Quantitative Experiments on Remote Action Toh-ate

The present experiments focus on the skills involved in the traditional Japanese martial art called 'toh-ate'. Toh-ate is a non-contact attack by one person against another when some distance separates the two. For the experiments, 6 pairs of veteran practitioners of martial arts participated. Three pairs were practitioners of Japanese martial arts and the other pairs were practitioners of Chinese qigong. As control, 6 pairs (non-trainees) participated; these persons had no martial arts training. Two subjects of a pair were put in separate rooms with communicational deprivation and the experimenters measured physiological changes of one of the two, acting as a Receiver, when the other, acting as a Sender, attempted to make a remote attack on the Receiver at a distance. The Receiver was seated in a Faraday cage and the Sender performed only one 'sending' motion per 80-second trial on double blinded and randomized conditions. When the Sender or Receiver pushed a switch as the event marker, output signals were produced. The signals were recorded as the sending time or the response time, along with physiological data, by recorders. No anomalous changes of average gradient of skin temperature of the Receiver's palm were observed around the sending time. Totally 797 data were available for analyses of time coincidence between motions of the Sender and Receiver. There was no significant coincidence between any of the data. However, two pairs of Chinese qigong practitioners showed 5% significance peaks at +11 sec. If these delay peaks were caused by toh-ate, their sending performances were longer than several seconds.