Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Discussion on the three big Chinese internals, Yiquan, Bajiquan, Piguazhang and other similar styles.

Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sat May 05, 2012 2:16 pm

CheapBastid,

I have a basic understanding of the encoding and strengthening of neural pathways and how it contributes to movement and learning, but my interest is in the re-coding process that a focus on Yi and Ting can allow for.


I won't be using colloquial or culturally specific terms in my discussion on this thread. There's nothing wrong with such terms in and of themselves, and I'm sure the readership will relate my concepts to them in various ways as they understand them, but I am interested in discussing the actual processes themselves, so I won't be running them first through the filter of colloquial Chinese internal martial arts jargon. Additionally, attempts to discuss scientific concepts using both objective, scientific terminology and culturally specific jargon at the same time has proven confusing and unfruitful in the many attempts at it that we've made here on RSF. It's generally far more useful to discuss the apples and oranges separately most of the time and make whatever connections between them as we can.

Habituating and strengthening movement is different IMHO than the 'tiny adjustments in stillness' training that can to allow for a 'wholistic' response to a partner.


I'm not sure exactly what you mean here, especially in regard to the latter phrase.

It does (of course) involve myelination (as does all movement) but it seems to approach from a de-habituation process perspective.


In real terms, there is no distinction here. A "de-habituation process perspective" is a reference to issues more related to psychology than physiology. The physiology is identical in all cases regardless of the perspective of the individual in cognition.
Last edited by Chris McKinley on Sat May 05, 2012 2:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sat May 05, 2012 2:23 pm

KEND,

Are we talking about only the kinesthetic processes, how do other factors such as visualization, emotional content etc react to strengthen memory trace


In this thread, really only the former. The latter is a whole lot of fun and just as interesting, but it quickly gets outside the scope of a single thread such as this.
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sat May 05, 2012 2:37 pm

Quigga,

You can try this for yourself. Take some time and practice for at least 4 hours on one day, preferably more. Be amazed when you start training the next day. Even though it might not be feasible for the more busy folk, this really makes a difference.


What I'm describing isn't really something that happens quite that instantaneously. Sometimes it does, especially when new links are made to existing neuroassociations. However, actual myelination is not a process that can be "forced", so to speak, through willpower, or by deciding to put in marathon sessions of training. In fact, longer training sessions such as you described, if they occur without numerous breaks, will actually be a very inefficient method of encoding specific engrams, and can often even be counterproductive. The way the information is processed for learning, the brain will often take an average of the performances within a single unbroken session. In a four hour session, there is no way to maintain perfect form over the entire session. Degradation due to fatigue, carelessness, and even a wandering mind will eventually result in a large percentage and perhaps even a majority of performances of the movement within that session to become sub-par in varying ways. This means that when the brain takes an average of the performances of that session for learning storage purposes, the average is often of substantially less quality than we would intend, and the actual results in learning can be correspondingly disappointing.

I'll toss out another Easter egg here: Instead of one long session of four hours, try breaking it up with a five-to-ten-minute break every half hour minimum. It's important that during this break, each person completely changes their focus from whatever was being trained. Think about or do anything else at all, so long as it is completely unrelated in any way to the training material. These are called Zeigarnik breaks, and what they can do for accelerated learning and retention is phenomenal. Using these Zeigarnik breaks as I recommended also takes advantage of both the Primacy and Recency effects, whereby a person is far likelier to learn and retain information that is first or last in a session of new information to be learned. This doesn't just mean sequential information, such as strings of numbers, but of any kind of information at all. Up to a point, the more frequent the breaks, the more instances of the Primacy and Recency effect we get to benefit from in a given training session.
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sat May 05, 2012 2:51 pm

For those who first read my introduction of this topic over on the Absolutely essential knowledge thread, you will notice that I included Youtube links and a recommendation of the excellent book by Daniel Coyle entitled The Talent Code. I highly recommend this book, as it is written for the layman and includes multiple examples of people who are unusually excellent performers from a wide variety of human activities, as well as the institutions, instructors and coaches that produce them, and discusses what they all have in common.

In that book, Coyle describes something known as "deep practice", and lists it as being one of the fundamental keys to the kind of success his subjects exhibit. For those reading this thread, Coyle's deep practice concept is already contained and even augmented in the Sculptor method I have herein described. This information is provided for corollary purposes for those reading both my posts and Mr. Coyle's fantastic book.
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Dmitri on Sat May 05, 2012 7:48 pm

A pro tennis coach recommended (and highly praised) that book to me, so I bought it for my wife and she thought it was by far one of the best books she had ever read on the subject; it helped her a lot with working with kids athletes (she's teaching competitive riding to kids).
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sun May 06, 2012 11:07 am

Teazer,

I was under the impression that myelination is something that happens gradually to some axons and not to others, and eventually (given the absence of degenerative disease) everyone would get similar ones myelinated.


For the purposes of this topic, we are talking specifically about motor nerves, those nerves that connect the motor cortex in the brain to the motor units in the muscles. A motor unit consists of a single motor neuron and all of the individual muscle fibers, or cells, to which that motor neuron is connected. Activation of a motor unit has the effect of stimulating it to accrue more myelin along its myelin sheath, the process called myelination. As a rule of thumb, the more use it gets, the more myelination occurs.

At current, we no longer know the upper age limit of myelination. Some of these discoveries are part of a newer field of research within neuroscience known as neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity represents part of the vanguard of current neuroscience research, and our collective knowledge of the field has grown more in the last 15to 20 years than in all years previously combined. We are truly in an era of new discovery with regard to the brain.

Is there some conveniently distilled research or article on that?


Here is an article from the March 2008 issue of Scientific American entitled White Matter Matters which provides a synopsis:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... er-matters

P.S. Excellent references, btw. Thank you much for that contribution.
Last edited by Chris McKinley on Sun May 06, 2012 11:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sun May 06, 2012 11:14 am

marqs,

Is it clear how big part nutrition / sleep / other activity done outside "training" affect myelination and encoding of the movement?


Not yet. That is exactly some of the research that's being done as we speak. We do know in a more general sense that myelination in children and other mammals is influenced by severe dietary imbalance and by other pathogenic factors, but we're only beginning to explore its effect on motor nerve myelination in adult humans.
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sun May 06, 2012 11:40 am

Ben Fisher,

Really excellent questions!

Quick question, how are you differentiating an increase in performance via myelination vs engram patterning?


I'm not, because you really can't. They essentially work as tandem processes regarding motor skills. The performance of a motor activity, i.e., a physical movement, results in stimulation of myelination in the motor nerves and further encoding of the corresponding engram in the motor cortex of the brain. The performance of that activity requires both structures and both processes together. That's why when I first introduced the concept of myelination in my OP, I also immediately introduced its tandem partner process, engram encoding.

How would you differentiate in the CNS the effect of myelination vs some other method of conduction increase (i.e. axonal diameter change, or even just grooving the pathway)?


We know very little overall about neuropathological processes such as the degenerative diseases that cause axonal diameter decrease, but we do have some good developing evidence that it has a significant negative effect on proper neurological function. We know far less about the inverse situation, in fact, we do not know if actual changes in size or composition of neural tissue is even possible, nor if it is possible via motor unit activation, engram activation, etc. That question is such a good one that at this rate it will have to wait until our children's generation at least before we can answer it fully.

How would you differentiate whether this change is occuring in the PNS vs CNS?


Changes occur in both, as I have already detailed. As to the PNS, or peripheral nervous system, myelination occurs in response to both motor unit activation predominantly, and to a lesser extent to engram activation in the motor cortex. As to the CNS, or central nervous system, encoding of the corresponding engram occurs in the motor cortex of the brain as a response to the performance of a motor activity and the resulting activation of the corresponding motor units.

How plastic is the myelination process in adults? I know that what you are describing (practice affecting myelination) occurs in children pre-puberty, but wasn't aware it continued after that.


That was the previous understanding before the current era of research. We used to think that we knew. At current, we don't actually know either the upper age limit for the process of myelination in humans, nor if there even is one, and we know even less about the very nature of neuroplasticity, nevermind its scope limitations. This is part of the absolute cutting edge of neuroscience today.
Chris McKinley

 

Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Sun May 06, 2012 11:44 am

jjy5016,

Been thinking about hsing yi's practice of walking the five fists back and forth over the course of a long field recently and why it helps so much with a number of issues. Doing a thousand reps of heng quan in a stationary stance or even walking back and forth in a large room doesn't have the same effect or feel as walking a long field does. Do you think that using the field has an effect on the engram and myelination?


The location is irrelevant, but the action of motor locution is key. Put simply, a different pattern of motor units is involved in performing the movement in a stationary fashion versus performing it while in ambulatory motion. Neither is "superior", so to speak. However, practice of each type will ingrain different motor unit activation patterns, and thus at least lightly different engrams in the motor cortex.
Chris McKinley

 

Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby middleway on Tue May 08, 2012 4:25 am

very interesting read. Thanks chris.
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Bhassler on Tue May 15, 2012 8:51 am

Hey Chris,

This is great stuff, I just haven't had time to respond. Thanks for posting.

How much movement is enough to stimulate encoding (or as I prefer to call it "engramification")? I believe that as the shoulder internally rotates, the ribcage should expand. If I practice to habituate that relationship, does it matter how far I rotate my arms? If I consistently rotate 60 degrees, will the same myelination and engramification allow me to rotate to 90 degrees just as well (assuming no difference in structural ability to physically do the movement)? Intuitively, I would say as long as I am able to feel the relationship I will get the large majority of the benefit, but I don't actually know.

We know that with declarative learning (something like "the capital of Zimbabwe is Harare") the more different associations you can make with the information, the more available it is (a mnemonic might be "zimbabwe sounds bouncy, and hare's hop, and harare sounds like hare"). Is this true of somatic learning as well? That is, if I want to increase mobility in my ribcage to increase the power of a particular movement, am I better served neurologically to repeat the exact movement and willfully get my ribs to comply, or would it be better to find as many ways to involve the ribcage in movement in general so that the region in question is better mapped in my brain and therefore more accessible? Again, intuitively and anecdotally I would say the latter.

When we train a variety of movements, are we encoding each movement in toto, or are we encoding an array of smaller movements, and simultaneously encoding a bunch of discrete relationships between those movements that can later be combined any way we choose? Can our training be organized in such a way that we have a choice, or does our nervous system choose for us?

That's probably enough for now...
What I'm after isn't flexible bodies, but flexible brains.
--Moshe Feldenkrais
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Bhassler on Tue May 15, 2012 11:58 am

Just getting caught up on the "absolutely essential knowledge" thread, and it looks like a lot of what I wrote is discussed there.
What I'm after isn't flexible bodies, but flexible brains.
--Moshe Feldenkrais
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Tue May 15, 2012 12:20 pm

Brian,

How much movement is enough to stimulate encoding?


It happens every time you move.

I believe that as the shoulder internally rotates, the ribcage should expand. If I practice to habituate that relationship, does it matter how far I rotate my arms?


Habituation is a different consideration altogether. It is a term from psychology, not physiology. The processes I have described for myelination and for encoding engrams are separate ones from habituation.

If I consistently rotate 60 degrees, will the same myelination and engramification allow me to rotate to 90 degrees just as well (assuming no difference in structural ability to physically do the movement)?


You would always have the same ability to move to 90 degrees as you always had, your caveats in place. You would, however, have a far more familiar sensation proprioceptively moving to the 60 degree point, because data pertaining to that position have been integrated into the engram through more numerous repetitions to only that degree of rotation. Put simply, it would begin to feel more comfortable, natural, etc. to stop at 60 degrees.

...if I want to increase mobility in my ribcage to increase the power of a particular movement, am I better served neurologically to repeat the exact movement and willfully get my ribs to comply, or would it be better to find as many ways to involve the ribcage in movement in general so that the region in question is better mapped in my brain and therefore more accessible?


Most definitely the former, although thankfully they're not mutually exclusive. Both are beneficial, but due to the principle of specificity, the closer you can exactly replicate a given movement with all of the component elements included and intact, the more that movement will be reinforced and eventually stored, processed and activated as a single motor engram. Proprioceptive mapping will occur in both cases equally.

When we train a variety of movements, are we encoding each movement in toto, or are we encoding an array of smaller movements, and simultaneously encoding a bunch of discrete relationships between those movements that can later be combined any way we choose?


Excellent question. The answer is, perhaps inconveniently, most definitely the former. This tendency is what gives rise to the principle of specificity. Its converse is also equally extremely important to an understanding of learning theory. If the concept is a two-edged sword, the other 'edge' is that there is a strong tendency for that engram to be reinforced as an average composite of the performances of it within a given single session of practice. This has more to do with the cognitive aspects of that engram rather than purely motor aspects, but these are vital in regard to accessibility and long-term memory storage. I mentioned more about that topic here:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11428&p=199158&hilit=+recency+primacy#p199158

and here:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=12123&p=210794&hilit=+recency+primacy#p210794

Existing separate motor engrams can be associated together through the very same kind of practice, but their associated actions would still have to be performed simultaneously in order to create a new integrated motor engram that includes them both.
Chris McKinley

 

Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Ben on Wed May 16, 2012 8:54 am

Thanks Chris, Very good stuff. I enjoyed it very much!
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Re: Myelination: The Most Holy Grrrrail of Martial Arts

Postby Chris McKinley on Wed May 16, 2012 10:04 am

Great, Ben! I enjoyed sharing it. I'm really hoping that people will put it to actual use and start getting some of the kind of results I know come with this approach. I know there aren't a lot of people, percentage-wise, who are interested in training their IMA for full combative use, and for those who are, information and materials are already extremely scarce. For those on this board who are with me on that path, it's my pleasure to share what I have learned to help them with their progress.
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