Arjarn Nick Hewitson is from the Petchyindee Muay Thai Boxing Camp International

More and more martial artists are turning to mind control techniques to improve there performance. This can be from dealing with fear of getting hurt to mastering complex combinations or katas. Psychological and mental training techniques have been around for a long time; some use the conscious mind while others the unconscious mind and nearly all deal with changes in your perception.

Everything that we do, every thought, every action is data that our brain encodes, stores and analyses every minute of every day. Our brain is the ultimate super computer, however it's the interpretation of that data that gives us the ability to more effectively harness the power of the brain. Ok I'll start with the easy one, brain washing. This is where our perceptions are modified. Our perceptions are generally a learned behaviour, think of a small child, given the opportunity they will put almost anything in their mouth – dirt, paper, marbles, coins, poison etc.

Now I understand that eating dirt won't harm you but I'm set in my ways so I'm not going to try it, but when we see children do it we usually make them spit it out, scream in outrage, and tell them not to do it again. Therefore setting up this programming that says this is bad, don't eat it. The same example could use cockroaches, bugs or one hundred and one other vile things (sorry things that we perceive as vile). If you had grown up in Borneo you would think nothing of eating bugs as they make up a staple part of your diet, however if given an ice cream you might think it's the worst thing you ever tasted as your not used to large amounts of processed sugar. Another little thing to mess with your mind, think about tomato ketchup. Here in America it is almost un-American not to put ketchup on your food. I'm not quite sure why because you can't taste any tomato in it. It's about 80% sugar. It's only because you have been told its tomato, just as strawberry jam doesn't taste like strawberries, but they are both red so I'm sure if some evil genius made something sweet and yellow they could call it a banana and everyone would take it as the truth.

Ok back on track, during the Second World War the Nazis were the first to mess with people's minds or rather their perceptions. They ran propaganda films, telling everybody that all their problems stemmed from the Jews. They said they looked different, acted different, stole, lied and everything else including eating babies. All of which as we now know was lies. It was just a way of the Nazis to steal first their wealth and property and eventually their lives and to distract everyone from what was really going one.

After the Second World War many of the these techniques were still further modified. During the early part of the Vietnam War the American's incorporated similar brain washing techniques but on a much more localized group. The GI's were to gentlemanly to deal with guerrilla warfare, or rather they weren't prepared for there situation. They had only seen men as soldiers, not women and children and in Vietnam that wasn't the case. Therefore as a consequence of the high number of fatalities, a number of camps were set up in America where the GI's were sent for what is now called behavioural modification. The GI's after they had finished there basic training were put into trucks and driven to these special camps, the camps were set up just like Vietnamese prisoner of war camps, including the guards who were also Vietnamese. They would be pulled out of there trucks beaten, starved, they would be deprived sleep, interrogated, even tortured, being held in slurry pits while 24 hours a day loud speaker blasted out Vietnamese radio propaganda. After no more than a week usually the inmates would have been broken. They would then be taken back to another camp where they were cleaned up and taught to kill, with there bare hands if necessary. They were then transported to Vietnam where they would be dropped into the jungle in small groups where they would kill without hesitation anyone and everyone who resembled the enemy (i.e. Vietnamese, men, women, children). In the short term this proved effective however you can't just turn this off, so when the GI's returned home on leave there were several instances where these brain washed solders killed people simply because they looked oriental and so this brainwashing was put to an end. These same techniques of mind control were and are used by religious cults to brain wash there members, limiting there food, depriving them of sleep for long periods and having them indoctrinated by there disciples for long periods, excluding them from all external influences, family, friends, TV, radio. This is why cult members usually need action to be taken to snatch them back and deprogram them prior to them returning to regular life because there perception of life has been so radically altered.

Ok moving on from brain washing to the slightly more reasonable hypnotism. This once again plants a subconscious seed in there unconscious mind, and is used as a means to treat the cravings of people quitting smoking, to helping people lose weight by telling them that they don't like the taste of particular food or food groups (telling them that sugar tastes like salt to them). Even professional boxers have used hypnotism to deal with a subconscious fear of being hurt or killed or if they have a particular apprehension to fighting a particular opponent, particularly if he has seriously injured opponents in the past.

Another method that deals with the modification of perception is NLP or neurolingusitical pathways. This is a method of perceptual reprogramming to deal with fears, phobias and post-traumatic situations as well as a means of changing your own perception of yourself, such as self-doubt or poor self-image. Not being a practitioner I am not going to delve too much, except to say that this is highly connected to perception and the methods our mind uses to code data. Imagine a horror movie, the atmosphere that is being set which pushes your buttons, such as causing the hairs on the back of your neck to stand on end, you heart rate to race, the surge of adrenaline are all tied to your fight or fright response. A dark dimly lit house and some spooky music is enough to get some people jumping out of there skins. This is because your mind starts to fill in the blanks. Ok this time take the same scene but instead of a spooky tune, think of it put to the music of Monty Python's flying circus or the Smurf's song. Think of the Jaws movie, the way the music builds (dur dur, dur dur, dur dur) getting faster and faster as the shark gets closer to getting its victim (very scary). Now think of it put the air horn from the dukes of hazard (far from scary). It's because the music is subconsciously affecting your heart rate and therefore your fight or flight response. By changing just one of those psychological triggers changes everything else.

The next method which in some ways is similar to NLP is visualization. This is where you start by picturing yourself doing something, that jumping spinning side kick, over and over in your minds eye you imagine yourself doing it. Then in slow motion, you study every little movement, how your weight is distributed which leg you are pushing off with first, where your hands are positioned. You then get into position just as in your minds eye, you position your feet, distribute your weight and jump as you leave the ground. You're replaying the picture in your head adjusting everything to maintain cohesion to the image and as if by magic you find yourself doing it. Once you have achieved it once you mind starts to record those key constraints and so the next time they are pulled and automatically triggered so allowing you to perform this again and again. It can also be used as a training aid to build self-confidence, by picturing yourself lifting up that championship belt, in front of a packed stadium, so as you train you are getting tied or frustrated, you cant motivate yourself to push harder, you think of that image, you see yourself as the champion, it spurs you on to train harder.

The final method that I'm going to cover is called Psycho-Cybernetics. This is a unconscious mind control method or rather a learning tool. Ok first I need to explain about how your mind works while you sleep. During the day from the moment you wake up your mind is working, it is taking in a vast amount of information both conscious and unconscious, so to visualize what I'm talking about think of it as two video recorders one marked conscious the other marked unconscious. Well the tape in the conscious video player stores only the shows you want (or rather the information you want to learn 2 + 2 = 4, Pamela Andersons breasts are 48DD, England has beaten the French in rugby every game in last 3 years etc) and 101 other things besides, now throughout the day this tape gets filled and therefore put away in a pigeonhole in your brain, so when someone asks about Pamela Anderson, you can look in the pigeonhole and tell them 48DD. Ok that's the conscious mind and that's the easy part. Ok the unconscious video records all the other stuff the meaningless stuff, the daydreams about if you won the lottery, the girl in accounts, what you'll have for your tea? (Quick test: what did you have for your tea 2 weeks ago today? Can't remember? That's because it's not important to your brain and so has been binned.)

Ok now when you sleep you brain plays back the tapes from the unconscious mind, just to make sure that it hasn't missed important stuff, but because of these all being jigsaw pieces of 1001 different non-connected thoughts your mind tries to arrange them into a logical order, and this is where dreams come from. So what happens next is that the dream is played through and any useful information is pulled out and stored but at the same time as the tape is played it is being wiped clean, therefore why you can't remember your dreams. Ok Psycho-Cybernetics uses this principal of unconscious review in order to learn. How it does it is to use tape recordings or CD's and play them to you over and over again as you sleep, therefore storing it on the unconscious video tape, however because this is all useful when the tape is played back it is pigeonholed for later use, and because it is all connected your mind doesn't have to make sense of it and therefore turn it into a dream to be lost. This technique has been used to train people in language skills, learning complex mathematical formula and many other things. However it only stores it as verbal data, so it will help you to understand someone speaking Arabic or Thai or Chinese or Russian but you will still have the problem of pronouncing the newly learned language for example, as your brain hasn't had your lips move to make the sound and therefore remember how to move them to reproduce the sound. However with complex formulae they can be shown to you before or after the programming so that your brain connects the two and therefore puts both pieces away in the same pigeonhole for later use.

Well that's about it for a mind control methods, I hope that it has given you some food for thought, and perhaps a means to expand your training horizons, but just remember the best way to control your mind is to be open minded to everything for that's where the real power lies.