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A Visualisation of the Reprograming of the Advanced Wing Chun Practitioner’s Brain

In this article I introduce what the Homunculus is and why this is a useful tool to help students looking to develop advanced skills in Wing Chun Kung Fu.  It looks at the original scientific 2-D mapping diagram by Dr Wilder Penfield and the 3-D clay models from Sharon Price-James to help the student understand that reprogramming the brain is a key part in developing the motor skills and sensory sensitivity necessary to refine and master their Wing Chun skills.

Having introduced the ‘standard’ representation (of how an everyday person’s brain is structured) I then introduce the Wing Chun Homunculus and talk through the motor and sensory mapping changes within the brain that are developed in the advanced Wing Chun practitioner.  This involves reference to the Wing Chun Sensory and Motor Homunculus 3-D models, discussing some of the Wing Chun concepts, principles and techniques behind these changes. 

These 3-D models have been created specifically for this purpose and are the result of my personal research over the last 20 years in developing as a Wing Chun practitioner.  In the absence of scientific research showing the cortical changes in highly developed athletes this is at least a first step towards using our modern understanding of how our bodies and brains function and apply this to mastering Wing Chun Kung Fu skills.     

This article is an extract from the larger work, Reprogramming the Wing Chun Brain which is a chapter taken from the upcoming book from Wing Chun Journey, Understanding Wing Chun as an Internal Martial Art which explores the physiological, psychological and neurological changes the developing student must go through in the journey to master Wing Chun Kung Fu.

Within the article I reference, and use reference material from other articles available on the www.wingchunjourney.com website which are also extracts from the book.  The intention in this article is to contextualise the Wing Chun Homunculus as a visual aid that assists in the internal exploration that is captured in much greater descriptive and anatomical detail within these other articles. 

The Homunculus – an Introduction

The ‘Homunculus’ is often described as “how the brain sees itself” – a representation in terms how much area within the brain in relation to how much attention it is required to give to move and process signals from the different parts of the body. 

The ‘Cortical Homunculus’ is a distorted visual representation of the human body, based on a neurological “map” of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor or sensory functions, for different parts of the body.

The word Homunculus is Latin for “little man” and the Cortical Homunculus illustrates the concept of a representation of the body lying within the brain.  This is based on the nerve fibres which conduct somatosensory information from all over the body, terminating in various areas of the parietal lobe in the cerebral cortex, forming a representational map of the body in the brain.

Dr. Wilder Penfield, Edwin Boldrey and Theodore Rasmussen are considered to be the originators of the Sensory and Motor Homunculi.  Although not the first to attempt to objectify human brain function by means of a Homunculus they were the first to differentiate between sensory and motor function, mapping these across the brain separately, resulting in two different Homunculi.

Their drawings and subsequent drawings based on theirs became the most famous conceptual maps in modern neuroscience because of how they compellingly illustrated the data in a highly visual way.  Penfield’s Homunculi are usually shown in the 2-D diagrams, as shown below.

Penfield visualised how these mappings would look if mapped out as a 3-D character and referred to his creations as “grotesque creatures”, due to their strange-looking proportions.  For example, the sensory nerves arriving from the hands terminate over large areas of the brain, resulting in the hands of the Homunculus being correspondingly large. The nerves emanating from the torso or arms, however, cover a much smaller area and this is why the torso and arms of the Homunculus look comparatively small.

It is useful to visualise the Homunculi represented as 3-D figures, as this can make it easier to understand the ratios between the different body regions’ levels of motor or sensory innervation (the volume of the brain assigned for the control and coordination of these areas).  A downside of this 3-D model approach is it does not illustrate which areas of the brain are associated with which parts of the body.  As such, it is beneficial to reference both the 2-D and 3-D representations.

The following 3-D models were sculpted by Sharon Price-James. 

The Wing Chun Homunculus

To be effective in the art of Wing Chun Kung Fu, it is necessary to develop speed, power, coordination, control, accuracy and a whole host of other skills that extend beyond the everyday use of our bodies.   This level of development has been understood in scientific detail within athletics and those individual within various high-level competition sports in terms of their diet, psychology, and physical training.  It is easy for all to see the transformation that the body can go through when we look at the massive bodies that Weightlifters are able to sculpture through training. 

What has not been captured is the transformation that the brains of these athletes go through, especially in terms of the mapping of advanced motor skills in the Motor and Sensory Cortex’s.  The brain, like the body, is also able to change significantly, but this is not so obvious to see from the outside.  Indeed, to master Wing Chun fu your brain will have to ‘get ripped’ – sculptured to the same level of transformation as your body.  For the developing student within Wing Chun as an ‘internal’ martial art this poses real problems of understanding how to go about this process.  

‘Neuroplasticity’ is the term used to describe your brain’s amazing ability to reprogramme itself.  This is a process that involves altering the synapses and pathways that connect the different parts of your brain through environmental and behavioural experiences.  This means that we can fundamentally change the structure of our brain by training it.  And, more specifically, by training it with reference to external stimuli – through conscious practice of forms along with experience from training with partners and fighting opponents.  Neuroplasticity is what allows for the acquisition and retention of motor skills through physical application.  

In training the body, we understand how muscle-pairs work together and how external forces (gravity in free-weights or using pulleys) can be used to provide counterforce for muscles to work against.  It makes sense, therefore, that in seeking to train the mind that we should understand the different parts of the brain involved in the necessary re-writing of the ‘synapses and pathway’ connections between them.    We should also understand the external forces or stimulation necessary to trigger the brain to be reprogrammed.

In training Wing Chun, the developing student must master the skills necessary to perform highly skilled movements behind fighting techniques.  Mastering Wing Chun requires developing many new skills, some initial examples to provide a context of this necessary change includes moving to using your peripheral vision to ‘look at nothing but see everything’, letting go of tension through external muscles and using your ‘core’ internal muscles to allow the relaxed structure necessary to both ‘sink’ into the ground and use ‘forwarding energy’ from the ground into your opponent through whole-body application.  All of which require developing refined motor and sensory skills that fundamentally involves reprogramming the brain.

A physical representation of the different mappings in the brain of an elite athlete compared with those of an average person has not, to my knowledge, been mapped out.  I have certainly never seen a 3-D visualisation of the differences in the Sensory and Motor Cortex’s.  These certainly would be a helpful guide to cross reference against Wing Chun development. However, in the absence of anything to aid the developing Wing Chun student, I decided to create my own.  

Having trained in Wing Chun for almost 20 years and being interested in biology, chemistry, psychology, neuroscience and physiology I have tracked the physiological changes I observed in my brain / body necessary to move from a beginner student through to the much more refined mastery required to unleash the speed and power that comes from the use of whole-body relaxed, structure in Wing Chun.  I have captured this in a range of articles which you can find on the Wing Chun Journey website and will soon be released as part of a book.  Based on this learning I wanted to create a visual 3-D representation of how I had reprogrammed my own brain over the years.  

I initially tried to create this digitally, but quickly found myself creating clay sculptures which I could then mould with more or less clay to capture and represent the changes of muscle usage, sensitivity, and mental focus.   The end result was a Wing Chun version of the Sensory and Motor Homunculus models from clay.   

In Part 2 we explore the Wing Chun Sensory Homunculus.

Copyright @ Craig Sands