John, thank you for the book recommendation. I snagged a paperback copy off Amazon for $5.Originally Posted by John Hearne
Very interesting discussion, I have been wondering about things like this for a long time. I appreciate the research, and look forward to reading your dissertation after you publish it.
(Not talking smack of any kind, I'm serious.)
There are some nuggets of truth in your theory, it just isn't complete, and I only see one point that I would heavily contest. Both Cirillo and Reitz were able to pull off very solid performances in their first fight. Cirillo's first fight was his most famous and his most difficult but his performance was utterly amazing.
My major point of contention (and you aren't saying this but I'm reading it in there) is that there is no relationship between the level of technical shooting skill and your ability to deliver that skill in a fight. Everything that I have read leads me to believe that once one's skill is sufficient to be overlearned to some degree, the odds of that skill being used increase. Overlearned skills are clearly insulated from the effects of arousal seen in critical events. The more they are overlearned, the more they are insulated and therefore they tend to be more accessible.
I would also offer, primary for evolutionary reasons, that it isn't until your third successful engagement that you really hit your stride and begin to deliver more of your potential in a fight. This is the theory behind force-on-force training. The idea is to get you through your first engagements with a safety net so that your first "real" engagement is not so tough to handle.
Your mind/body has two major systems it can use to solve problems. If you engage the lymbic/emotional system you see all of the effects that we're warned about (fight/flight/freeze/posture, SNS dump, etc.) and you won't access much if any of your technical skill. If you stay in your rational mind, you are far more likely to use your shooting skills, remain calm, and have a dominating win.
Much of my presentation is a review of existing research. One of the few original contribution is a flow chart that attempts to predict which mental system you're likely to use in an encounter. There are a lot of moving parts and I'm sure I'm missing some but it seems pretty solid. Because the chart is original, I'm hesitant to post it in a public forum right now.
It is probably incorrect to argue that the degree of skill accessibility is fixed during a fight. I offer that your degree of system use will vary depending on how well the unfolding events meet your expectations or mental map. Events unfolding in congruence with your expectations tend to keep the rational mind engaged. When the events unfold in contradiction to your mental map or you have no mental map, you slip into the emotional mind and you're brain will slip into fight/flight/freeze/posture.
I just want to say that this may be the best, most enriching forum thread I have ever read. Thanks for all the thoughtful contributions. I'll go back to lurking and learning now.
My comments have not been approved by my employer and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer. These are my comments, not my employer's.
Ken wrote a paper on intuition and experience, not exactly on the same topic, but I strongly think the same factors come into play.
Very good reading IMHO;
http://www.strategosintl.com/pdfs/In...Techniques.pdf
Don't believe you got what I meant. I just said that the first fight range was much greater than successive fights, that the percentage performance loss ranged from 0-100 percent, and the explanation for the larger range was how different folks are wired. Cirillo doing great is perfectly consistent with my theory. Paul Kirchner, our mutual friend and author of a book on Cirillo would have some insights on this.
Nope. Obviously the greater the technical skill you start with the greater the skill level you have to bring to the fight -- regardless of the percentage discount.
I still think you are attaching greater significance to overlearned than I do. Most people have tons of overlearned skills -- everything from driving, to brushing your teeth, and most activities of daily living. The key to me isn't whether it is overlearned, but rather what is their level of technical excellence in these things they can do subconsciously.
Last I looked, I have 400 something hours in a level D flight simulator (considered realistic enough by the FAA you can log it as time of flight, and be legal to fly a type jet based just on the simulator training). I view simulator and force on force to really be three dimensional square range training -- and the reason for that is you (probably) won't die in the simulator or the force on force training. As soon as death as a result is off the table, the stress level dramatically changes.
Likes pretty much everything in every caliber.
It seems to me that we're talking about preconscious competence which is essentially "what you can do when you don't have to think about it."
Most folks are familiar with the tree that stretches from unconscious incompetence (you don't know how little you know) to unconscious competence (you can do it without thinking about it). The problem I've always had with that model is it presumes there's a journey where the IC guy is shooting a drill in 10s and the UC is doing it in 5s.
Everyone has a UC "level" -- and based on a discussion I had with one of John's friends and fellow trainers I've learned it's more appropriate to refer to it as preconscious rather than unconscious for whatever that's worth to you. Preconscious skill level is what you can do when you don't get to think about how to do it before& during the act.
If you've never fired a gun before you have a level of preconscious skill: it's essentially zero, but it exists. And so that's the level of skill you'll be able to bring to bear. A lot of people with near-zero preconscious win fights because their opponents aren't any better, luck exists, and candidly the amount of real skill needed to point shoot someone in the chest at 10ft is amazingly low. As an aside, that's why I'm not as big a detractor of point/threat focused shooting for the undedicated as many of my peers: I think someone who spends a day getting confident at doing the easy part well under a little bit of stress is better prepared than the guy who is shown the perfect way to hold, sight, press but never builds those skills to the point that they can be called upon in a preconscious way.
As you get better, your preconscious skill -- what I've always thought of as true on demand ability rises because your brain has taught the muscles to do things with greater precision and speed with less direct input. You program yourself and an efficient program just executes better than an inefficient one.
The best example I can think of is SLG. He's never going to win USPSA Nationals and there are people on this board who will have personal records greater than his. But SLG can pick up a gun and do whatever he's going to do with it, every time, when he's angry and cold and hurt, and just execute the program properly. To me, for what I care about, that's a million times better than posting your best-ever one time video of a 3.5s FAST. It's not about what he can pull off when things are perfect and a little lucky. It's whether he's the guy who can walk through the doorway and deliver every time no matter what.
That's why my goals are based on things like lots of reps and getting technique right & understood. Write the program. Perfect the program. Execute the program. Sure that will mean over time you should be getting better at the conscious level (which in turn will eventually translate into the preconscious). But it also means you need to be careful about somersaulting around the training technique universe and trying fifty million different things looking for "the best" because you're robbing yourself of the overlearning necessary to program that efficient, on-demand program.
At the moment of truth, if the physical skill needed is to put a pair of rounds into a slowly moving 6" zone at 8yd in 2s -- based on whatever your unique circumstance is -- you can either do it, get lucky, or fail. Your tactics might be so awesome that they expand your success window; they might be so bad that you're on a tighter limit than you should have been. But once the necessary parameter is established for this one moment we're trying to live through, you can either do that on demand under distraction and stress thanks to your program or are just a rookie closing his eyes, pointing his gun, and jerking the trigger with hope in his heart.
That was excellent, thanks for sharing. I'd have to say that his whole article tracks with my major themes. It really scary as I had already added pictures of of the Liberian firearms use to my presentaion. I'm using them as an example of the emotional use of a firearm but intuitive is essentially the same thing.
"Who's Training Who" has been one of my favorite training essays for years, now this one is fighting for top honors.
I do not think that being able to demonstrate a skill at a high level of performance necessarily means that the skill is overlearned.
C Class shooter.
Yes and no. Are there some folks who are genetically gifted and can learn and execute physical skills at much higher levels for levels of practice that are way below average? Absolutely, I work with one of those guys and I HATE him for it. There are definitely some folks on the low side of physical skill mastery - folks who can practice a lot and not make the same gains that the average person does for the same amount of practice. In the Epstien book, he referenced studies of aerobic and strength training. The range of improvement from solid programs was 0-300%. So there were people who lifted and gained no appreciable strength gains and people who gained way above average. I'd say the phenomena is out there and well documented.I do not think that being able to demonstrate a skill at a high level of performance necessarily means that the skill is overlearned.
When we look at the motor skills research (see for good starting points Schmidt's Motor Control and Learning or Proctor's Skill Acquistion and Human Performance) we see that overlearned skills have certain characteristics. Besides being better quantitatively (faster, more accurate), overlearned skills are differently qualitatively. I don't remember all of the differences but I do recall that the actual tension of the muscles during overlearned activities are reduced over those in merely learned skills. The idea that smooth is fast is in all likelihood the result of overlearned muscle programs and the different manifestations of overlearned skills.
Let's talk stop talking about shooting for a bit. Suppose I wanted you to field strip a Sig P226. I'd talk about it, show you how to do it, and then walk you through the process. At the point that you perform it once, without my input, the skills is technically learned. You have demonstrated the ability to perform the task but you certainly haven't mastered it. Now suppose that for the next six months, you spend 15 minutes a day taking apart and reassembling you P226. At the end of the six months, you will be able to complete the process much quicker than the first time you did it. If we measured the amount of mental effort you were using, it would be dramatically lower than when you started. If we measured the tension in your arm muscles, there would be less than when you started. At the end of six months, you could probably talk the whole time and the process would proceed for all practical purposes - automatically.
Now, let's say that after six months of practice, we suddenly add complexity to the field stripping process. We start yelling at you, we strobe the lights, we set off fireworks by your feet, we even cut off the lights and make you do it in the dark. The person who has really overlearned the process is going to be much more successful in completing the field strip under those conditions. They are certainly going to be more successful than the person who learned how to do it, practiced it twice, and then didn't touch a P226 for six months.
This is science so there nothing proven to 100% certainty - we only disprove a hypothesis. Are there outliers who could perform at high levels without overlearning - absolutely. For the bulk of the population is performance at a high level, and especially under stress, indicative of overlearning - I would say - YES!
Re-reading my earlier post, I expressed myself poorly.
A better way to put it would be to say a skill does not necessarily need to be performed at a high level of performance to be overlearned. Consequently, measuring the performance of that skill to determine the level of overlearning seems flawed to me. I would agree that performing a skill at a high level is indicative of overlearning.
C Class shooter.
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