As it happens, it’s not necessary for you to understand all of them. There are only about a half-dozen unique reactions15 that are important from the standpoint of defensive shooting, important in the sense that they affect how and what you train. In the chapters that follow, you’ll find techniques that build on and take advantage of these natural survival reactions, allowing you to respond more efficiently than trying to force an unnatural, artificial technique into the situation (if you even could.)
By training properly you can make the transition from instinctive reaction to intuitive response faster, easier, and without cognitive thought.
Some of the body’s natural reactions are external, meaning that they’re observable. When you watch surveillance camera footage you’ll often see all three of these reactions, all happening approximately simultaneously or, at the very least, in extremely rapid succession. (The order in which I’ve presented them should not be taken as a timeline of any sort.)
If you think about it, preparing for any physical activity — be it running away or fighting — requires that the body first drop its center of gravity. Stand in front of a mirror and try to move naturally without changing the height of your belly button; you’ll find that you can do nothing more than a robot-like shuffling. When you need to move immediately, like when you’re faced with a sudden threat, your body naturally drops its center of gravity to prepare for an extreme exertion. This puts your body in a superb position from which it can lunge or move rapidly to either side, both of which are definite survival positives when facing something that wants to eat you.
This lowering of the center of gravity looks like a shallow crouch; your knees bend causing your body to drop, while at the same time your upper torso leans forward at the hips to maintain balance; the buttocks are forced backward to compensate.
Humans, as you may have been told, are truly visual creatures. You derive a huge portion of what you know from what you see, and in a lethal encounter that’s especially true: what you know of the threat comes mainly from what your eyes tell you. As a result, your mind is hard-wired to protect that most valuable asset.
When people are startled, their hands start to move in a protective manner toward their line of sight; they flinch toward the eyes. They don’t always make it all the way, of course, for a number of reasons (including familiarity with certain stimuli). They do almost always start in that direction, however, and again you can see this very often in videos of actual surprise attacks.
One thing I’ve noticed is that this flinch, as we’ll call it, is convulsive. The muscles that produce the movement tense suddenly and violently, throwing the hands into motion; the shoulders often hunch or roll forward in concert. Sometimes the flinch rises and subsides seemingly without the subject being aware that it even happened.
At the onset of a surprise stimulus the body tends to orient to whatever it is that is identified as being a potential threat. The head turns to put the threat into its line of sight, where binocular vision is at its most useful, and the body usually follows by squaring up to the threat so that it can employ its natural weapons: hands and feet.
This is not a boxing stance, which is a learned position; the natural stance is neutral, in that the body is parallel to the threat and the feet are directly under the body, preparing to move in any direction needed. Any off-axis orientation, such as blading to the threat, would make movement to one side more difficult than the other; it’s easy to see how that could be a detriment to survival.
The external reactions are aided and supplemented by some internal reactions, all of which have to do with changes in blood flow in the body. The blood carries oxygen and the myriad of chemicals which serve to initiate all of the transformations which occur as a result of the threat16. As it happens, if you can see the external manifestations we just talked about, you know that these internal reactions have also occurred. The external reactions serve as markers that prove the internal ones are happening as well.
Again, in no particular order:
The retina of the eye uses rods and cones to collect and transmit image information to the optic nerve, and that information is sent to the visual cortex where it’s interpreted as sight. In the middle of the retina is the fovea, which is populated exclusively by cones, which have higher resolution and faster reaction times than the rods. As a result, the fovea is capable of delivering a much higher level of detail than is the rest of the retina. When the body’s alarm response is activated, changes in blood supply to the eye cause most of the information to come from this center where all the cones are located. The result is an increase in resolution, though with a very narrow angle of view. This has a very positive effect on survivability, because it allows the gathering of much more information specifically about the threat.
When faced with a sudden possibility of lethal injury, the body shunts blood from the extremities — hands and feet — to the core. There are several explanations for this phenomenon, but the end result is a decrease in blood to the hands and fingers.
When blood flow is reduced, there is a decrease in strength, dexterity and tactile sensation. Hands might tremble a bit, have trouble doing complex tasks that rely on muscle control, and have less feeling. This sounds entirely negative, but consider the upside: that same reduced blood flow also means that damage to the extremities won’t be felt as keenly, and injuries won’t result in dangerous blood loss as quickly.
The downsides of reduced dexterity and tactile sensation are something that we have to work around when we design techniques for handling tools (the gun).
One of the more unusual natural reactions is a distortion in the perceived passage of time during a lethal attack. In most cases people report that time slows down, making things appear to be happening at a slower rate — including their own responses to what they’re seeing. In reality both the person and the world are still moving at the same speed, but their brains report that they’re not.
This becomes a real issue if you have to do anything which requires visual input, since that’s where the distortion occurs. Though you may believe you are moving slowly, in reality the rest of the world isn’t — which means there is a disconnect between what you think is happening and what actually is.
I’ve actually experienced this as the result of a severe fright. When I was in college I once parked on a seedy street in a not-terribly-good area of a large city. Walking back to my car I noticed a rather hulking male following me; I quickened my pace, but so did he. I ran to my car and tried to put my key into the door (this was long before the days of remote control locks). I clearly remember trying to get the key in the hole, knowing full well that there was someone closing in, but I couldn’t seem to do it fast enough. I tried to speed up but that only caused me to fumble, which in turn fed my panic, which seemed to make things slow down even more! I finally got the key in the lock, jumped into the car and hit the lock button — about the time the fellow ran past me, yelling at a couple of other men on the far end of the block to “wait for me!”