unarmed combaters employ a similar concept called the feint. Half fed motions cause the brain to finish the action at a subconscious level and this in turn causes our opponent to become falsely engrossed in the wrong motion offering us an opportunity to exploit. Magicians call this time period of exposure a frame and in fighting we similarly are looking to create frames of opportunity through subconsciously misdirecting our opponent’s attention to the wrong place at theright time.
Bruce Lee, the father of MMA, believed that when two opponents of equal speed, skill and power were faced off that the master of the feint would be victorious. This, I believe, is more important than ever today as we enter the era of high speed poker tactics being employed to gain the edge on advanced opponents. As we push the boundaries of our physical selves to nature’s boundaries, we open up the avenues of the mind to increase our winning wealth. The mind, inevitably, will become ever relevant in the battle for supremacy in this 3rd generation of warriors; it is time to step up the game.
