Key To Optical Illusion

[FearlessFreep]

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080602-foresee-future.html

My first thought was I wonder if there is a way to take advantage of that 1/10sec lag/future percpetion for Martial Arts

 

[crushing]

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/080602-foresee-future.html

My first thought was I wonder if there is a way to take advantage of that 1/10sec lag/future percpetion for Martial Arts

For sporting MA, make this your patch:

While their brain is in the future, kick 'em in the head in the present.

 

[MA-Caver]

1/10th of a second into the future...
As MA-ists we do that already. Those who have trained and have experienced tournaments, real-life fights have the experience to "see it coming". Though we may not always avoid it, we do avoid it with our blocks (whatever art we study) and counters.
It's just one more tool in our personal tool boxes that we can use to give us that slight edge of advantage over our opponent or attacker(s).
We train and train and train to have folks launch punches, kicks in our direction and we block and counter them. Doing this repeatedly we are subconsciously learning to read body movements the slight dip of either shoulder that tells us the arm is moving, the sudden lift or tilt of the body that says there's a kick coming, all within our peripheral vision that has been trained right along side everything else.
We'll probably see it coming but our reaction time is going to vary. We may see that fist 1/10th of a second right before it slams into our eye. We can't always be 100% aware of everything. We're mainly civilians for cripes sake. Civilians are supposed to live civil and peaceful lives. But living as sheepdogs we can at least catch the wolves 1/10th of a second before they strike... that may be all that we need.

 

[arnisador]

My first thought was I wonder if there is a way to take advantage of that 1/10sec lag/future percpetion for Martial Arts

Yes, I had the same thought when I read that--a point sparring champion like Chuck Norris must be doing something exceptionally well in this regard!

 

[tellner]

Very cool article. Thanks for finding it.

 

[Deaf Smith]

For sporting MA, make this your patch:

While their brain is in the future, kick 'em in the head in the present.

Not a patch... but a tattoo on the forehead. Sure would distract them.

Deaf

 

[exile]

I love this stuff—it illustrates, simply and clearly, how our senses are not simply passive intakes of data from the world, but instead are the yield of complex computational processes carried out by assemblies of specialized neural tissue.

A familar example is the nearly half-century old random dot stereogram. If you present each eye separately with a set of data points, in the form of black and white pixels, which are off-shifted in just the way they would be if the two eyes were presented with a particular three-dimensional object, then, with a bit of training, it is possible to train your eyes to focus separately in a way which leads you to actually see that three dimensional object, even though there is no such animal physically present—just the two off-shifted dot matrices! There is a simple example, with explanation of how it's done, here. There has been a lot of work on the nature of the computation, and the local algorithms that implement this computation, in visual psychophysics, and the actual stereograms themselves have gotten pretty bloody intricate and fancy; see http://www.ied.edu.hk/has/vrdemo/rds/ for some intriguing examples.

Both the stereogram model of 3-D perception and the stuff that the OP article is talking about are based on the by now overwhelmingly successful model of vision as the construction of a mental scene based on synthesizing visual input data of several different kinds, and 'squeezing' these data using sophisticated mathematical tricks—tricks that are simulated by particular cell arrays at various places in the visual system. These optical illusions and weird effects are actually evidence for the existence of detailed computational procedures wired into our brain neuroanatomy; the explanation the chap cited in the article gives is in perfect accord with this model of how visual perception, and our senses generally, work.

It took me about a week to learn how recover the three-dimensional image visual by looking at stereograms with the right blurring of focus that allows the left eye to see only the left sterogram, the right eye only the right stereogram, and then allow higher-order processes to compute out the three-dimensional situation that, according to the brain's take on things, must have given rise to those two separate inputs. Definitely worth it—being able to see 3-D images, without any special equipment, when all you have are two dimensional inputs, is a real kick... eerie, but fun as hell!

 

[jks9199]

I
It took me about a week to learn how recover the three-dimensional image visual by looking at stereograms with the right blurring of focus that allows the left eye to see only the left sterogram, the right eye only the right stereogram, and then allow higher-order processes to compute out the three-dimensional situation that, according to the brain's take on things, must have given rise to those two separate inputs. Definitely worth it—being able to see 3-D images, without any special equipment, when all you have are two dimensional inputs, is a real kick... eerie, but fun as hell!

Are these those damn Magic Eye things that are supposed to have images in 'em if you stare at them just right? They've never worked for me... I'm very, very left eye dominant and I just have never been able to see the damn things. I'm not 100% convinced they're not just a huge practical joke that I'm not in on...

 

[exile]

Are these those damn Magic Eye things that are supposed to have images in 'em if you stare at them just right? They've never worked for me... I'm very, very left eye dominant and I just have never been able to see the damn things. I'm not 100% convinced they're not just a huge practical joke that I'm not in on...

Honest, they're for real! Talk to a field geologist, especially one working for a mining or fuel exploration concern, and they'll tell you that this is how they do 90% of their exploration: the pilot goes up and shoots a bunch of photos of terrain, it's computer-massaged to give the stereogram pairs I was talking about, and then the geologist does just what I said, looking at the 3-D results of the computer-generated 2-D image pairs. There are major clues that emerge in the 3-D picture which aren't directly available from the 2-D images, and the eye of an experienced field researcher can pick them out and allow shrewd guesses of what kind of resources are where, if anywhere, in this landscape.

It does take a bit of time and dedicated work. The first few times I tried it I got nowhere (more accurately: I got slightly nauseous from the effort). But it does work, and the proof is, if you code up a message in random-dot sterograms, one that will emerge in 3-D but is completely buried in the 2-D, I—or anyone who's learned the trick—can tell you what the message is, without fail, every time. It's real, and anyone can do it... but you have to be willing to spend a certain amount of time doing something slightly unpleasant to get there. But hey, we're martial artists—we should be used to doing that sort of thing!

PS: some more examples, for those who these exercises (with level of resolution difficulty indicated—YMMV):

http://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/Stereo.shtml (intermediate)
http://www.ixtlan.ru/faq.php (very advanced)
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~jdt1/vision/lab3/rds1.html (elementary)
http://www.nd.edu/~busiforc/handout...m Dot Stereograms/Random Dot Stereograms.html
(intermediate)

 

[kidswarrior]

1/10th of a second into the future...
As MA-ists we do that already. Those who have trained and have experienced tournaments, real-life fights have the experience to "see it coming". Though we may not always avoid it, we do avoid it with ... (the) tells...

Good point, Caver: experience plus practice, in order to see the split-second 'tell'. 1/10 of a second--100 milliseconds--can be just enough when your tail's in a bind.

And exile, I see your point. But I'm just a poor teacher with a somewhat violent past to draw on (tho long ago), so while acknowledging the concept you're so adroitly making, it's mostly too deep for me. :bangahead:

 

[exile]

And exile, I see your point. But I'm just a poor teacher with a somewhat violent past to draw on (tho long ago), so while acknowledging the concept you're so adroitly making, it's mostly too deep for me. :bangahead:

I don't know that it's deep so much as weird...really weird, because the message seems to be this: there's a world out there, all right. But your eyes don't actually see it as it is. They just report back to your brain a bunch of data of a certain kind... and it's your brain that figures out what that world looks like, and presents its results to you in the form of sensations we call 'sight'. And all the senses (including our language capability) work the same way. Give the eye deceptive data, and the brain will brilliantly compute the wrong answer every time.

In the end, nothing involving consciousness and awareness turns out to be simple, eh?

 

[FearlessFreep]

Good point, Caver: experience plus practice, in order to see the split-second 'tell'. 1/10 of a second--100 milliseconds--can be just enough when your tail's in a bind.

Actually when I asked the question I had something far different in mind.

There's a difference between anticipating a move based on position and movement and taking advantage of the human vision system to project forward in order to make your opponent think he's seeing something he is not while you are really doing something else.

I don't know if that's possible..

 

[FearlessFreep]

Give the eye deceptive data, and the brain will brilliantly compute the wrong answer every time.

Can you do that on purpose? That's my wondering.. Not just a feint or fake but actually deceptive visual data knowing that the brain will conclude the wrong answer about it

 

[exile]

Can you do that on purpose? That's my wondering.. Not just a feint or fake but actually deceptive visual data knowing that the brain will conclude the wrong answer about it

I think that in principle you could—but it would require a very sophisticated understanding of how someone in motion visually interprets another moving object. The fact of motion would vastly exaggerate the complexity of the task, because stuff like peripheral vision and real-time motion (on top of the 'simulated' motion created by the convergence of the lines in the OP optical illusion at the vanishing point) would come into play. I'm not saying it couldn't be done; that would be a classic error. But since, in contrast to the OP optical illusion (where a 2-D image triggers erroneous effects based on 3-D calculation), you're trying to use actual 3-D motion to create the illusion of somewhat different 3-D motion, the sheer scale of the problem is ramped up significantly.

 

[kidswarrior]

Actually when I asked the question I had something far different in mind.

There's a difference between anticipating a move based on position and movement and taking advantage of the human vision system to project forward in order to make your opponent think he's seeing something he is not while you are really doing something else.

I don't know if that's possible..

I get ya, F-F, but since I have no clue, chose to deal with it in terms I could understand.

 

[MA-Caver]

Actually when I asked the question I had something far different in mind.

There's a difference between anticipating a move based on position and movement and taking advantage of the human vision system to project forward in order to make your opponent think he's seeing something he is not while you are really doing something else.

I don't know if that's possible..

Can you do that on purpose? That's my wondering.. Not just a feint or fake but actually deceptive visual data knowing that the brain will conclude the wrong answer about it

Well much of the art of deception is alot like the accuracy of a gun. 50% is the gun itself and the remaining 50 goes to the shooter, just as how the MA-ist/defender is going to be deceptive and the remainder is the attacker's willingness or gullibility (if you will) to be deceived.
A well trained martialist knows not to rely only on visual clues, even if their "target" is directly ahead of them.
During one such street fight I gave the impression that I was holding a blade in one hand when it was actually in my other, I could see the guy's eyes was constantly flicking to the "empty-hand" and back to me (my eyes/face), but I had the (unintentional) advantage of being partly in shadow and while letting see (my) blade in that hand he missed the shift and kept thinking it was in that hand he originally saw it. Something I guess kept giving him the impression that I was still holding it in that hand.
I'm not going to go into the outcome of it only that it ended in a draw of sorts because of the timely arrival of LEO's. But it is using psychology and tricks of the light to do as you mentioned tricking the (opponent's) eye into thinking it's seeing something that really wasn't there.
Fear has a lot of influence on what we want to see or don't see. So that plays into it's part. If you have it in your opponent then you've obviously got that advantage. Basically I was just plain lucky that day.
But it can be done without weapons. But honestly I can't think of anything else to call it but feinting. Move the left hand slightly to draw attention to it and actually punching with the right (or vice-versa).

 

[FearlessFreep]

I get ya, F-F, but since I have no clue, chose to deal with it in terms I could understand.

I understand I can barely get my mind around it as it is so I don't even know if my questions are sensible.

 

[Em MacIntosh]

Fighting is about reacting with proper muscle-memory and hoping you're right. Any thinking has to be done in the present and should not inhibit your reflex actions. There are spots of time where you can think about the situation or come up with a quick, mimetic strategy but due to it's unpredictable nature you have to go with the flow. You know how fast your heart beats when you almost get blind-sided by a car? That's a lot faster than a tenth of a second. Train to use it, like the adrenaline dump.

 

[DavidCC]

Can you do that on purpose? That's my wondering.. Not just a feint or fake but actually deceptive visual data knowing that the brain will conclude the wrong answer about it

Yes it can be done, it is called "spatial distortion". Can I do it? Heck no. Doc told me about it. he related it to watching a pretty girl and tripping over your own feet, or thinking there was one more stair than there was. If you really want to know, ask him!

It's not new information though. I don't know if it was Musashi or Munenori who wrote that if you can sufficiently disturb the other's rhythm, he can't even "step over a drain" which might have had more metaphorical meaning to an 18th century Japanese swordsman but I think the point is still valid

 

[jks9199]

Honest, they're for real!
...
It does take a bit of time and dedicated work. The first few times I tried it I got nowhere (more accurately: I got slightly nauseous from the effort). But it does work, and the proof is, if you code up a message in random-dot sterograms, one that will emerge in 3-D but is completely buried in the 2-D, I—or anyone who's learned the trick—can tell you what the message is, without fail, every time. It's real, and anyone can do it... but you have to be willing to spend a certain amount of time doing something slightly unpleasant to get there. But hey, we're martial artists—we should be used to doing that sort of thing!

PS: some more examples, for those who these exercises (with level of resolution difficulty indicated—YMMV):

You can say it works, but I've tried quite extensively, using various methods, and still don't see anything but a bunch of silly dots with a little bit of a repeating pattern... I think I'm just wired a wee bit weird. I know I'm so strongly left eye dominant that the eye doctor has given up on figuring out what the correction is for my right eye... especially since it's not much of a correction.