How does distance, speed and timing effect our ability to defend ourselves? Why does a preplanned physical response to surprise violence cause you to lose a confrontation?
We must agree that generally there are only 2 self defense situations you will face. They are Ambush situations and situations that you have prior warning of and/or prior knowledge of potential physical contact.
That being said, if we have an understanding of pre-contact psychology then we can control, manipulate and pre-empt those situation that offers us warning signs, so we don't have to worry much about physically defending / blocking those attacks.
So that leaves us with ambush attacks which is what most people should be concerned about. In ambush situations we do not have time to cognitively calculate our responses. Our brainstem, cerebellum and mostly the amygdale take over and cause the Startle / flinch response as well as Adrenaline Dumps and fight or flight, all of which bypass cognitive processing. So the very first affect will be the lose of technically specific responses and training which rely on cognitive processes. Our only hope is that we can work with in the flinch response to enhance our built in defensive mechanisms.
The next issue is purely biological, if we are cognizing our responses we have to work with in the OODA loop and that increases our natural reaction times similarly even with the flinch response our neurology is not fast enough to protect us from all attacks.
Let see why.
The Tueller Rule, A study done by Force Science Research Center (FSRC - For more information, visit www.forcescience.org or e-mail
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
) at Minnesota State University found that “for many officers and situations, a 21-foot reactionary gap was not sufficient.” The "fastest, most skillful, most powerful" knife wielding attacker that FSRC tested "easily" covered the distance of 21ft in 1.27 seconds. Even the slowest subject covered this distance in just 2.5 seconds. Dr. Bill Lewinski, FSRC's executive director states that Intense rage, high agitation and/or the influence of stimulants may even shorten that time. He also states that "It's easily possible for suspects in some circumstances to launch a successful fatal attack from a distance greater than 21 feet”. When we are in the interview range of less than 10 feet an attacker can close the distance in less than 0.5 seconds.
If the average punch moves at 20mph (Unskilled / Non-Athletic) and the fastest is 120mph (Mohammad Ali) that is an average of 29 FPS up to 176 FPS which means that if an attacker is 12 inches away it takes his punch between 0.0341 to 0.0057 seconds to reach it’s target.
For about 120 years, the accepted figures for mean simple reaction times for college-age individuals have been about 190 ms (0.19 sec) for visual stimuli and about 160 ms (0.16 sec) for auditory stimuli (Galton, 1899; Fieandt et al., 1956; Welford, 1980; Brebner and Welford, 1980).
Jerry Rice’s reaction time to auditory stimuli is 130 ms (0.13 sec) 15% faster then his reaction to visual stimuli. (FSN Sport Science - Episode 3 - Reaction Time) take note this is a reaction to a know stimuli.
In terms of reactions to unknown stimuli Research done by “Triple A” http://www.aaafoundation.org/resources/index.cfm?button=cellphone
shows that the mean reaction time was 0.40 seconds and added distractions increased the length of response time from .4 to .9 seconds.
So in the case where you have no precontact indicators and no distractions and a 20mph ambush punch comes flying at your face and you are as fast and athletic as Jerry Rice you will be able to defend yourself from 4 feet away. (The below dataset is consistent with current research – see the Tueller rule above and the Triple A Study).
See chart below.
Additional Background Research Hick's law Hick's law, named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick, or the Hick–Hyman law (for Ray Hyman), describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has. Given n equally probable choices, the average reaction time T required to choose among them is approximately T = blog2(n + 1) where b is a constant that can be determined empirically by fitting a line to measured data. Operation of logarithm here expresses depth of "choice tree" hierarchy. Basically log2 means that you perform binary search. According to Card, Moran, and Newell (1983), the +1 is "because there is uncertainty about whether to respond or not, as well as about which response to make." The law can be generalized in the case of choices with unequal probabilities pi of occurring, to T = bH where H is the information-theoretic entropy of the decision, defined as 
Hick's law is similar in form to Fitts' law. Intuitively, one can reason that Hick's law has a logarithmic form because people subdivide the total collection of choices into categories, eliminating about half of the remaining choices at each step, rather than considering each and every choice one-by-one, requiring linear time. Hick's law has been shown to apply in experiments where the user is presented with n buttons, each having a light bulb beside them. One light bulb is randomly lit up, after which the user must press the corresponding button as quickly as possible. Obviously, the decision to be made here is very simple, requiring little conscious thought. Hick's law is sometimes cited to justify menu design decisions (for an example, see [1]). However, applying the model to menus must be done with care. For example, to find a given word (e.g. the name of a command) in a randomly ordered word list (e.g. a menu), scanning of each word in the list is required, consuming linear time, so Hick's law does not apply. However, if the list is alphabetical and the user knows the name of the command, he or she may be able to use a subdividing strategy that works in logarithmic time. For Hick's law and Fitts' law considerations in the context of menu and submenu design, see Landauer and Nachbar (1985). Fitts Law In human-computer interaction and ergonomics, Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement which predicts the time required to rapidly move to a target area, as a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world (e.g., with a hand or finger) and on computers (e.g., with a mouse). It was published by Paul Fitts in 1954. Other research According to researchers Martin D. Topper, Ph.D., and Jack M. Feldman, Ph.D.: "Currently, the best explanation is provided by psychologist Gary Klein in Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. He's proposed that the human brain is capable of multi-tasking. Gary's theory works like this: A visual image is picked up by the retina and is transmitted to the visual center of the brain in the occipital lobe. From there the image is sent to two locations in the brain. On the one hand, it goes to the higher levels of the cerebral cortex which is the seat of full conscious awareness. There, in the frontal lobes, the image is available to be recognized, analyzed, input into a decision process and acted upon as the person considers appropriate. Let's call this "the slow track," because full recognition of the meaning of a visual image, analyzing what it represents, deciding what to do and then doing it takes time. Some psychologists also refer to this mental process as System II cognition. If you used System II cognition in critical situations like a skid, you wouldn't have enough time to finish processing the OODA Loop before your car went over the cliff.
Fortunately, there's a second track, which we'll call "the fast track," or System I Cognition. In this system, the image is also sent to a lower, pre-conscious region of the brain, which is the amygdala. This area of the brain stores visual memory and performs other mental operations as well. The visual image is compared here on a pre-conscious level at incredible speed with many thousands of images that are stored in memory. Let's call each image a "frame" which is a term that Dr. Erving Goffman used in his book Frame Analysis to describe specific, cognitively-bounded sets of environmental conditions. I like to use the word "frame" here because the memory probably contains more than just visual information. There may be sound, kinesthetic, tactile, olfactory or other sensory information that also helps complement the visual image contained within the frame - fortunately, the fast and slow tracks are usually complimentary, one focusing on insight, the other on action. Together they produce a synergistic effect that enhances the actor's chances of survival.
But even though these two tracks are complimentary, we know that some people seem to be much more skilled than others at integrating System 1 and System 2. These especially competent individuals seem to resolve critical situations and also adapt to rapid changes in those situations. They invent routines they have never before performed and act in a fluid, seamless manner without employing full focal awareness."
So at this point in our understanding, we have newer models discovered and developing that tell us something about how the brain can operate on two tracks at the same time, but we don't really have a good idea of how the two levels interact, except to say that the interaction is very fast and complex, and some people do it better than others. We really don't know everything we'd like to know. But we do know that specific types of training can help a person develop unconscious competence, and this is enough to make some suggestions about the kind of training that will help make relatively unskilled people more competent in finding solutions to potentially violent encounters. Taken from - http://www.aaafoundation.org/resources/index.cfm?button=cellphone
Complex conversation had a very similar effect on reaction time as physically turning your attention away from the road.
Below is an excerpt of the report, it goes into much greater detail and has some graphs and charts. All of the distractions led to significant increases in both the number of situations to which subjects failed to respond and the time it took to respond to them. Complex phone conversations created the greatest distraction and simple conversations the least, with tuning the radio falling in between. Placing a phone call was no more deleterious than a simple conversation in causing situations to go unnoticed, but delayed responses to about the same degree as did complex calls. Relative increase in chances of a highway-traffic situation going unnoticed ranged from approximately 20% for placing a call in simple conversations to 29% for complex conversations.
The effect of cellular phone use upon response to highway-traffic situations was the most deleterious for the older age group (i.e., 50-80). Overall, the increase in likelihood that some highway-traffic situation will go unnoticed while calling or conversing on a cellular phone was (for the older group) about twice that of their younger counterparts. Older subjects were no more distracted by radio tuning than the middle-age group (26-49 years) and considerably less than the youngest group (17-25 years). As far as time to respond is concerned, age only effected the placing of cellular phone calls.
While a cellular telephone conversation is no more distracting than a conversation of the same intensity with a passenger, the availability of a cellular phone is almost certain to increase significantly the number of conversations in general and the more distracting, intense, business conversation in particular. Older drivers, in particular, should be cautioned against placing calls.
Overall, the various distractions increased the length of time needed to respond to highway traffic conditions by from .4 to .9 seconds, and the proportion of situations missed entirely from .06 to .09. |
