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by therooster
Fri Jul 22, 2005 4:26 pm
Forum: General Texas CHL Discussion
Topic: Preventing Tunnel Vision
Replies: 9
Views: 2288

Re: Preventing Tunnel Vision

ghentry wrote:In another thread mojo mentioned
... in a high stress situation "Tunnel Vision" takes over and we only see a small part of the picture...
To not hijack that thread, I started a new one.

My question is this... Is there any way to train to teach yourself to not have tunnel vision?
in my study, and my experience, i would have to say No.

tunnel vision will happen, the only way around it is to train yourself to come out of tunnel vision on command, or after a certain action.

when the a problem arises, so to speak, you will hopefully go into condition Red (as opposed to condition Black). when you go into condition red you start to lose complex motor skills due to vasoconstriction from the introduction of adrenaline(one of the main reasons you get tunnel vision), but your visual reaction time and your cognitive reaction time increase. at any time in condition red you can experience one or several of these:
tunnel vision
visual clarity
intensified sound
diminished sound
slow motion time
fast motion time
memory loss of parts of the event
memory loss of some of your actions
dissociation
intrusive distracting thoughts
memory distortions
distance distortions
it only takes your body a millisecond to transfer from one to the other, and you can experience more than one at one time.

in this condition your brain stops using its frontal lobes and starts using its midbrain (the "animal" part), this is where training pays off. your midbrain will revert to your "unconscious competence" stage, the highest level of Abraham Maslow's 4 levels of mastery, as Bruce Lee put it "learn it until you forget it". basically learn it/train untill it becomes a programmed response, a natural reaction.

so...you cannot get rid of Tunnel vison, but you can train yourself to controll it. in Brian Enos's book, he talks briefly about it and makes it very easy to understand. i can tell you from my experience that competition helped me learn to controll tunnel vision, and it made me shoot faster and more accurate too.

Mr. Cotton mentiond Clint Smith saying ""look left, look right, look behind you . . . Wolves travel in [packs] . . . get your head on a swivel . . .". he would say this right after you engage a target or multiple targets. the idea behind it is to get you out of the tunnel vision that you experience while your shooting and into a state of awareness asap. this teaches you to controll tunnel vision, by comming out of it when you dont need it and looking around.

any of this make sense to you? its very hard to explain an experience through typing.

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