Becoming Batman
Page 13
The third and last stage is the automatic one. Batman would no longer pay much direct attention to the movements. His performance would be very consistent now and could be adapted to different settings. So, he would be able to apply his skills in any environment and against real attackers. It is really at this stage that we would call Batman highly trained. This is the point made in a story in the 1961 Giant Batman Annual called “How to Be the Batman.” As a result of taking a drug given to him by a ne’er-do-well, Batman has lost all memories of his prowess and crime-fighting skills. Robin takes him through a refresher program hoping to jog his memory. Robin comments to Batman, “Your muscles are so well trained that they respond automatically! It is only your mind that doesn’t remember.” What is interesting is that Robin does realize Batman is aiming to regain automaticity. He clearly appreciates how well-trained Batman is and was and how well ingrained are the “automatic muscle responses.” Regrettably, this also corresponds with the popularized idea of “muscle memory” that you hear trotted out on almost any television broadcast for any sport. Muscles don’t have a memory in this sense, but by now you know that your spinal cord and brain certainly do!
What Channel Are Those Programs On?
You might ask at this point just where all that training “lives”? How is it remembered and where does the remembering occur? To answer those questions we must refer back to the cerebellum and introduce another brain area called the hippocampus, which is the brain’s main home for memory formation and storage. The hippocampus is found under the frontal part of the cerebral cortex (cleverly named the frontal cortex!) and was named from the Greek words hippos and kampi, meaning “horse that is curved,” from the anatomical shape of this region. The role of the hippocampus in memory formation and storage was brought to light in the 1950s by the study of an individual known by the name of “Henry M.” or more commonly only by his initials. HM had intractable epilepsy and underwent neurosurgery involving sectioning through the hippocampus on both sides of his brain. After that, HM could recall events from before his surgery but was unable to make new memories. Researchers concluded that the connections through the hippocampus are critical for memory formation. The exact way in which this occurs involves activity in many neurons firing at the same time. This simultaneous activity leads to an enhancement of information flow across certain synapses because of a mechanism known as long-term potentiation, or LTP. LTP is the process by which memories are laid down and stored, and it requires input from multiple sites within the hippocampus. LTP is now known to occur in many different sites in the brain, including the motor cortex, but it does not occur after damage to the hippocampus. If the hippocampus is damaged, memories cannot be stored as before.
The importance of the hippocampus has really been demonstrated in experiments in which rats have learned how to navigate through mazes. If the connections in their hippocampi are disrupted, rats have great difficulty learning to get around. A really neat human comparison is that of London taxi drivers. To become a licensed taxi driver in London requires being trained for two to four years, learning all the 25,000 routes in this huge city. This is called “The Knowledge” and is strictly evaluated by an examination given to ensure that all drivers can navigate the city by memory. You might guess that the size of the hippocampus in these taxi drivers is somewhat larger than normal, and you would be correct. There is an interesting study of a London taxi driver who had a rare syndrome leading to damage of the hippocampus on both sides of his brain. He had worked as a taxi driver for over 40 years and thus had a very old and well-stored memory of “The Knowledge.” He could still get around London but became easily lost when going off the main routes. This again provides an example of the crucial role of the hippocampus in memory formation and storage. It will probably not be a surprise to learn that the neurological disorder Alzheimer’s disease, in which the formation of new memories eventually becomes impossible, arises because of degeneration in the hippocampus. We will come back to Alzheimer’s disease in Chapters 13 and 15.
So, memory formation while Bruce, then the Bat-Man, and eventually Batman was performing his training partly occurred in the hippocampus. For motor skills the cerebellum, our trusted VP of sensation and movement, plays a major role. In the cerebellum the reverse process of LTP occurs—wait for it, you know this will be good since scientists are so fanciful in naming things—by means of long-term depression, or LTD. The cerebellum receives information about what the cortex plans to do for movement as well as feedback related to what actually occurred. Therefore, the cerebellum is uniquely situated to act as a mediator during movement control and learning. Output (advice) from the cerebellum is used by the cortex to continually update and adjust the motor plans that are enacted.
A neat experiment that clearly shows how important the cerebellum is during motor skill acquisition involved people throwing darts at a target board while wearing prism goggles that shifted the visual field to one side. This meant that they perceived the target to be in front of them, even though it wasn’t. Let’s say you tried this. Over time, about 30 minutes or so, if you have no damage to your central nervous system, you would adapt to this shift and begin to throw the darts so that they hit the target (even though it would still appear to be in the wrong place). If the goggles were then removed, you would now “overshoot” in the opposite direction and miss the target just like you did when you first put on the goggles. Again, you would adapt to the new target over another 30-minute period. However, someone who has damage to the cerebellum would not make any adaptation and would always miss the target. This means the cerebellum is needed for motor learning required to adapt to new conditions.
An umbrella term is used to describe many neural processes related to things like motor learning or just changes in activity in the nervous system. That term is “adaptive plasticity,” and it refers to the remolding of neural circuits as a result of activity that has occurred. The basic principle behind this was suggested in 1949 by the Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb, who coined what is known as Hebb’s postulate. This states: “When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic changes take place so that A’s efficiency of firing B is increased.” The shorter version, and one which is easier to remember, is “neurons that fire together, wire together.” This explains why it is so important for Batman to have good practice conditions while he is learning and building his motor programs for martial arts and other skills. If nerve cells are wiring together by firing together, you want the correct stuff firing at the same time. That is, sloppy practice will generate poor motor programs. In a way this is the neural basis for the old expression “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.”
This is also related to the neural basis for adaptations to strength or power training (which we discussed back in Chapter 4). Training responses can occur either at the muscle level or at the level of the central nervous system (within the brain and spinal cord). At the muscle level, changes will happen to mirror the stimulus that is applied. That is, if the stimulus involves forcing the muscle to perform small numbers of high-force contractions, the adaptation will be different from times when the stimulus involves high numbers of low-force contractions. Within the central nervous system, differences in the motor program or movement command are sent by the brain when similar movements are performed fast or slow, with greater force or with lesser force. Try this yourself. Stand up and move your hand. Repeat the movement faster and slower. Then try a different movement with the same hand. Did you notice having to think about it? If you had repeated the same simple movements over and over, you could have done them more automatically.
These factors underlie the previously mentioned principles of overload and specificity in training. Because of the very nature of the training response in human beings, it is vitally important that the training stimulus be as specific and similar to the technique as possible. That explains
the way in which Batman learns the motor skills he needs to have at his disposal for fighting crime. However, when we think about applications for full-blown combat in martial arts or military applications, we really have entered the arena of what is known as overtraining or overlearning. That is, to go beyond just performing a task adequately, making the task and skill so ingrained as to really and truly be automatic. What we are talking about now is learning a skill so well that it is part of the individual. This is a basic approach of martial arts training, as I will further describe in the next chapter, as well as military training.
How Much Is Too Much?
This issue of overlearning was originally described by William Krueger from the University of Chicago back in 1929. He did experiments not on motor skill learning but rather on memorizing lists of words. The term “learning” describes the ability to remember the lists accurately, and the term “retention” indicates the ability to remember those lists after various set intervals. With a bit more relevance for motor skills, he performed another set of experiments in 1930 involving a maze-tracking task. The term “overlearning” was used to mean how much extra practice was required after a task or skill was learned. So, if it took 10 trials to do a certain maze-tracking task, 50% and 200% overlearning would occur with 15 trials and 30 trials, respectively. Now, with complex movement skills such as those with which Batman would need to be familiar, 10 trials would not likely approach reasonable skill. In fact, many old tales of martial arts mastery suggest that thousands or more repetitions of a form or pattern are needed for mastery. Tsuyoshi Chitose (1898–1984), the founder of one of the karate styles that I studied for 25 years, wrote that his teacher would not teach a new movement form until basic proficiency had been obtained in the previous form. Chitose recommended three thousand repetitions as the minimum to achieve this proficiency. I am not sure where I am in this count, but after more than 25 years I have some forms (kata) that I have now practiced more than ten thousand times. I still find something new every time I do one! Maybe I am a slow learner?
The kind of movement skills Batman uses in his nighttime prowling and crime-fighting activities are procedural skills. Procedural skills are tasks that have a series of discrete responses chained together. A discrete response is one where there is a well-defined beginning and end. A continuous response is one which, not surprisingly, continues. So, Batman on foot and running after Catwoman is performing a continuous skill—walking or running. However, once he catches up to Catwoman and they begin fighting, he will perform discrete actions—kicking for example—added together in a series, and this would be procedural skills.
It turns out that procedural tasks are ones that are the easiest for us to forget. For the U.S. Army, this was a major problem for the essential skills that the infantry learn in basic training. For example, it is critical that soldiers know how to assemble and disassemble their firearms. However, this is but one among a large set of motor skills and tasks that recruits are required to master during basic training. There is therefore only limited time to devote to each task or skill. This is not unlike the situation encountered in the basic training of essential public service providers such as police officers and firefighters. In the example of the U.S. Army, it was known that the amount of practice devoted to skills such as the assembly and disassembly of the M60 machine gun was sufficient to gain mastery during training. But, this mastery was rapidly forgotten in the weeks that followed basic training. It is quite costly and unwieldy to conduct refresher courses at regular intervals, so therefore the U.S. Army Research Institute explored overlearning as a way to mitigate the effects of forgetting. Soldiers typically could reach acceptable criterion performance of this skill in about 30 minutes of continuous practice. Overtraining of 100% past this criterion skill level resulted in improved performance at an eight-week post-training test.
Overtraining combined with refresher courses is an efficient way to store and restore procedural skills. It is now known that the effect of overtraining has a “half-life” of about three weeks. So, after five to six weeks, if no additional refresher course or training is implemented, the benefit of overlearning may be reduced almost to zero. What this means is that regular practice, even just a little bit, dispersed over weeks is critical for maintenance of the learning of procedural skills. I tell my martial arts students that even five to ten minutes of practice each day can make a huge difference in their ability to remember and improve on basic movement skills.
Batman cannot, therefore, expect his skills to be maintained if he just sits around (or runs around, or whatever he might do that is not practicing his important martial arts skills). Gichin Funakoshi, an Okinawan karate master who pioneered the development of karate on the Japanese mainland, wrote that “karate is like boiling water: without heat, it returns to its tepid state.” This metaphor very nicely captures the underlying science of motor skill learning and retention.
A question that you might be framing even now in your head is why is this so? If learning these skills fits with the concept of motor program and motor learning mentioned above—and it does—then why don’t these programs just sit there nicely and wait to be used? I am telling you that Batman’s skills will degrade if they aren’t used or practiced. However, if you have a certain software program on your computer and don’t use it for one year, you know it will work just the same now as it did a year ago. It hasn’t degraded, so why do the biological motor programs degrade?
A probable explanation can be seen when considering motor learning in light of the overall stress-response model established in Chapter 3. We have to consider the overall metabolic cost of learning—synapse formation and maintenance do require increased metabolic cost. The act of learning a skill and then constantly trying to use that skill can be considered the environmental stress needed to keep those skills and the underlying neural connections strong and efficient. We can think of practice and attempts to remember during practice as the stress for maintaining learning.
This is even more of an issue for Batman’s tools. His batarangs, his gliders, his weapons are all “tools.” It turns out that learning and remembering motor skills with tools can be even more difficult than without tools. In Batman’s case that really means that remembering how to use all his weapons is harder than just doing empty hand fighting. This is also why learning to play something like golf is so difficult. This is probably because the tools that we use are not “calibrated” as parts of our bodies. Remember the homunculus concept? Well, you have had those maps of your body in your brain since you were a baby. The map has been recalibrated over the years to reflect your changing body size and activities. However, your body has always been there. Well, tools aren’t with us all the time and we use them usually quite intermittently. It turns out that our homunculus can include parts of the way we use tools. But it seems these changes in the maps are very weak compared with those for our actual body parts. That means they need much more “maintenance” than do our other maps. I can testify that in my own martial arts experiences, empty hand karate techniques and patterns are much easier to learn and remember than are weapons techniques and patterns. Also, it is much, much easier to forget or “get rusty” with weapons than it is with karate technique. Although both require continual practice, empty hand fighting is more forgiving. This is why, as with almost every aspect of biological and physiological systems, motor skill learning for you, me, and Batman is absolutely a case of “use it or lose it.”
Now let’s look at how Batman would have taken these methods of learning skills and made himself a master of martial arts.
CHAPTER 8
Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting
BUT WHAT WAS BATMAN DOING?
I don’t have to explain that he has conditioned himself to the peak of physical perfection . . . and . . . is a master of the martial arts.
—The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, Volume 2: DC Comics, from the introduction by Martin Pasko
Batman is the most hi
ghly trained martial artist of all DC Comics superheroes. It could be argued that he is the greatest pure fighter in the history of comic book heroes. In fact, I am arguing that right now as you read this. So there. Batman has been shown doing many different fighting techniques over the years. A memorable panel appears in the story “This One’ll Kill You Batman” (Batman #260, 1975). Batman, described in the panel as “a master of unarmed combat,” is shown doing kung fu, judo, aikido, and “plain old fisticuffs.”
What type of martial arts training would best suit Batman? In The Ultimate Guide to the Dark Knight, Scott Beatty—a true master of all things Batman—says the Caped Crusader has studied 127 martial arts. First, I doubt that there are that many truly different martial arts. There are many subdivisions of martial arts, though, that could easily reach into the hundreds. Second, even if there were that many, could a person really study all of them? The idea that training in many different martial arts is the way you attain superior skill and mastery is false mythology. Studying four martial arts for one year each does not result in the same skill as having four years of training in one discipline. Instead it is more like going to ninth grade at four different schools and then asking for a high school diploma. You never really gain any deep understanding or competency with this approach. This is certainly the “jack of all trades, master of none” route. And master of none means a very short career as a costumed crimefighter.