Mushin and Zanshin - Neural Correlates

 Mushin and Zanshin

These are two terms, borrow from Zen and stretched over phenomena for with Budo - a fit that is not always a good one. It has been suggested this occurred because early swordsmen weren't particularly literate and the most educated people in Japanese society back then were Zen monks who were asked to transcribe the thought and ideas of the swordsman onto paper. The monks were far from passive amanuensis and often had to expand on that they thought the swordsman was getting at and it is through this process that Zen terms, ideas and concepts found their way into the vernacular of Budo. Having said that, there is very little evidence that the Samurai were actually enthusiastic practitioners of Zen despite what you might hear in dojo around the world.¹

 

 

Mushin is often translated as ‘no/without mind/spirit/heart’ and Zanshin as ‘lingering mind/spirit/heart. The latter is often superficially taken to mean ‘awareness’ especially after the final movement of a kata is completed. But they require further explanation -

 

Mushin Jap., colloquial, lit.”innocence”; in Zen an expression for detachment of mind, a state of complete naturalness and freedom from dualistic thinking and feeling.²   Mushin is being fully aware of one’s actions and surroundings, within performing a given task, and yet not being caught up in the minutiae of that task.³ Ones attention is free and open to anything and not fixed (‘stopped’ as Takuan Soho writes in an ‘Unfettered Mind’) upon any one action or category. 

 

                                                       

 Kanji Characters for Mushin. The upper part mean 'without' or 'none', the lower means 'heart', 'spirit' or 'mind'.

 

Zanshin is a corollary of mushin – a state of relaxed awareness where one can respond to an adversary. It is gentle focus on one salient stimulus in your environment, but still fluid enough to be subject to reallocation as the environment changes.

 

                                                               

 Kanji character for 'Zanshin'. The upper glyphs means 'remain' or 'linger' and the lower glyph, again means mind/spirit  or heart

 

 

In terms of neuroscience, we process a specific ‘stream’ of information selectively, in the presence of many other streams. In a crowd, you can focus on a specific person talking to you, but if you hear your name spoken elsewhere you can switch your attention to that. This is known as the ‘Cocktail Party Effect’. Or you may have just dispatched one enemy and you need to switch your attention to the next potential threat and act appropriately to that stimulus. Budoka are often fixated upon how we maintain our attention, but in a conflict situation, how we switch attention between stimuli (attackers) is just as, if not more, important.

 

The Science Bit

The areas of the brain that allow one to switch ones attention are the prefrontal cortex (located at the front of the brain, behind your forehead) and the basal ganglia ( a set of four nuclei found deeper in the midbrain)

                                                   

                                             Prefrontal cortex of the brain   

          

                                                                                                                                                                                   The nuclei that constitute the basal ganglia

 When we are talking to someone, looking intently at their face, your brain will increase processing activity in the face and auditory areas of one’s brain and decrease in other non-salient areas…eg. smell, taste, proprioception. 

 

 

 Emily is transfixed with Cyrii's recounting of the events at the last Iai seminar

 This allows you to process the person’s face and what it’s saying more accurately and not get distracted (remember, we have limited processing power). Thus their face and speech have all your attention. You are absorbed in what they are saying and the movements of their face as they say it. In a combat situation, when a threatening teki is in front of you, the brain areas that analyse visual angles, distancing and movements are likely to be highly activated, whereas those areas of the brain dealing with the processing of the general scenery, building structures, the weather, the sky’s colour etc will be deactivated since they are not important in this particular situation.

 

It is the basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex that switch ones attention to the most salient part of ones immediate environment, in this case, teki's fly being undone.

 

The basal ganglia has been found to be the structure that switches ones attention to the most salient stimulus in the environment. When we focus our attention on something, specialised areas of the brain will process that information eg. if you’re looking at a particular teki, the visual areas of your brain will be rendering those signals from your retinae into a person with a sword and decreasing process information about the background in which they’re standing or noises in the environment.  The prefrontal cortex increases communication with the brain region involved in processing the attended information and increases activity in that region. The prefrontal cortex  and the basal ganglia work together to bring about this switch in attention. Say we are focused on the face of a stationary enemy and a different teki begins to moves towards us, the basal ganglia decreases communication between prefrontal cortex  and ‘face processing area’ of the brain and increases communication between prefrontal cortex and thus the movement detection areas of the brain. We have successfully switched our attention onto something more threatening in our immediate environment.

 

The Basal Ganglia/Prefrontal cortex are the neural correlates for mushin/zanshin.

 

The reason ones attention has to be 'switched' is because we can only attend to one task at a time due to limited neural processing power. The idea of 'multitasking' is in fact a myth but the switching of attention is so rapidly achieved the illusion of multitasking is created. The average person can switch between three and four tasks at a time but persons such as fast jet pilots and astronauts can switch between ten, or so, tasks. Careful experimentation has shown that men are quicker and more efficient at switching attention despite the urban myths that suggest otherwise. It's just that we generally don't want to.

 

 References

1      Lowry D. (2002)  Traditions. Tuttle p 68.

2      A Concise Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen. Shambala. 1991 edition.

3      Mann, J.K., When Buddhists Attack.  Tuttle p130