Street Survival Insights
with Dave Smith
Making survival a habit
There is a lot of misconception about how we learn skills and what we need to do to be ready for the life and death struggles we might face whether on or off-duty. A great deal of the commentary is well-meaning but not supported by science. In fact, one of the real issues we face in law enforcement is the “junk science” that shows up in the courtroom and is used against us.
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One of the problems we face when translating any study in human learning to our profession is the limitation on the amount of stress that researchers can apply to their subjects. The reality for most law enforcement officers is criminals, citizens, Nature, and even bad luck often place us in remarkably dangerous and stressful situations that no researcher could ever match. Another dilemma, as pointed out in William H. Starbuck’s “The Production of Knowledge,” is the “subject-wishing-to-please-the-researcher” phenomenon that brings into doubt much of the credibility of current research in human behavior.
Some recent events have brought up the issue of how we learn a skill and how we can make a mistake such as grabbing our firearm instead of our TASER. The excellent Force Science Institute recently released videos of students drawing and firing a firearm to demonstrate how quickly a suspect with no training can fire a weapon from different positions. On the other hand, some instructors say we need to do “X” number of repetitions to learn a skill. Well, let us take a minute to review what science says about this.
Richard Schmidt explains in “Motor Control and Learning,” that there are three levels of learning a motor skill. The first is “cognitive,” where we have to think about doing the skill. In simple motor tasks performed without great stress we can usually learn a skill to this level alone for our day-to-day well being. The participants in the weapon drawing video clearly demonstrate a simple skill that they can perform at a cognitive level without stress. With a very few repetitions the participants would quickly move to the next level of learning the “associative” phase.
How quickly you move from each phase or level of learning will depend on many factors, such as your skill, other motor programs you can associate with the one you’re learning, your intensity of repetitions, and the diversity of practice, to name a few. If you do enough repetitions, this skill will become a habit and is said to be learned to the “autonomous” or at an automatic level. This is often confused with “muscle memory,” which is a physiological phrase to describe the phenomenon of how a well trained muscle can reclaim its level of conditioning in a much shorter time than an untrained muscle can gain. Anyone who ever wore a cast any length of time has witnessed muscle memory, but the two phenomena are vastly different.
A skill learned to the autonomous or habitual level can be done with very little conscious thought—in fact, conscious thought often interferes with a motor skill learned to this level. Anxiety, fear, and doubt are corrosive to our performance for many reasons—one being that they cause us to bring our conscious awareness to a task that was automatic and properly performed at an unconscious level, therefore, our performance can deteriorate.
This is where science still searches for answers. We like to think we can have simple solutions for human performance under stress but problems still keep popping up.
Pilots in World War II would sometimes raise their wheels instead of their flaps after landing, causing these highly skilled fliers to crash from a simple, avoidable error. Even changing the entire feel and look of the switches didn’t stop this from happening from time to time. Stress can be the enemy of performance even when we are highly trained, but we have other enemies as well. “Routine” creates a potential for bad “habits” to be incorporated into our key skills; and “artifacts” such as always shooting six rounds strings in firearms training because the course was developed with revolvers, or reholstering in the middle of gunfight can pop up under the stress of a critical incident and expose us to increased hazard.
In “Ten Questions About Human Error,” Sidney Dekker points out how far we are from truly understanding why humans make mistakes and we are always juggling engineering with human performance. How a young officer can start to draw his TASER and end up shooting a subject with his firearm is not very different than a pilot crashing his fighter by raising his landing gear after landing, only the consequences are usually more tragic for the officer and the subject being shot!
The human mind is a marvelous mystery and I encourage you (whether you’re a trainer, coach, or just someone who wants to improve his or her performance) to learn about learning! There is an incredible variety of sources from which you can draw new knowledge, and an array of exercises you can employ to practice your skills and do you physical and mental repetitions. To begin, here are five suggestions:
• Read “The Survivors Club” by Ben Sherwood
• Read “Motor Control and Learning” by Richard Schmidt
• Take some time on your own to Watch the Force Science videos mentioned above discuss them at roll call one day
• Start a doing your autogenic breathing on non-critical calls so you’re more ready for critical call when it happens
• After every call, take a moment to visualize: “What would I have done had an assault occurred on that call?”
One of the things you will be rewarded with is the understanding that your performance depends on your ongoing practice and preparation, as well as your faith in yourself and your mission.
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LIGEIRINHO
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