Then I did it with strangers. A man in a parking lot finished a fight his body had been holding for years, and you could see the years leave him. A fit fighter gassed out in sixty seconds against someone twice his age and half his strength, because something in him had never learned to stay. A woman who couldn't settle on a massage chair was all the way home in her body the second a sword was in her hand.
I didn't theorize any of this. I watched it happen, again and again. And once I began filming the events — so I could study them frame by frame — the early patterns I'd only half-seen started to surface and connect, until they landed on a thesis.
The thesis: this kind of play loads four systems at once — the body's engine, its threat-alarm, its live read of another nervous system, and its moment-to-moment sense of that person's intent. Almost nothing in modern life asks for all four. A sad friend with a foam sword gets all four inside a minute.
The connection came first. The science came second. That order is the whole reason I trust it. I am not a neuroscientist explaining brains — I am a field researcher reporting what bodies do.