Episode 3 [Audio] | Aiming (Part 1)

transcript of episode
french translation of episode

Transcript:

I want to talk to you in this session about aiming. I get asked a lot about aiming. We do a target sport and people have many, many ideas about functional aiming techniques - and I am not wholly sure that this one little five minute download will cover it. So, where are we going to start? We’re going to start with some of the psycho-physiological background - and that is how the functions within your brain tie up with muscles, and what the limitations of these are.

So let’s start by dispelling one myth. You can’t see a picture, hold that picture, send a message to your brain, have a message come back out of your brain which fires some neurons and activates a muscle and you execute the shot. There isn’t time. Everybody has a thing called natural sway. You move when you are trying to do something exacting. This movement is constant (this natural sway) and for the most part we don’t notice it, as it is something that (as I say) is constant. What this means though is that when people say 'I can hold that pin rock solid', it’s not actually the case and we have done some work with pistol shooters and archers where we plot where the sight pins move around the target, and that gave some quite disquieting information back to these very skilled performers about exactly where and how they aimed (but we will maybe come back to that).

It takes 40 milliseconds - the very fastest it can be is 40 milliseconds - to recognize a picture and send a message to execute a muscle. And in that 40 milliseconds, you won’t be pointing where you were pointing before. So, really you’re wasting your time trying to do it in that way. So, how does it work? Well, experts, if you measure their brain wave activity when they are shooting a bow and arrow or a pistol or a rifle for that matter, there is no cognitive activity. So, they don’t think about things and they don’t process information on a cognitive level. What they do is they trust their skill, and you will see at a point where they are happy that they have set the shot up right, that the cognitive centers in their brains, the electrical activity 'flatlines', and this includes the optical centers. So, they are not processing images. What are they doing? They’re using their expertise and they’re looking for a picture. They have experience, they are relaxed and trust in their skill and they are looking for a picture. They are not processing everything that is happening. They are waiting for an image, and when that image happens they will execute and make a movement.

Now, we do this all the time and I suppose if we want to take the most famous example (of this); in the mid 80s in Formula I, Honda brought over a telemetry system for the McLaren Formula I cars during testing and a certain Brazilian racing driver went out, did a couple of laps of the testing circuit, came back and the technicians were amazed at the amount of individual movements, individual breaking and accelerating and turning of the wheel that this individual was capable of doing within a single corner - within a single second. And when information about these tests got out, psychophysiologists turned around to Honda and said “your machinery is broken.” And when Honda took umbrage at this and came back to know it is not, the slightly strangely next logical assumption was that this very famous Brazilian Formula I driver was a God - was some mercurial talent, some superhuman with reaction times of unbelievable levels and this actually stood for about 6 months to a year as an idea and then they tested to more people and they found out that they could do similar - not quite as good - but similar sort of reaction times. And they then went further afield and famously looked at skiers and they went 'but these guys and making reactions faster than it is possible to send messages through the body system', and then it dawned on them that skilled athletes were using experience.

If you put a skier on a piece of ice that acts oddly as opposed to snow, they crash. If you made the car handle in a different way to that which they expected, said world class Brazilian racing driver, would have spun off. What they were doing was using experience and what you have to do is trust to the picture that you are looking for - is to allow the experience that you built up (you don’t have to be world class) the experience that you’ve built up, the experiences that you have used since your were little, to allow you to execute a well learned skill because you see a picture. Not because you made that picture happen cognitively, but because you trust it is going to happen and you execute. This requires you to be looking at the right things. It requires extremely good cue attenuation and it requires a physical feedback to be driving the execution rather than an optical feedback. These two systems have to work in tandem. As binocular creatures we use our eyes far too much and don’t listen to our bodies and so we still have to see - and we understand why the ideas of target panic come around (or punching with a compound when people wholly focus on holding a dot still) - that a cognitively printed image is the one that will drive the shot.

I look forward to talking some more about this and I hope that it has whetted your appetite and made you think a little bit about how you aim.