Peripheral Vision | Warrior Mind Coach - Helping You Achieve Peak Performance

15 Steps to Mental Strength in Sports – Step 8

May 172012

Step 8 – Managing Mistakes and Their Negative Emotions

In my opinion the most performance damaging behavior an athlete can have is to hang on to their mistake during a competition. Hanging on to your mistake will certainly take you out of the game.

Holding on to a mistake means you’re not mentally present and paying attention to the game or your cues to help you reach peak athletic performance. The only time you can achieve peak performance is now and the only place is here.

When you are thinking about the mistake you are not in the here and now. You are in the past the there.

Keep in mind that every athlete makes mistakes. The difference is the great ones know how to release the mistake during the competition and then use the mistake as feedback on what to improve on during practice.

There is no real perfection in sports, except for how you respond to your imperfections.

Your job as an athlete during the game is to forgive and forget. Forgive yourself and forget about the mistake. Then during practice work on improving your performance so the mistake won’t happen again.

You see, you get what you focus on, the more you focus on the mistake during the game the more mistakes you’ll make in the game.

Focusing on the mistake will only make your uptight, nervous and tense. Your muscles than won’t be able move and function properly and you’ll make more mistakes. This can be a death spiral for trying to reach peak performance.

Peak performance comes from being calm and relaxed; focusing on mistake does just the opposite.

Focusing on mistakes kills your self-confidence and give’s you a distorted picture of your abilities. For example, you’ve had numerous practices when you were in the zone. By focusing on the mistake this negates all those great practices and you end up thinking you’re no good.

Dwelling on mistakes sets yourself up to trying too hard to make up for the mistake. When you try too hard guess what? That’s right; you make more mistakes, playing frustrated equals playing poorly.

Mental Rebounding

So what to do when a mistake does happen?

Here are a few mental strength tactics to help manage the mental and emotional side of making a mistake.

Step #1 – Awareness: When you make a mistake you must be aware that your focus of concentration has left the here and now and is in the past (on the mistake). Also you must become aware of the accompanying negative self-talk that comes along with the mistake. When you become aware you then can change your focus and negative self-talk.

If you don’t become aware you’ll end up in the performance death spiral. You need to know the mental cascade of thoughts that occur when you make a mistake so you can break the cycle/pattern.

Step #2 – Change Focus and Self-Talk: Once you become aware then you change your focus and self-talk. I went over the self-talk in a previous post that you can read HERE. As you change your self-talk you’ll be able to bring yourself back to the here and now. You might come up with a one word cue, like “focus” or “come back” to trigger yourself to refocus and shift your self-talk. Your job is to be aware where your attention is and bring it back to now (the game) so that you can achieve peak athletic performance.

Step #3 – Calm Down: When you focus on mistake you get nervous, when you get nervous you make more mistakes. When you’re too emotional about your mistake you don’t have access to all your mental resources and you’ll say or do some very stupid things. One tip to calm down is to immediately slow down, that is, deepen your breathing (slow diaphragmatic breaths) and go into peripheral vision (looking from the sides of your eyes/vision).

One method to control your breathing is to inhale to a count of 7 and exhale to count of 11. This will activate your “relaxing” nervous system and allow you to refocus and gain access to more of your mental resources. Doing this a few minutes of this daily will help you be prepared when you need it on the field.

Refocus Ritual

Use the above in any combine that works for you and when you make a mistake immediately perform the ritual. What ever ritual you create you need to have all 3 steps in the process. Here are three examples, oh yea, when reading these it may seem like they’ll take too long to do during the game, and as you practice them during training and practice you’ll be able to fire off your ritual during a match in no time.

1 – When the play (mistake) is over, go pick up some grass, focus on the grass and say “Let it go, it’s over, it’s in the past, stay in the now.” At the same time breathe deep, go into peripheral vision then take the grass and threw it away (the grass is representing your mistake), turn your back on the grass and get back into the game.

2 – Find a physical spot, when you make a mistake go the spot, touch it say “let it go”, take a few deep breaths go into peripheral vision and then come back to the game.

3 – Imagine you’re holding the mistake in your hand, breath deep, go into peripheral vision, squeeze your hand and then let relax and let go of the mistake.

It’s important to work on your ritual during practice so it becomes automatic in a game.

Step #4: Act as if: Once you have performed your refocus ritual you then use the “act as it” technique. This is, right after your ritual you “come back” to the game and act as if nothing happen. Head up, shoulders back, breathing confidently, you have a focused relaxed look your face and you act positive, as if nothing happen. When you change your physiology (your body) you will change your internal picture of yourself.

Play around with these steps and come up with your own refocus ritual. When you do, you’ll be better prepared to reach peak athletic performance.

Want to start today to develop your mental strength for peak athletic performance? Pick up a copy of “Mental Strength Training for Athletes” by going HERE.

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OODA, Information Processing, and Mental Strength – Part 2

Tactical Athlete No Responses »

Sep 272011

Welcome back!

In last weeks post we began our in-depth look at OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) by looking at Observe. We looked at all the factors that go into this first step and how the Observe step is a simple as seeing or looking at the situation.

Today I’d like to continue with the Observe stage.

Preattentively

People unconsciously accumulate information from the environment. All available information is pre-attentively processed. Then, the brain filters and processes what is important. Information that has the highest salience (a stimulus that stands out the most) or relevance to what a person is thinking about is selected for further and more complete analysis by conscious (attentive) processing. Understanding how pre-attentive processing works is useful for the tactical athlete and I’ll hold off on that subject for another time.

For a trained tactical athlete the preattentive processes are specifically tuned to seek stimuli such as guns, victim in a pool of blood, etc. as this issue directly relates to survival and sustenance of the individual.

To help the individual aversive stimuli has the power to take partial to total control of perceptual processing mechanism (a.k.a., sensory tunneling). This may result in a decrease of other cognitive and motor activities, i.e. driving, speech, etc.

Research has shown that the sensory tunneling reduces the range of cue utilization, i.e. diminished peripheral vision or change in sensation thresholds and resolution of sensory systems, and may even reprioritize the activities that need to be carried out.

The latter is best captured by the adage “a dog in a hunt doesn’t stop to scratch its fleas.”

The sensory tunneling, during highly aroused states, occurs for the most part good of the individual – e.g., accomplish a goal, such as capturing a fugitive or ensuring safety in a high speed chase. It can also make the tactical athlete “blind” to threats outside of their peripheral vision

Attention

Attention should never be assumed to be a limitation to vision. It includes all the senses. For instance, lack of auditory attention may result in a low noise being missed. That is, unattended stimuli often go unnoticed.

Highly arousing events like a street fight or car accident have the power to grab a persons attention involuntarily from an ongoing activity (attention rubber necking). This can result in in-attention “blindness” and have a decrease in other activates such as driving or monitoring a radio.

In fact the detection of threatening information can break up ongoing observable activity in ways that direct a persona’s perception, attention, judgment and even memory towards a threat-related outcomes.

The bottom line is that humans have an unconsciousness system (preattentive), which automatically and constantly scans external stimuli for emotional significance. This is also true when people encounter unusual or highly informative objects and situation because they fixate faster, more often, and for longer durations on them.

In practical terms, the resulting selective attention interferes with multi-tasking because this process obstructs incoming information and doesn’t allow for the dividing of attention.

With the tactical athlete, the use of peripheral vision or perceptual scanning can be important to offset tunneling. For example, scanning for a target with known description or trying to spot suspicious activity, etc.

At one level, selective attention is good in that that it focuses all attention on overcoming an adversarial situation or goal-driven activities. At another level, it is detrimental because it may result in the subject missing or ignoring other important cues in the environment that may be required to develop an adequate mental mode or situation awareness for successful goal accomplishment.

Attention as a Spotlight

Studies have shown that in multi-modal (all senses) selective attention has been shown that when a specific location is given the attention one of the sense, the others follow. In other words, if, vision is tracking a fleeing suspect, it is wrong to assume that the auditory sensory modality is not occupied. In reality the “attention” of the auditory sense is also tracking the fleeing suspect.

In addition, modalities may lose sensitivity to other incoming sounds such as a radio call sign. In other words, the “beams of attention” of all modalities (visual, auditory, etc.) – even if just one of them is serving as a primary sensor (“visual” in the fleeing suspect example) – align together and attention turns as a spotlight with a laser beam like focus.

Optimal direction of attention is critical for the tactical athlete to successfully “orient” to a given situation in support of good decision making and action. Simply put, the individual’s attention should be drawn to cues that are most relevant to achieving the goal and he/she should be successfully able to filter out irrelevant cues. This selective filtering can be developed by training.

I hope you see how the simple act of Observe stage can be affected by numerous and various situations, events and stimuli.

With vision and mental strength training, and possibly with the help of technology this first component can be more effectively utilized.

I’d like to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Into the Dark – Jedi Night Walking for Peripheral Vision Training

Personal Performance No Responses »

Feb 152011

This is a continuation of Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance

In case I missed any features of peripheral vision, like detecting motion, I reread the physiology texts. This time I took seriously the fact that peripheral vision is superior in low light situations.

That meant dark!…Of course

Here’s what the sky looks like from space, in case you’re looking for a good place to train.

When light levels are low enough the cones hardly function at all. Central and peripheral visions are separated by using a fixed visual point and giving the peripheral part of your vision something dynamic to do. By walking at night you can separate it even more. By walking at night while focusing on the rod tip you’ll have the opportunity to totally experience the mental states associated with peripheral vision.

Headgear (which will be available from the Warrior Mind Store soon) can be altered by painting the beads on the rod tip with luminescent paint. I would suggest start taking vitamin A, which is necessary for the formation of visual purple, a substance which enables the eyes to adjust from bright light to darkness.

To test this I set out around sunset along some trails along the Deschutes River. Entering the peripheral state was more difficult than expected, partly because of some apprehension of walking around in a somewhat unfamiliar place in the dark. There were all sorts of “wildlife” that could have been encountered, i.e. rattlesnakes, and though I couldn’t really “see” the road, I got carried away and imagined the trail covered with them – this was before I became proficient at my mental strength training

I strained my peripheral hearing and vision for telltale signs. Long, dark shapes were everywhere; the air was filled with the sound of hollow clacking insects. I thought I’d probably “know” if I was about to step into something ugly, but the maintenance of faith in peripheral vision, so critical to the endeavor, was…challenging. The knowledge that adult males seldom die from snake bites was of some small comfort.

As an aid to quieting internal dialogue, I used a Sufi walking meditation technique with sub-vocally chanting of empowering phrases with a number of syllables that match the footsteps. I thought that this exercise would help to balance the two hemispheres of the brain, reinforcing the basic relaxing effect of deliberate reliance upon peripheral vision.

I started with a four-count on inhalation and exhalation, something like “I trust my – self,” which seemed to suit my pace and respiration. You can shift the numbers, counting three steps while inhaling, for example, and four while exhaling. As the light faded, so did my apprehension of snakes.

Waiting for full darkness, I stopped and looked ahead at the loom of the Cascade Mountains. Then I set out into the black…then it happened!

The most accurate description is that I entered the night. It became alive. Rabbits hopped by casually, nighthawks and bats flew past to check us out. My steps got lighter, walking approached the status of flight, and I felt like I’d fully entered the peripheral state, much more deeply than before. I smiled at the thought of what I was doing– walking effortlessly in the night under the stars, with no conscious knowledge of what was on the path in front of me, no consciousness of anything but the feeling of everything.

My suggestion…give Jedi Night Walking a shot, you’ll become one of the most consistently relaxing and exhilarating experiences you have ever had. You’ll find that the reports, ancient and modern, are true–employing peripheral vision and “second sight” facilitates a distinct change in perception while promoting a serene sense of well-being.

You’ll discover that anxiety in general, and fear of the dark in particular, are effectively eliminated, as if they were somehow related to the brain processes of central vision. You’ll lean to see by moving your attention around in the visual field and will find that with this kind of attention management you can ‘rearrange’ pain and discomfort by shifting your attention away from it and onto anything else in the whole field of sensory perception.

Not only will you be learning to travel freely in the dark; it will become apparent that this capability will connect you more directly to your unconsciousness mind, the part of your brain that seems devoted to your safety and general security. Far from being a storehouse of fear, you will find that the ‘other then conscious’ (or at least the aspect of it that is accessed through the state of peripheral awareness) to be a trustworthy protector. Not only will it lead you around rocks, away from cliffs and fallen tress, but also serves as a guide to some other ‘natural state’…to some most basic part of yourself. In the peripheral state you’ll feel comfortable, alert, relaxed, open, happy and very alive. Feelings of fear, anger, worry, doubt, and lust seem antithetical to the state, as if the neural wiring, whatever it is, for such strong emotions, is bypassed. Compassionate is one way to accurately describe the feeling of Jedi Night Walking.

As Daniel C. Dennett writes in Consciousness Explained, “Only a theory that explained conscious events in terms of unconscious events could explain consciousness at all.”

The more you Jedi Walk, the more you may come to question the supremacy of the consciousness mind. You may come to believe that, peripheral vision is making you more aware of what you are not conscious of. Those particulars, which are contained in that huge, mysterious mass of neurons (like a computer), that is making decisions and judgments on its own. The brain doesn’t need the ‘me’ of conscious thought to operate–in fact; it often seems to operate much better without the intervention of the consciousness mind. It may become a bit sobering and sometimes an unsettling at times.

Any clear night is a good for Jedi Night Walking, especially for beginners, but strong starlight is especially favorable. Keep your eyes fixed on a particular star. This will trigger a hypnotic effect (Alpha brainwave), and for some beginners may stop walking when “their” star sinks below the skyline or rises above their head. For others, you may not notice the disappearance, because by the time that the star has passed out of your sight, you will have formed a subjective image of it which will remain fixed before you.

Some initiates in the secret lore also assert that, as a result of long years of practice, after he has travelled over a certain distance, the feet of the lung-gom-pa no longer touch the ground, and that he glides on the air with an extreme celerity.

I hope you have enjoyed this series on peripheral vision, Jedi Walking and Jedi Night Walking. If you have, please let me know in the comments below.

Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance (warriormindcoach.com)
Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance – Part III (warriormindcoach.com)
Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance – Jedi Walking (warriormindcoach.com)
Tactical Breathing for Inner Strength (warriormindcoach.com)
Into the Dark – Jedi Night Walking for Peripheral Vision Training (warriormindcoach.com)

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Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance – Part III

Personal Performance 2 Responses »

Feb 082011

Image via Wikipedia

This is a continuation of a series on peripheral vision and human performance. Here you can locate Part I and Part II.

I know I mentioned at the end of Part II that I was going to go into night vision, but I wanted to finish up with some interesting occurrences as I tested my peripheral vision.

Well…for the next few months, I walked once a week, adding new elements to each adventure. For some of the walks I used a variety of music to see how this would affect the experience my Jedi Walking. I used didgeridoo music, Native American, shamanic journey work drumming and even some classical.

The terrain I picked was similar to the first, though a bit steeper and more strenuous. I put in my ear-buds, started the music, and headed up the trail. Almost immediately I fell into the already familiar state, my shoulders hunched a little and my chin jutting slightly in a posture that most would associate with ‘early man’ and Musashi.

The didgeridoo music established a wave that seemed to carry my breath and feet. In an effort to evaluate the sounds, I attempted to detach from the flood of pure sensory experience and succeeded just long enough to become aware that a rising and falling buzzing sound I was hearing was not in the recording but instead an insect, a cicada, perhaps, buzzing in our ‘peripheral’ hearing. I turned up the volume and the buzzing intensity increased rapidly – up to a point where the didgeridoo was so loud it drowned out all peripheral sound…I think my ears are still ringing!

The next music was Steve Reich‘s Music for Large Orchestra – great contemporary `trance music’ built on a repetitive structure. Dominated by the bright, light sounds produced by instruments such as vibraphones, the music enhanced the brightness of the day and the ‘lightness’ of my steps.

Such concordance between the music and me were generally true throughout the walk, but I did find that that the lyrics got in the way.

The vocal’s (actual words) forced my attention inward and tended to make me more aware of the specific and less aware of the general. Nevertheless, I found no correlation between type and/or volume of sound and the ability of my unconscious to process data from peripheral vision, all though I would recommend instrumental music only. What it did affect was the scope or range of our consciousness.

Some Key Points from the Experiences

Music should be faint so one can focus on environmental sound and hear music peripherally.

It seems that when the conscious mind is given specific tasks to focus on–walking, looking at the end of the rod and listening to environmental sounds–the unconscious is freed to participate in a much fuller way.

General awareness seems to be basic to the peripheral state, while specific awareness tends to bring things into consciousness.

Without specific awareness, consciousness doesn’t exist. Therefore, it would seem that specific awareness would be useful only when necessary.

This brings up a paradox: One can’t be immediately aware of deep, general awareness and surface, specific awareness at the same time. Therefore to operate while only conscious of general awareness, a certain faith seems to be required

I would say that the central metaphor for accessing the peripheral state–an act of faith. To reach the state, one has to let go of reliance on central vision, on “knowing” where you’re going, and come to trust that unknowable brain and eye functions will guide and protect. Without such faith a person will stumble.

The more difficult the terrain yielded another important insight: Control of fatigue and pain can be accomplished easily through an application of mental strength, focusing attention on the tired body part, for instance, and moving the discomfort off to the edges of awareness–virtually the same process as moving your attention about in the great field of peripheral vision without moving your eyes.

A few weeks into the walking experiments I confirmed what I read in other reports…this was something important and even maybe profound. I’d found that simply walking outdoors with eyes focused on the tip of a little metal rod, seeing where we were going by moving our attention rather than our eyes, resulted in an altered state of consciousness.

Again…no drugs, no mantras or rigorous meditative practices. Simply clip on a rod and take a walk. Eventually I discovered that I didn’t even need the rods. At first I would place my hand at the desired distance and focus on it. Then I removed my hand and kept my focus to where it was. Then I began to ‘anchor’ the experience by using a phrase, “wide vision,” and everything would open up –mood, perspective, and vision in every sense of the word.

Change the way you see and you change the way you feel.

After twenty or thirty minutes of walking, you’ll click into an ecstatic state of “no thought.” The mind got absolutely quiet and the body filled with the uncensored, unconsidered sights, sounds and smells of your surroundings. Distinctions between “you” and “it” will evaporate as you reentered the state, which will feel natural and oddly familiar…if you’ve been doing this for awhile.

I must admit that at times I felt like Carlos Castaneda during his adventures with Don Juan Matus.

OK…for next time I promise…I’ll get into night vision, but for now…please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Tactical Breathing for Inner Strength (warriormindcoach.com)
Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance (warriormindcoach.com)
Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance – Jedi Walking (warriormindcoach.com)
Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance – Part III (warriormindcoach.com)
Into the Dark – Jedi Night Walking for Peripheral Vision Training (warriormindcoach.com)

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Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance – Jedi Walking

Personal Develpoment, Personal Performance No Responses »

Feb 012011

TM & © Lucasfilm

In Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance we began our investigation into peripheral vision.

Before I get into the continuation of this topic, if you’d like to find out about The Physiology of Vision, here’s a good Cliff Notes on the subject.

Application of Peripheral Vision – Does it Work?

What Musashi was saying in the Book of Five Rings was that peripheral vision was a dynamic type of sight. It had been in all the physiology texts, but it had been overlooked it: we are most sensitive to motion in our peripheral field. Peripheral vision is made for movement!

So the problem is how to create a visual point which would remain fixed while one moved. Here’s what you can do: attach a nine-inch stick (wooden, plastic or similar) with a bead at the end, pinned on the bill of a ball cap. (You’ll want the bead about 12” from your eye). You can turn your head from side to side and move around, all the time focusing on the rod tip. This would also satisfy the requirement of holding one’s focal point constant and not on the object observed. It was an easy way to achieve Musashi’s insistence on cross-eyedness.

He had apparently taught himself to focus and keep focused on an imaginary point during life and death sword battles. There must be something to the technique or else he wouldn’t have used it. While sword fights might be a little extreme as a means for testing this…at least for beginners , you’ll needed an activity that requires that your peripheral vision be operative to insure your safety. So try this…hiking over somewhat rough terrain, this will do the trick.

A friend of mine nicknamed this Jedi running. He actually progressed to running over rocks, logs, streams, etc. while in this vision state.

A Beginners Guide to Jedi Walking

Selected a path that is wide enough to be safe, yet has other opportunities for more challenges…a fire road works well. Most of the time a fire road has hiking trails that offshoot from it. Remember to put your cap on before you start your walk. This is also another good reason for a remote road…nobody will see you and think you’ve lost it.

Keep your eyes always focused on the bead, you’ll soon become too engaged with the immediate difficulty of walking through uneven terrain to worry about what you’ll looked like anyway. Everything you’ll see in your central area of vision around and in front of the rod will be doubled. This is an illusion caused by binocular vision.

To illustrate this point, hold your finger about six inches in front of your nose. Stare at your finger and you’ll notice that everything in front of it and to several degrees on either side is doubled.

So while watching the bead at the end of the rod, it will appear as if the straight path you are walking will always be approaching a “Y.” Sometimes the path will run straight between two rocks, the two rocks will become one the moment your foot, aimed to step between them, comes directly down on it.’

Stop the Double

There are three solutions for dealing with the doubling of the path and images.

1- Tilt your head to the right and up, so that the line of the path, for example, is seen “undoubled” in the left portion of your peripheral field. Peripheral vision is unfocused, so there’s no doubling unless viewing something very close to the eyes, in which case central and peripheral visions overlap.

2 – Guess. The real rock is probably not on the right or the left, but between the two.

3- Trust Yourself. This means don’t think about it, use your intuition, or as Obi-Wan Kenobi would say, “Use the Force.” The brain – unconsciousness mind – knows exactly where the ‘real’ object is even if your eyes and conscious mind don’t. Left alone it will deliver unerring instructions to your limbs. This may seem like a wonderful revelation if you’ve never experienced this before. To understand that a virtually unknown part of you knows much more than you think you ‘know.’ This most likely will be the first of many challenges to what you’ve long assumed to be the supremacy of the consciousness mind….the implications of this should be exhilarating!

You may have looked silly as you continue slowly walking the rocky trail; shoulders hunched, chins extended, staring so intently at your little bead, yet inside you’ll be feeling ecstatic. It will as if your eyes and chests had opened up wide, and in the process some previously inviolable boundary between yourselves and the landscape will have evaporated. Everything will simultaneously become peaceful and scintillating. Your sense of balance and muscle control will be so acute that the ground will seem to rise up and gently join your feet with each step.

In time you’ll gain the confidence that you can walk in unfamiliar territory using only your peripheral vision. What will look like, to your conciseness mind, as abstract quality of peripheral sight, will provide plenty of information to your unconscious mind, allowing it to guide your feet automatically and unerringly over and around rocks, dips and rises in the ground, and protect your body – your eyes in particular – from contact with tree branches.

As you continue to Jedi walk you’ll become aware of the limits of your peripheral vision. You might want to create a simultaneous awareness of the whole peripheral field–nearly 180 degrees horizontally, perhaps 130 degrees vertically.

In tricky passages requiring special attention, you’ll find you can concentrate your awareness on the lower center area in your peripheral vision; this will slow your progress and you’ll still have a magical feeling. You will, however, have to be alert during this phase, although alertness will seem to expand automatically when locked in peripheral vision.

Other senses will awaken as well. You may notice that your hearing, balance and touch expanded, as if each sense had a peripheral realm of its own. Concurrently, the perception of weight will shift lower in the body, to the hips and on down to your feet.

After a bit you may want to try Jedi running. You’ll find that it will intensify the thrill but surprisingly without a rise in anxiety. When you trust yourself you can push yourselves into unsure situations where footing will be tricky. This will confirm that you can negotiate obstacles with almost effortless flow.

You’ll also find that when standing close to something, i.e. a tree it will appear the same, whether viewed with peripheral or ‘normal’ vision. There may also be a shift in time perception. A time lapse of what will seem like several moments between the apparently automatic actions of your feet as they avoid an obstacle and our consciousness of their movement.

After a couple of hours of walking you will be deeply relaxed. The source of this pronounced calm: Walking while relying on your peripheral vision requires that your conscious mind trust the unconsciousness mind, and this inter-mind trust is the part of the essence for this relaxation state.

You may find that your hands will have warmed and swelled slightly. This might be an indication that active employment of peripheral vision might also stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. You also experience a sense of time distortion; it may feel as if you’d been out about an hour when in fact you’ve be walking around for more than two hours!

All this without ingesting any “teaching plants”

In the next installment I’ll go into how this process can help with night vision and how when the consciousness and unconsciousness mind are in rapport magical things can happen, like ease of personal success, peak personal performance and quantum personal growth.

Please let me know what think about this topic and your experience with peripheral vision in the comments below.

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Vision, Eye Sight and Peak Human Performance

Personal Develpoment, Personal Performance No Responses »

Jan 252011

My friend Steve Mosley (from Combat Hard in the Atlanta area) and I have been discussing several methods in helping his self-defense and tactical athlete students enhance their personal performance.

I shared with Steve numerous NLP and hypnosis techniques that are very effective. Were now in process of putting together workshops were we will share and instruct on this info.

One key component that we have been discussing is vision (eye sight) and how peripheral vision can be very beneficial.

Before I go into the background of peripheral vision I’d like to thank nava ching for much this great information and inspiration!

For quite some time I’ve been very interested in what is variously referred to as flow, peak personal performance or optimal experience — those moments when actions and thoughts are unusually smooth, clear and effortless…perfect human performance! We seem to shift into a higher gear. Time slows and an almost magical feeling of control is accompanied by an oceanic sense of union with everything around us.

Accounts of flow are often found in what appear to be wildly different sectors of experience such as athletics and mysticism. And yet to a great extent both arenas are devoted to the attainment of the same physiological and neurological state, the same feeling of transcendence.

John Brodie, who was quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers some 25+ years ago, has talked enthusiastically and knowledgeably about flow, perhaps encouraged by his friend, Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen Institute. He once recalled how in the midst of a game his level of play would suddenly jump to a higher plane.

Though huge lineman crashed in on him, he was in perfect control as he calmly stepped back, set up, and threw. Brodie described how the football appeared to travel on a “wire of will” that connected him to his receiver, usually the peerless Gene Washington. He claimed that he had seen defensive backs cut in front of Washington to intercept the ball, but it had hopped over their fingertips and into the pass catcher’s hands. It seemed inevitable that the play be completed.

Bill Russell has described how the great Boston Celtic teams of the late 60s would sometimes get into such a flow, a scoring surge that could only be stopped by the opposition calling time out. He and his teammates were absolutely in tune with each other. Each player could “see the whole court,” and preternaturally anticipate his teammates actions. They were playing not only over their heads, but “out of their heads,” operating on instinct and maybe inspiration.

In religious contexts the vocabulary is different and we hear of “flashes of insight,” “clear vision” and “brilliant light.” Saul on the road to Damascus was such an example. In recounting events of sudden realization, many individuals give visual reports of the moment of enlightenment: “I suddenly saw the answer,” “It all became clear to me,” or “I saw with a crystal clarity that . . .”

Most people are familiar with this kind of high, at least in secular contexts. You might have felt it on the golf course, working in the garden or doing a crossword puzzle–the sudden feeling of being in absolute control, of feeling like you know what’s going to happen before it happens. You’re so totally engrossed in the activity that your eyes seem to open a little wider as visual data streams into your brain, flows through the realm of ideas, and floods into action, as if the three things were different aspects of one unnamable thing that connects you and the putter or the roses to be pruned or the clues to 36 across and 14 down. Stop and think about what you’re doing and the spell is broken; the whole brain engagement with the outside world interrupted by conscious involvement. The ball slices into the woods; the thorn that a moment ago caressed your fingertip now draws blood.

In the spring of 1989, the folks at nava ching decided to spend some time trying to find a way to maximize the potential for experiencing flow. They began with a theory, that people who have the ability to see farther, or wider, or more deeply or more clearly might have access to whatever the brain processes are that give rise to peak experience. They began to think that the descriptions of such experiences were not just metaphors, but were, in fact, literal representations of actual internal experience.

People who frequently experience flow aren’t just more athletic or smarter or more creative or holier than the average person but perhaps literally see–and therefore understand and even experience–the world in a different manner. This “seeing” might access a neurological facility enabling them to process vast amounts of spatial and even intellectual material and resolve it into inspired action or insight. As they looked for direct relationships between the meanings of words like seeing and understanding, vision (VEN – visual internal narrow focus) and Vision (VEB – visual external broad focus), it slowly became apparent that they might be on to something.

They knew that individuals’ reported of intensely joyful experiences often revolved around a change in visual perception and theorized that the converse was also true: that a change in visual perception could engender peak experiences.

Night Vision

From studies and personal experience it was discovered that in low light, peripheral vision is far superior to central or focused vision. Night vision relies almost entirely on the rod cell receptors of the peripheral region of the retina, which because of their neural connections and physical makeup are very sensitive to light. Rods need about 30 minutes of dark or dim red light to activate fully, and then, it is claimed, they have the capacity in the healthy eye to detect a single photon–the equivalent, under optimal conditions, of the flame of a candle that is ten miles away. In the dark, color-sensitive cones are not very useful–hence sight at night is almost entirely dependent on peripheral vision.

Most people in industrialized countries have come to rely almost entirely on focused sight. Our culture’s dependence on focused vision has deprived us of the mental processes which accompany peripheral vision. We don’t even have an adequate descriptive vocabulary for peripheral abilities. And this was one of the more troubling aspects throughout their investigations, our culture has little understanding, appreciation or experience with peripheral vision.

Perhaps the special perception claimed by mystics and athletes comes from the ability to observe the world and themselves from a “different point of view,” in a broader, more open context. Since it is clearly established that we all possess two visual systems, it may be that creativity, intuition and even some kinds of ecstatic experience might have a direct connection with second sight, a sight dependent to a great extent on the brain’s capacity for processing peripheral vision.

Additional references that shed more light on second sight were a succession of texts from the Taoists of early China and through the accounts of Carlos Casteñada that speak of a certain kind of all-seeing gaze. One in particular gave very precise description of the powers of second sight and instructions for its development.

In The Book of Five Rings, Miyamoto Musashi, the legendary swordsman of 16th century Japan, implies that he fought his greatest duels with his eyes crossed, and goes into considerable detail about developing and using this strange ability. He writes somewhat mysteriously about a state he entered while so engaged. He also refers to the two types of sight which he calls Ken and Kan. Ken registers the movements of surface phenomena; it’s the observation of superficial appearance. Kan is the examination of the essence of things, seeing through or into. For Musashi, Ken is seeing with the eyes, Kan is seeing with the mind, a difference paralleling that between style and substance. He gives instructions for developing Kan sight: “It is important to observe both sides without moving the eyes. It is no good trying to learn this kind of thing in great haste. Always be watchful in this manner and under no circumstances alter your point of concentration.”

It’s often thought that peripheral vision is a more passive type of sight, certainly not one to be used in a duel. Most of the references to cross-eyed meditation and “soft-focus vision” were in calm, quiet circumstances. In the search for methods to create peak experiences, it’s assumed that the peak experiences only became available when anxiety was absolutely abated, and that anxiety abatement would, by necessity, require serenity.

But reading Musashi changed all that. While anxiety abatement might be necessary, passivity certainly wasn’t. Musashi may not have understood the biology of sight, but he was acutely aware of the difference between cone and rod vision.

Neural structures existed within the eye and brain, which facilitate a way of seeing that is radically dissimilar from the one we’re accustomed to using, and that this way of seeing is available to all of us all the time. The question was how. A good method to experiment with is the 3d or Magic Eye pictures/books. They are great a tool for developing second sight, but they lacked the depth, the passion and the experience of real life usage.

In the next post I’ll go into the advantages of peripheral vision for instant relaxation, especially in a stressful situation.

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OK…what’s your experience been with peripheral vision? Let me know in the comments below.