by Chris McKinley on Sun May 31, 2009 2:48 pm
Good, fair questions. Thanks guys.
Deus,
RE: "Chris, could you define contextualization better?". I don't know, but I'll sure give it a shot. For perspective and to realize where I'm coming from, I'll give a very brief summary of my background with regard to this topic. I've been a very long time martial artist. Started when I was 6 and now I'm 40. When I was younger, I competed full-contact and lost only once out of several dozen fights...my last fight, after which I basically threw a tantrum like the little bitch that I was and quit competing. After that is when I consider myself to have started getting serious about martial arts.
I started training not for competition, but for real combat. I pursued a career where the requirements of the profession included consistently functional and viable combat skills. I eventually changed course and decided to go a more academic route as a neurophysiologist, but maintained my contacts in both the martial arts and professional military/LEO worlds and continued some of that kind of work as a consultant. I participated in, and in some cases created, studies having to do with combat psychology, physiology, tactics, strategies, etc. I also got heavily into the world of accelerated learning and learning theory. As a practitioner and trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, I developed some of NLP's earlier applications to the world of combat training, building off of John Grinder's earlier but less comprehensive work.
Eventually, I coalesced my information from various sources and from personal experimentation into a specific model of training that I still use and am still improving today. Part of that method recognizes that learning of this type of material, i.e., combat skills, happens optimally in three distinct and complementary phases.
1) Learning. This is where you identify and acquire the skill. This phase isn't complete until you can perform the skill functionally. The challenge in this phase for combat training is that learning is state-dependent, and initial learning happens most optimally in an environment that includes a positive emotional state. For material that is ostensibly capable of being used for lethal purposes, creating a balance between healthy respect for the inherent seriousness of the material and an emotionally positive learning environment is not always obvious and easy to do.
2) Practicing. This phase is where skills that have already been learned are then developed and refined beyond the rudimentarily functional level. It's possible, within IMA as an example, to learn something relatively quickly and then spend years, even a lifetime, practicing and refining it. This phase corresponds to the "eating bitter" and "gung fu" phases of training. In terms of its state dependence, practicing produces optimal results when the emotional state is neutral, objective and dissociated. Think of scientists or engineers in white lab coats with clipboards taking unbiased test results from an experiment.
3) Contextualizing. The dictionary definition is "to place (as a word or activity) in a context", and I can't really improve on that definition. What it means for combat skills, or for any physical activity or behavior that has a specific and identifiable context, is that once learned, the skills must be practiced in order to achieve consistent reliable performance. However, those same skills must then be placed into the appropriate native context for their proper use. Simply having the skills, even to a refined degree, is not enough. As mentioned, this is true for any behavior which has a specific native context, and the more rare or even unique that context is, the more contextualization is required.
For instance, walking is a non-context-dependent behavior. We use the skill of walking in almost every physical endeavor in which we engage, and even as a required subset skill for those behaviors in which we can engage while seated. Learning to walk as a baby is positively reinforcing, allowing new interaction with and control over one's environment. Practicing that skill includes cruising and eventually plenty of falling down in repeated attempts to develop consistent ability. However, once that consistency is achieved, further effort to contextualize that newly developed skill is not consciously necessary, since the skill is used in pretty much every context and every activity in which we engage from that point onward. It could be said to be a somewhat universal skill for that reason.
In contrast, skills for surviving a real, surprise, life-or-death assault belong exclusively to that rather narrow, hopefully rare, and emotionally atypical context. It is simply inappropriate to apply such skills outside of that context for moral, ethical and legal reasons for well-adjusted, law-abiding citizens who are men and women of goodwill. Further, in addition to the native context being exceedingly rare in occurrence, it also involves some of the most intense emotional duress under which a person will ever find themselves throughout their lifetime. It is possible, for instance, for a person to be literally frightened to death as a worst-case example of such duress.
Under such conditions, one of the most common and ironically tragic things that can happen to a person is to become amnesic for any and all of the fighting skills obtained in the relative quiet and safety of the training hall, even if those skills have been developed over decades of dedicated and productive refinement. Put a bit oversimply, without contextualization, the neural pathways in the brain involved in the storage, access and utilization of those skills aren't connected to or associated with the pathways which are currently overriding all others temporarily while under that kind of duress. You literally don't have access to all that highly developed and refined skill at that moment, however many years you might have been practicing it.
Also a bit oversimply but sufficient for this discussion, the process of contextualization involves the creation of neural associations between your hard-won fighting skills and the neural pathways to which you will be limited under the emotional environment of extreme duress which is inherent to the native context of those skills. Learning and practicing aren't enough. Without contextualizing that skill, you have the equivalent of creating and developing a really killer website with all sorts of the latest features and functionality, and then never connecting it to the internet. Without that last crucial step, all that came before it is completely useless, and all the energy expended in the development of the website is completely wasted. The difference is, with an unconnected website, all you lose is time and maybe some money. With uncontextualized combat skills, what you lose may be your life or the life of a loved one.
RE: "To me skills are things like listening, following, vision, timing, precision, distance, power, quickness. This is different from techniques like blocks, parries, strikes, locks and throws. Which are you referring to?". Both. For the purposes of how they function in the learning process, those are all identical. They are all behaviors which must be learned, developed/practiced, then contextualized into their native context if they are to be accessible and functional in that context.