Rituals.

Your tongue contains quite a lot of nerves and provides your brain with an unceasing torrent of distracting information. You will find this information slows to a trickle if you hold your tongue between your teeth. However, this is a stupid thing to do during a fight. If you find yourself doing that, stop.. Then press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. It has the same effect and you don't risk serious injury.

Why do I mention this? Well, it has struck me that we all have our little quirks with mask on head and sword in hand. The master that I have the honour of being trained by reacts very differently in competition to how he does in freeplay, and as such he encourages his protegés to engage in competition even when the odds are against them.

I have noticed that my mind goes blank shortly after the salute, not in a bad way- I've just stopped thinking and.. well.. fight.. This can lead to problems, since I have noticed a tendency to mirror other people's fighting styles. This will probably fade once I know what I am doing and have learned enough to develop my own preferences, but then again, I would like to keep a little of that chameleonic tendency- knowing how your opponent fights on an instinctive level is a useful tool.

But I digress, rituals are important in their own way. In my opinion, Oriental martial arts overruse them. I could do some psychobabble here but quite frankly I find it insulting when people use long words to prove that they know what they're talking about, so I try not to do it as much as possible.

So the importance of ritual? Well, since it is becoming obvious that I am a fan of magic, I shall explain using Derren Brown as an example. Mr Brown is a sneaky, conniving git- he has, through the use and understanding of ritual, persuaded someone to be drunk every time he sees a certain word. This is allegedly through the use of something called Neurolinguistic programming. Although, you may as well call it semi-hypnosis. The concept involves tying a certain psychological state to a sensation, a Pavlovian response ¹ if you will. This is the mechanism behind a ritual. You also have something known as state-dependent memory- this basically means we're more likely to recall something if we are in a similar state to when we learnt it.

So, we have the mechanisms, or at least some of them. Ritual allows you to step in to 'character', we use it all the time- you hear actors saying that the defining moment of their character is stepping into those clothes for the first time. People have their routines that get them into driving mode. Every one of us has something that brings us luck in certain situations.

This doesn't bring us luck by being lucky- it does it by allowing us time to access the right parts of our brain and tie everything together into the structures that make us better fighters/drivers/pass our exams. It can act as a placebo, allowing you to become calm again and be in the original state that you were taught in. From what I have heard about the Beast's self-defence training, he knows this- but because you cannot calm down when surprised, he tries to control your emotional state to replicate how you would be feeling in a dangerous situation... but my thoughts for teachers and what aspects I think they excel at is for a different post.

So, what are your little rituals?

¹ Pavlov- Russian bloke, discovered classical conditioning. Made dogs salivate to the sound of a bell by ringing the bell and producing food at the same time. Eventually the food was not produced, but the dogs still salivated. Internal physiological effect produced by external, artificially related stimulus. If you spend a lot of time being beaten up whilst wearing a fencing mask, putting the fencing mask on should persuade your body to produce fightystuff before you get hit.