An odd Youtube video that I have a question about...

There is an interesting Youtube video with a martial arts “master” doing some weird stuff (must be seen to be believed) with his students. Then he tries it on an outsider (another, more-practically-oriented style of martial arts fighter) and fails utterly.
Here is the link :

My question is – the things he is doing with his students in the first thirty seconds or so of the video – how the heck can you do something like that? I’m guessing the best explanation is some type of mass hypnosis. Were the students just feeble-minded? “True believers” in the “channel your Chi” phenomenon? I dunno…

I must admit, it is fascinating and kind of amusing to watch!

Theres several frauds out there that claim they can channel their Chi as energy. I’m surprised this guy actually agreed to a real match. The results are no surprise.

National Geo did a segment on Chi energy.

I just ran across this recently too. Here is an article about it that may explain it, although it’s just an outside observer’s analysis.

That was interesting. Thanks!

I knew what video this was going to be even before clicking on the link. I’ve seen some even weirder videos of “magical” ki power. IMO some of the effects are applied psychology on the part of the practitioner, while others are belief responses by the receptive party.

Kiai, for example, are supposed to be ki projected through your voice, but bellowing suddenly like some kind of wild animal at the exact same time you’re attacking someone has the understandable effect of startling the shit (in some cases literally so) out of them. It also is a fairly natural reaction to attacking and being attacked, or putting forth maximal efforts. Training has the effect of reducing the psychological and physiological reactions you experience in combat, as well as retraining your reflexive responses. If you train to do certain kinds of yells while attacking and being attacked, you unnerve or distract your opponent, while it has a relative calming effect on you since you’ve done the same thing many times in training when you were under less stress and in no real danger. Boom, instant edge in a fight, even if the ki part is complete bullshit and the other guy doesn’t believe in it at all.

People who train under someone who really and truly believes in special powers can become influenced by those beliefs. If you’ve ever been to a Pentecostal church, you’ve seen group delusions in action. People succumb to ecstatic dance, speak in tongues, do spontaneous prophecies (sometimes in “unknown” or “foreign” languages that are “translated” by other church-goers) and have physical reactions to the laying on of hands. This stuff is the same kind of thing, just on a smaller scale. He believes he can wave his hand and knock you down, you believe he can do it, so it happens. Especially in a circumstance like a training group, you have a self-selecting audience. People who think it’s all bullshit tend not to train for long. It’s like a hypnotist who has an audience of people who have all been hypnotized before; all he has to do is say “banana” and he sounds like he’s in a poultry farm.

Consider placebo effects: roughly 40% of people will experience effects due to belief alone. In some cases, there are measurable physical effects due to nothing more than belief. A whole class of widely prescribed drugs has been shown to be no better than a placebo. So, practically speaking, if a patient believes a person in a white coat can make them better by prescribing a sugar pill, it might actually work. MD, witch doctor, faith healer, whatever; doesn’t matter if a susceptible person believes sufficiently. Even the people at Skeptic’s Dictionary are convinced that the placebo effect isn’t simply a statistical anomaly or random occurrence; there’s something going on that we may someday be able to explain, but that we don’t fully understand yet.

Looks like extremely bad acting to me.