Skill in marksmanship and weapons manipulation come to very little benefit if one is caught unawares and fails or is late to initiate defensive action. Out-drawing the drawn weapon is hardly a viable or desirable strategy. Although, as a species we expend great energy into post-mortem evaluations, it often adds little to our ability to prevent lethal encounters. In fact, as has been noted by many trainers, it is clear that well-developed situational awareness can lead to successful problem solving and self-defense through avoidance of the need to take action. The best answer to surviving a fight is not to be in a fight, not to be there when it happens; situational awareness is a major factor underlying this optimal response (of course, there are those professions – LEO and military – which are bound to move toward the sound of gunfire). In the best case scenario, much of this process becomes automatic in nature, although the intricacies of self-defense law make it imperative that some conscious evaluation (i.e., decision making) typically mediate between awareness and action, as a function of the nature, degree, and imminence of the threat. The more unconscious some parts of the process become, the more conscious resources can be dedicated to others.
The end result is that much attention has been paid to the concept of situational awareness because it is, ultimately, our most potent weapon for ensuring personal security. Even in the absence of well-developed action- and survival-oriented skills, awareness increases the probability of survival. It is a necessary, if not always sufficient, condition for effective personal defense. If we can be aware of the presence of potential threats and anticipate their movements, we can avoid them or, if not able to evade or escape, be prepared to preemptively act against them. Such preparation has a number of advantages, the most general of which is to change the action/reaction dynamic. For instance, cognizance of an impending threat allows us, to some extent, to moderate our natural startle response, to mitigate the element of surprise that a successful assault often involves. Expecting a threat, both generally and specifically, can help mediate our level of arousal in response. Such awareness can also allow for physical preparation, such as heightened vigilance, proactively seeking cover and surreptitiously drawing and staging a weapon, again facilitating our ability to act rather than exclusively react, to disrupt the actions of our aggressor. The closer we can come to proactive defense (offense?) the more likely we are to succeed.
A prominent example of the establishment and maintenance of step one in the awareness process – attention – is found in the use of color-coded systems to reflect levels of awareness or alertness. Such systems also provide a structured means of describing our level of attention to the world around us (the most famous of these being the white, yellow, orange, and red – sometimes also black - system attributed to COL Jeff Cooper). Another useful system that encompasses attention, processing of information and responding is the OODA loop, attributed to Boyd, which describes a cycle of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting. Both provide useful tools in that they give the individual a way of evaluating their level of attention as they move through the environment and organizing a structure for conceptualizing the processing of incoming information when the level of attention/awareness is appropriate to the situation. Both constitute a useful template to plan for and execute an aware lifestyle. What both may not readily account for is the fact that so much of our information processing is at a level below consciousness; these operations must be trained to a point of moderate automaticity.
The topic that is least often addressed in discussion of situational awareness, yet perhaps the most important to acting in either defense or avoidance, is anticipation or the ability to predict and project the status of current events into a probable future so as to act accordingly. This element of the situational awareness process, although crucial, is also the most esoteric and least easily codified, trainable and definable part. It certainly takes the most time to train our ability to anticipate to a level of unconscious competence. The difficulty in understanding this process and training it is, in some ways, strange; it is, after all, the essence of what we are built to do. The human brain is built to learn (not as in reading books, but form experience), to anticipate – it has been referred to as an “anticipation machine” (Dennett). In fact, our perceptual systems are designed to project perceptions a brief time (a matter of milliseconds) into the future; this process is hypothesized to be the basis of several well-known “optical illusions”, such as the perception of parallel lines bending outward, as if we are passing between them. The notion is that our visual-spatial processing system has evolved to account the fact that we are “forward-moving organisms” that we move through space and do so most often in a forward (eyes front –they are there for a reason) fashion – we move most often into our field of vision. Hence, our visual-perceptual system has evolved a built-in correction for the time it takes to process incoming sensory information, a form of perceptual anticipation/projection that is both adaptable and unnoticeable when we are in motion, but can manifest in illusions when we are stationary.
It is also clear that our neurobiology is built to encode experiences and outcomes of our behavior – good and bad – so that these data can be used to anticipate changing situations and highlight behaviors that are most likely to “work” (function) in the future given circumstances that match some template (pattern recognition). This is the basis of learning theory. Lastly, as all of this suggests, most of this process runs most efficiently when it is running occurs outside of our conscious awareness; while it is useful for us to be able to self-talk (as in commentary driving) so as to train/increase self-awareness and build less effortful processing, once a situation is initiated, most of this program is going to run without the aid of conscious commentary.
So what? At this point I am sure you are wondering why you should care about your brain; you’re looking for ways to be better prepared for personal defense. Well, all of this suggests that we are designed to learn – not because learning is fun, will help you pass classes, get a good job someday, get a promotion, or so that we can dazzle our friends with knowledge of trivia or do crossword puzzles – not the kind of learning all of those performances imply - but in order to reliably anticipate requirements and respond accordingly, to prepare, to create the memory traces necessary for efficient and successful reaction. If we think back to where this all started, then that sounds relevant to personal defense to me. Memory is not really built-in so that we can remember all those glory days of our youth, our first kiss (or more); that conscious manifestation of memory is simply a pleasant by-product of our built-in systems for self-awareness and encoding experience. Learning and memory reflect the fact that our machinery is made to gather information for the purpose of more efficient and accurate responding when similar future situations are encountered. That’s what life is all about, is central to all survival; learning to recognize patterns of climate change or local predation so as to prepare is essential to our survival (although modern humans have worked hard to try to overcome this natural tendency). Of course, a major question then is how can we take advantage of this ability, this machinery, to increase our situational awareness – without having to look for and engage in a large number of dangerous assaultive encounters?
The process of anticipation begins early – from the wide range of stimuli encroaching upon our senses, it directs attention to the pertinent details to process recognizable patterns (stimulus templates) and select response templates that include activation of emotional responses as well. Gavin De Becker refers, in his notion of Intuitive processing…intuition, the gift of fear…to this idea that much of our processing of threat information in the environment occurs outside of our awareness and sometimes comes to us as vague feelings of unease and foreboding, and other aversive sensations. In fact, he insists that our conscious intervention in these processes is counter to our safety and security – that we, as noted above, have learned to explain away our concerns as faulty or inappropriate. This is consistent with the fact that, of the thousands to millions of bits of information that impact on our senses on an ongoing basis, only a small percentage can be consciously processed. The rest are not necessarily lost, but are processed outside of awareness. We may only become aware of these stimuli once they have activated certain embodied visceral or physiological systems. Once this happens, they often garner our effortful attention. In such cases, according to De Becker’s ideas, it is our explicit or conscious evaluations of these sensations that often take us awry. That is, as we evolved the ability to consciously monitor our reactions, we have come to talk back to such sensations, explain them away based on explicit lessons we have been taught (“don’t be rude!” “don’t prejudge”), instead of using them as cues to suggest a need to focus attention on the situation and take action. De Becker suggests, in recounting many anecdotal reports of violence, that our tendency to explain away this sense of foreboding as foolish, unfair, or even prejudiced (that’s my word) that can lead to danger. We convince ourselves NOT to follow our sensations and so put ourselves at risk.
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