a theory about dreaming

I’ve had this theory for years, and have tried to explain it to friends and family over cocktails with little success. Maybe it makes no sense but here goes. It’s based on the analogy of the brain being like a hard drive. I know, I know…

You can’t just write data to a hard drive. Hard drives have to be formatted before you can use them. Formatting is kind of like numbering the pages of a blank book and leaving space for an index and table of contents. After it’s formatted, whenever you write in the book or change something, you update the index and table of contents.

But it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s more like each page has to be formatted, and you can only write so much on a single page, and the pages might not be in order, so you have to leave little “continued” notes at the beginning and end of each page so that someone reading it can trace the story.

And it’s a little more complicated than that. You’d like to be able to categorize your pages but since there is limited space, you can only come up with so many categories and extra bits of information, such as the date you wrote it, the day you modified, who is allowed to read it, who is allowed to erase or modify it, etc. These categories and tags have to be on every page so they better be useful. For example, the way most Unix filesystems are formatted, you don’t know the creation date for a file. It’s just not recorded and there’s no direct way to record it with the file. That saves space on every page.

Okay, the brain is very different. A slowly changing network of neurons, that frankly I don’t know the first thing about. But it does store and retrieve information. I know that if I study something before going to sleep, it’s much easier to learn it the next day. I know that it is difficult to learn completely new things (as in unusual and outside my skill set). I know that my dreams tend to be chopped up absurd versions of what happens to me in real life. I know that we forget our dreams. Massive quantities of dream experience are forgotten by everyone every morning. So if I’m forgetting 99% of my dreams but ’sleeping on it’ tends to help one understand things, what gives?

There is a Russian saying – “Morning is wiser.”

How in the heck does running your brain in high gear (dreaming) and then forgetting all of it make you wiser?

My theory is that daily experience is so complicated that our neural structures (no idea what sort of structures – could be actual connections or just collections of reinforcement in a network?) need to be customized to deal with it optimally ahead of time. Unlike a hard drive which might get formatted in NTFS for Windows, or mostly Ext3 for Unix, our neural structures get all sorts of pre-formatting done to them while we are sleeping, to be ready for the types of experience our brain expects us to have.

That’s the theory. Dreaming is your brain formatting itself.

center

If you take more than a few aikido classes, at some point you’ll try to do a technique, and nothing will happen. Your partner will say “connect it to your center.” You’ll try to swallow your frustration, feel connected somehow, and the technique might work. As you do more aikido you get better at “connecting to the center”.

They say the center is a point a couple inches below the navel and inside.

A two-day aunkai seminar seems to have done more for my “center” than several years of aikido. Naturally, the years of aikido informed me about what to look for and I had already developed some sense of it. Aunkai is a training regimen, not a martial art, and you have to train regularly to get the benefits, but with just those two 6-hour sessions, plus a little work on my own, I’m already feeling it in class. More power, better stability, better ukemi.

In short, forget about the center. Connect and maintain your frame, and connect to the ground. Moving with your center will happen naturally. These guys give a great seminar, well worth your time.

Snaky Balance 2

More on trying to see balance as a function of feet…

Practiced morote tori kokyu nage today. It’s kind of like this, except nage grabs with both hands, which as our teacher pointed out, is an incredibly stupid way to attack someone.

You’ll notice that nage’s elbow drops early in the technique. This plus footwork put uke’s balance on the outside edge of the heel closest to nage. Nage rotates slightly, accepting the momentum but rolling uke’s balance along the outside edge of that same foot to the little toe while compressing himself, bending at the knees. Uke is about to fall forward in front of nage.

Uke shouldn’t like this and will naturally pull away. Nage augments the response, thereby planting most of uke’s balance on the far heel and twisting at the same time, standing up straight and extending arms overhead as if drinking a large stein of beer and then tossing it away (ta-da!). If momentum goes out over the uke’s heel, uke falls.

Uke compensates by adopting a wide stance and spreading balance between two feet. But to hold onto nage’s arm, uke finds himself leaning backwards.

This is where the snaky balance comes in. Nage must succeed in getting uke’s balance headed for the back foot to make uke want to compensate. At the point where uke’s balance is shared between his feet he is actually on his heels. Nage continues rotating just a bit more and then drops the sack of potatoes on uke, who falls like a drunk doing the limbo.

Snaky Balance

Taking balance is one of those huge topics in aikido. I’m going to zero in on a fine point in that expansive arena, though it may not seem like it at first.

Advanced aikidoists have a hobby of borrowing just a smidgen of your balance and keeping it for a while. It’s odd to go from attacking to someone to feeling somewhat violated as a shadow marionette takes over your actions, subconsciously searching for a way to get that balance back.

I’m not that advanced. In fact, I can’t even get close to doing this except with a VERY cooperative uke. For now I’m going to simplify the problem so I too may one day blithely toy with uke’s balance. <evil wringing of hands>

My narrow problem starts with those continuous arcing, spiraling, and winding paths that uke’s center may trace when unbalanced. I’ve gotten to the point where I can sense these motions if I’m paying attention and the throw goes well. But I still don’t know how to find these paths. I’m not laboring under the misconception that one could produce a three-dimensional diagram, rotate it in front of someone, and reliably say, this is what uke’s center does in shomen uchi sankyo ura. But I do think one could show a set of paths and say reliably that this where the technique will happen optimally.

To take balance, we’re taught to visualize kazushi points at ground level, on the mat. If you draw an imaginary line from uke’s center to the kazushi point, that is roughly the vector to propel uke’s center in order to take balance. That’s all well and good but it’s a primitive kick in the butt toward actually taking balance in a dynamic situation. For one thing, kazushi points are static and uke is moving. Moreover, uke’s weight is constantly shifting. So a real visualization would resemble atomic orbitals or the umbra of various shadows overlapping. The overlaps would be the conventional kazushi points. But at other points in the technique, or if uke suddenly compensates, the kazushi points can be completely elsewhere. Also, uke can steal balance back from nage, which means there are kazushi points in mid-air too.

No matter how flexible, wily, or tricky you are, if you are standing up, then the way your feet meet the floor determines most of your balance. Imagine the footprint of a person standing on one foot and consider the outline of the footprint as describing the limits of balance. When the center of weight is outside the outline, balance is lost. Inside, balance is kept. On the line: balance is precarious, and curiously, the object being balanced becomes easy to move a short distance, like when a box is tilted onto a corner.

So I have this hypothesis that if one succeeds in stealing a smidgen of uke’s balance throughout much of a technique, one will be following, in a kazushi-point way, the winding edge of the bones in their feet that are in closest contact with the floor. That is, if you projected the three-dimensional curve of the motion of their center onto the two-dimensional floor, the outline should mirror the edges of the foot bearing most of the weight. As uke compensates, pivots and moves his/her feet, the path should shift correspondingly.