Counter Ambush Neuroscience Session 2: Counter Ambush Neurophysiology

There's a region, inside the brain. It's an approximation of the brain. The region inside the brain that deals with our sensory perceptions and our instinctive and intuitive responses. It's called the limbic region. It's part of the midbrain.

It's part of the paleomammalian structures. Not the reptile brain, reptile brain is instinctive, automatic, reflexive. This is a more sophisticated part of the human brain. So a more evolved part of the human brain. It deals not only with physical things but also with behavioral issues and emotional issues.

The important thing to understand is that all of our sensory data, all of the things brought into our body then into our brain specifically through our senses, touch, smell, sight pass through this limbic region and essentially get filtered, get examined, get processed at a very low level, very efficient low level, not very complex. To look for stimuli that will elicit instinctive automatic reactions. That's the first thing that's important to understand. All of the sensory data gets filtered through this limbic region in the brain. There's a structure on each side of the brain called the amygdala.

It's part of the the cingulate gyrus, this horseshoe shaped business. It's part of the limbic region. Not really important that you understand the science about it, but I know that some of you are interested in this enough that you'll want to research it, right? I'm not a neuroscientist by trade, right? It's important, I think to understand this stuff at some level, so you understand why you're training in a certain way.

Why it's important to take this counter ambush approach how it's possible, that you are reacting to something that you can't even explain. How you're making decisions, but you're not aware of having even made that decision necessarily. How you can learn to do things without having to choreograph each step, right? This is all controlled right in here. We've got the instinctive reactions so the amygdala screens all this information that's coming in looking for certain sets of stimuli, certain things.

Proximity, is something very close to us. That's gonna make us react in a certain way. A flash of light, a loud noise contact, right? What happens when you touch a hot stove? Do you smell something funny in the air?

Look down, realize it's your flesh burning and turning into smoke. Realize the stove is on, choose to remove your hand and then go get mad at someone for leaving the stove on. Or do you pull your hand off and then go through one or more of those other things? You pull your hand off. Of course, that's reflexive.

You get stung by a mosquito, "Man I'm really mad that that mosquito just stung me." I would like to now take my hand and try to crush its little body up against my flesh. No, there's no cognitive -- That doesn't happen. You get stung by a mosquito your hand reflexively, instinctively goes to the point of contact where you were hurt. Your hand just goes up there, right? And if you happen to smash that little guy then so be it.

Bonus. But your hand goes up there. There's other reasons that you-- if you have pain, you rub that area. That stimulation actually can block the pain transmitters to the brain. So you rub your leg, that's instinctive.

You may not even be perceiving that what you're doing is you are occupying the gate in your brain that feels pain and soreness and tells you that your leg hurts. You're doing that with the tactile stimulation of the muscle and the skin and the fascia that holds the muscle together. Nobody may have told you, you didn't know that. Maybe, now you do. You're stuck with that knowledge now You're going to rub your leg.

And be like "Oh my God. I know what I'm doing that now. That's awesome." All right. Peanut butter and jelly, why does it taste good together? I don't know.

I do know fats and sugars and salts all put together. Was better when I didn't know, but now I know, now you know, you're stuck with that. So there's these things that happen because of this limbic region which is awesome. Natural, instinctive, protective, positive, good things that have kept humanity pushing forward and being awesome for a long time because they just happen and that's where it's controlled. In other animals too, not just humans.

This area is also responsible for intuitive things. This area is also responsible for intuitive responses. So we'll distinguish; we have instinctive reactions, we have intuitive responses. Intuitive things have to be learned, or they're improvised. They're not automatic.

Learned or improvised. We also have this-- running out of colors. We also have this ability in the even more evolved part of the human brain to make conscious decisions, to be very aware that we are going to do something. To make a conscious decision. So this is a situation where you look over and you see someone who's about to hurt a family member.

You choose to intercede. You choose to go over there, and move your hands in a way that will apply force to that person and make them stop. Right? As opposed to you're walking down the little hallway and somebody comes around the corner and you move your hands in a way that makes them stop coming towards you. There's instinctive and then there's planned, cognitive, a choice.

We saw something, we processed it, we analyzed it, we made a decision, we executed. Somewhere in the middle is intuitive. Somewhere in the middle is intuitive. If we practice our close quarters defensive striking, our elbows, our knees, our palm strikes, maybe grappling skills. If we practice that stuff, if we get really comfortable with it, if we work with other people, our training partners, to elicit those sensations and learned tactile responses of what distance I moved my elbow, the direction I decide to strike, what part of my arm I want to come in contact with what part of their body.

If we learned that at a very high level all of a sudden I'm walking down that street sidewalk, guy comes out of the alley, rushing at me. I do the instinctive thing and then as I focus, part of the instinct, I recognize that that person is trying to hurt me and I intuitively in this position throw this vertical elbow strike as their face comes in. I intuitively strike with my palm. I don't just push them away, reflexively and instinctively. I strike with my palm at their jaw.

And then I lower my center of gravity. And I keep my hands out in front of me. And now that person standing there, now I'm aware, I'm processing information at a higher analytical level. And now I either make the decision to grab them and throw a knee strike or I make the decision to back away and draw on my gun or I make the decision to back away and turn and run. So we can have these little scenarios in just a matter of seconds, where we go from instinctive, to intuitive, to cognitively planned choreographed, in control, on balanced decision making.

If we don't take into account this part of it and we don't develop the skill for that part of it, no martial artists in the world is going to take the day seven martial arts student and say "so here's how you want to throw an elbow. You want to kind of put your body way off balance get up on your toe, get your other foot in the air and then just kind of go like that." Like, that's not how you throw elbow strikes in karate land, right? But you might need to throw that elbow strike because that's the only thing you've got as that person is coming in to headbutt you and their face is there and your elbows there, right? That's not the same as being up against a bag and driving in and closing your hip and rotating and getting all this energy and this power and I'm awesome, right? That's like I'm scared, but I'm doing something more than just pushing away instinctively because I've developed this intuitive ability to throw this tool against that target.

And then once I get on balance I can make the cognitive decision. If you skip the moment and you can't do that because the head was here and you're just hoping that somehow you magic yourself into this fighting stance and now you can throw your powerful elbow. You might get lucky, your body may instinctively or intuitively improvise you into that position. But it's a heck of a lot better if you can integrate your natural reactions and develop some intuitive, non-cognitive responses to get you through that storm, to get you back on balance, to fight you through the ambush. Counter, ambush.

If you're surprised, if it's chaotic, you need to capitalize on what your brain does really, really well which is react automatically and respond intuitively. And your training model is gonna help facilitate that. The issue is that it would be great if we could jump right to, you know I see something with my eyes, the information comes in, I analyze it cognitively and I send it down to the motor cortex and I make my hands do awesome things, right? But in between that process which takes relatively long, in fact, in behavioral psychology world, it's called the long path. That is the long path or the slow path of motor skill execution based on sensory input.

It involves cognitive analytical processing of the information at a detailed level. This other thing that we've got going on is the short path. Well, the fast path... the fast path is the information kind of gets hijacked by the limbic system and things get done. The hands move up reflexively, the hand slaps at the mosquito bite, the hand comes off the hot thing, and then we start analyzing.

Well, in between the two, and this is very subtle and this is very important and for some people it caused a misunderstanding of what we're about to talk about this kind of medium path. A misunderstanding of intuitive skill development leads a lot of people to just ignore the non-analytical, non-cognitive part and decide that counter ambush training isn't really that important. This is all crazy talk and we should just plan on taking control and being unbalanced and executing plan A every time if you just practice enough and train hard enough. And the misunderstanding comes from our ability to use learned skills without an awareness. Without a cognitive decision-making process.