It has been established LONG ago in this thread that muscles do not have cognitive ability. Big friggin deal! No one is disagreeing on that, and I think the average person knows this. Ed was right on: this is another useless argument over semantics about the phrase "Muscle Memory". What a colossal waste of time!
Pluspinc thinks he is on to something big when it is absolutely nothing new. The infamous Colonel Jeff Copper and others have been teaching the "panic freeze up" for decades. It is layed out in the "Conditions" Cooper established. We know most of them, but the upper few are:
Condition Orange: Ready to react with training while consciously aware of situation,
Condition Red: Acting as trained and practiced, not necessarily with conscious thought,
Condition Black: Panic, loss of all trained ability.
"Condition Black" has been a term used to describe this for decades in the shooting community and it is nothing new. The idea is to ride in Condition Red when the time comes and hope to god you never cross over into Condition Black. This is the whole premise of training, to reduce the chance of panic.
We all train and practice mentally and physically with the goal that we don't fall into Condition Black. No one has said it can't happen, but we do know that the more we prepare mentally and physically, the less likely it will happen, otherwise none of us would train.
We all know people that have used their training to defend themselves or to save their lives whether it be riding a motorcycle or shooting a gun. Some people here would have us believe that we all turn to babbling piles of goo when stress hits. Sometimes, sure, everyone panics sometimes. Some people also panic a lot of the time, and other people have the "steely nerves" of James Bond and are never flustered. But most of us fall in the middle and are going to perform just like we practice when the time comes, and we see cases of this every day.
When it comes down to it, we are all wired a little differently anyway, so how can we generalize how all people will react? Look at a video on Real TV sometime and watch how crowds react and how differently people react to the same situation.
For instance, I was watching a plane crash at an air show once. The plane went down in a ball of fire about 100 yards from the crowd. Some people sat there and watched. Some people got up and ran away. Some people got up and ran toward the wreck to help. This all happened so suddenly that it was totally reflexive. People were running *toward* the wreck, which was a huge ball of fire, in a useless but instinctive attempt to save the pilot. Other people ran away from a wreck that was 100 yards away and posed no threat to them. Neither were very logical things to do, but everyone is wired a little differently and people react differently to the same situation.
Everyone reacts differently to these kinds of life endangering situations and everyone has a different threshold of what they consider stress and what send them into panic. So, how can we lump everyone into one group and say that when stress hits we are all going to fall apart and not be able to draw our gun, especially when real life tells us that as long as we practice enough, we probably WILL be able to react exactly like we train when the time comes.
To use Police Officers as an example of the best of us is ludicrous. These Officers are usually guys that barely qualify annually, and that is the only time all year that they even fire their gun! I know personally many cops like this, so I know for a fact there are may many of them out there, possibly even making up the greater majority of Police Officers as a whole. When they need to defend their life with a gun, of course some of them lose their abilities (abilites that they never had in the first place!). Let's look at the 2 million people a year that successfully defend themselves from criminal attack with a gun. Lets look at all the athletes that SUCCEED in performing intricate and nearly impossible feats under extreme stress, instead of looking at the few failures. Let's look at people in war time. Pluspinc would have us believe that both sides in a battle turn into piles of mush and they can't even flick the safety off on their gun or change a magazine. Obviously, people can and do perform under such stress because humans have proven to be very capable of performing in war. Yes, we can find a few instances of people failing to perform in war, and yes we can all tell crazy stories, but overall, a lot of people are getting shot, and that means a lot of people are pulling the trigger and hitting the target which means that a lot of people are doing what they were trained to do, even under the utmost of life threatening and fearful circumstances.
It is called a Red Herring argument, when you use one case of an Olympiad screwing up to prove that everyone fails under stress. Let's look at all the people that SUCCEED under stress, like Olympiads doing movements that are much more difficult than drawing a gun. Like Gwinny said, Olympiads are performing intricate feats that are nearly impossible under even the best conditions, and the fact is, they get %99 of it correct, even under extreme stress! This only serves to PROVE that people can perform very well under immense stress.
Focusing on a few failures is lacking to see the whole picture. Let's also look at the guys that train a lot and practice hard and see how well they shoot under stress? How about SWAT guys as whole? How about competitive shooters as a whole? How many of them can't draw their gun when they need to? And once again, we need to look at the whole picture, not a few Red Herring examples.
The fact is, I don't care what "science" says either way on this issue, when I know what real life is. Sometimes science takes a while to catch up and explain things that the average person knows from real life experience. I have been in battle, I have had my fair share of small arms fired at ME, trying to kill ME, and I have reacted in those situations according to my training and prevailed, so what kind of person, especially one that has never been there, going to tell me how I am supposed to react in that situation or how other people will react? We all know people, or ourselves, that have been in life threatening situations where we reacted with our training. I don't care if pseudo-scientists tell me that we can't react with our training when our lives are threatened. I have, others have, many people here have, so real life tells us that if we practice, we will.
[This message has been edited by Red Bull (edited January 30, 2000).]
) was not just trying to pole vault, he was trying to do it high and well enough to make the cut at the Olympics. Those gymnasts on the bars are attempting actions I will simply NEVER be able to do, and stress is not the reason. They are simply very very difficult movements, and I don't know how you would separate the actual tiny mistakes from stress reactions.
