The mental process involved in shooting at a target

Adela G. wrote:

I took my test for my conceal/carry permit at the firing range last night. You have to hit the silhouette (which is large) at least 15 out of 20 shots at a distance of 7 yards, with a pistol and then again with a revolver. It’s not a difficult test. Nevertheless, having had only about half a dozen sessions of informal, though nerve-wracking, target practice (always supervised by my bigger half—what merriment!), I was distinctly nervous. My corrected vision is not good, especially toward dusk, I’m not well-coordinated and I have difficulty understanding spoken instructions (I have to see things to process them; written instructions, or better still, diagrams, are much easier for me). I was the only female and least experienced shooter present.

I shot the high score—385 out of 400.

I tell you this not to boast but to demonstrate my qualifications for the position of Chief of Security once you’ve formally established Austerism over the West.

LA replied:

That’s great. Congratulations.

I have a theory that, assuming the physical coordination and steadiness is there, good aim is correlated with high IQ. Because aim involves constant adjustment, you’re looking at the target, you’re thinking, no, the aim is not quite right yet, so you adjust again, you keep adjusting, and finally when it feels “right” you fire. It’s an act of thinking and concentration. A g-loaded activity.

I was very good in the prone position with a .22 in summer camp at age 12. Won the riflery award that summer for the intermediate age group. But once we moved to the kneeling and standing positions (which I guess was the next summer), I was terrible. The physical steadiness wasn’t there. My inability to hold my body and arms completely still wiped out my aim. Physical steadiness is not needed in the prone position, because the ground is supporting your elbows and thus the rifle, and you don’t have to do anything with your body, you just have to aim. It’s purely mental.

Adela G. replies:

You are absolutely right about the physical steadiness. Much to my dismay, our instructor predicted before I shot that mine would be the high score, because females so often do well in target shooting. Later I asked him why this is so and he said females tend to be steadier.

Frankly, all I did was sight as he taught us to do, then pull the trigger and just keep pulling it, making minute adjustments to my aim. After I began, he told the guys to keep quiet (they were laughing and joking as I shot) and told me not to pay attention to them. But I wasn’t paying attention to them or to him, I was in what I call “a zone,” aware of my surroundings but concentrating only on the target. It was a weird combination of feeling very relaxed yet very focused. (Not that I started out that way, I actually worried beforehand that I might vomit out of nervousness.)

It’s interesting that something as ordinary as focusing intently on a target can induce one to enter into a slightly altered state of consciousness.

I sent the first two above e-mails to Mike Berman, who was once a top competitor at New York City gun clubs, asking him what he thought about my theory, and he replied:

I must agree with everything you’ve written in your response to the smarter than smart Adela G. I was fortunate to start with the physical attributes necessary for good scores. That is, I possessed better than 20/20 vision and the ability to hold a rather steady sight picture. The difference between good scores and competitive ones, however, is one’s ability to concentrate. It does become a mental game. Many can send a round where they want it to on a regular basis. The trick is to eliminate the occasional bad one. The bad ones can be caused by a variety of reasons, but eliminating them requires focus and concentration. Once a target shooter acquires the sight picture he’s looking for, he must continue to focus on it as he would be reading the words on a page while he deliberately squeezes through without flinching. Those who are easily distracted will not be competitive.

We used to have long conversations about this with Fred Kart, a national record holder, until the sun was rising. He used to talk about this Army shooter named Anderson. Kart told us that Anderson broke every rule there was and still won a number of national championships. The Army brass would normally make a coach of someone with his abilities but, as Kart told it, no one ever accused Anderson of being a genius. I guess Anderson was the exception that proves the rule.

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Adela G. writes:

In support of what Mike said, my husband has better than 20/20 eyesight and a very steady hand (for a male). Only he of the men present at our test just casually shot without regard for his score—and his was the second-highest score, after mine. As Mike said, my husband has the prerequisites for being a good shot.

As for the champion shooter, Anderson, who was not terribly bright, I wonder if he might not have been high-functioning autistic. People with autism are said to have a higher than normal ability to concentrate but autism, as I understand it, is not necessarily correlated with intelligence. Autistic people range in intelligence from very bright to mentally retarded.

An unusual ability to concentrate may have kicked in when Anderson shot so that whatever else he did (wrong) mattered less. If so, then he would not be the exception which proves the rule (that the difference between good shooting and competitive shooting lies in the ability to concentrate), but instead a weird variation of the rule.

Mark Jaws writes:

You and Adele G and Mike Berman are right. Good shooting and brains go hand in hand. But it runs much deeper than that. I remember reading an article in The Army Times back in 1980 demonstrating the clear link between combat power and cognitive ability. According to tests conducted during simulated combat training, high-IQ tank gunners were able to kill 6 enemy tanks before they themselves were done in. Low IQ tank gunners (Mental Categories III and IV) were able to manage only a 1.5 to 1 kill ratio. Is it any wonder then, that the Israelis are so much better than their adversaries? This is why I maintain that the greatest breathing force on the planet is armed and determined European men.

Mark N. writes:

Strange, but I never considered the connection between shooting and intelligence. For example, the single most difficult thing to do in sports is to hit a baseball. Think about it. You’re standing at bat, and the guy on the mound is going to throw a little white ball at you at up to 90 miles per hour, and you have to decide where ball is going the micro-second it leaves the pitcher’s hand. That requires amazing coordination and concentration, and I think we can all agree that many professional baseball players are not rocket scientists.

I’m a good shot, and I shoot twice a week, more if I have the time. I’m not competition level because I don’t have the time to put into it, but I may give it a try this year. From my experience a number of factors relate to shooting accuracy.

First, the main reason people miss the target is flinching. It’s neurologically built into humans to flinch at loud noises. We see this in newborns. Flinching can be overcome by “dry firing,” or practicing without ammunition. In this type of training the shooter does not anticipate the noise and recoil of the pistol, and therefore the flinch response is not activated. This retraining of neurological response can be generalized to a shooting situation where real ammunition is used. Improvement in scores can be quite dramatic.

Second, the pistol must feel comfortable in a shooter’s hand. I’m a large guy and I like heavy guns. I generally shoot a 1911 military model, and the weight of the gun feels comfortable in my hand. The 1911 also has great ergonomics, and the weight plus the ergonomic factor gives the pistol stability. When I shoot with a Glock, or most other polymer guns, they feel like toys to me, and my shooting is not near as good. Cops generally carry polymer guns like Sigs and Glocks, but If I was a cop, I’d want to carry a 1911.

Lastly, there is an extremely important factor very few people consider, and that is the quality of the pistol. I repeat, the quality. Many of my pistols are custom made, some costing as much as $2,000. A custom pistol will out-shoot a production model any day of the week. One day I was at the range with one of my custom 1911s, and I was landing my shots right on target. The guy next to me said, “You’re one hell of a shooter.” I responded, “Not bad, but this gun makes me look better than I am.”

Oh yeah, I have an IQ two standard deviations above average, and I also have a doctorate. Who knows, you may be right.

Kidist writes from Canada:

You wrote: “I have a theory that, assuming the physical conditions and steadiness is there, good aim is correlated with high IQ.”

Swimming is a different sport, but in the case of Michael Phelps’s extraordinary 7th gold medal win so far, I think this is related. Commentators started talking about “magic” and luck when he made his win. It was certainly magical and extraordinary, but I was quite sure that Phelps was making quick, tight decisions to reach his “target” especially at those very last moments. Phelps later explained he had decided to put in an extra half a stroke in those final micro-seconds to reach the wall quicker. He said that he was also hoping it was the right decision. How can you hope it was the right decision, and make the decision in a matter of micro-seconds?!

His opponent, Cavic, chose to coast to the finish instead, which lost him the gold 1/100 of a second later. That must now seem to him like an awful long 1/100 second of floating!

I don’t know if Phelps has a high IQ or not, but it certainly shows that a high level of mental activity is going on with certain brilliant athletes.

LA replies:

Well there are different kinds of intelligence. Willie Mays was a brilliant ball player, the greatest ball player I’ve seen in my lifetime. When you watched him play, you saw how his alertness level was geared up way beyond the normal. Even at the plate, waiting for the next pitch, he was not standing still like most players, but his body was moving and trembling in nervous anticipation for whatever might happen next. (Keith Hernandez, the great first baseman for the Mets in the 1980s, had a similar quality at the plate and also at first base, where he would be moving or jittering around even as the pitcher was pitching and you would see him guessing or intuiting something was going to happen before it happened, and moving to meet it.) So clearly Mays was very high in a certain type of intelligence, but whether it’s the type of intelligence measured in an IQ test, namely g, or general intelligence, I don’t know.

Kidist writes:

I wrote my comment before reading Mark N.’s comment on the micro-second decisions baseball players have to make, as you have also commented.

The difference between target shooters and baseball players hitting bats (and swimmers touching walls) seems to be that target shooters, like archers, have time to think. Whereas baseball batters have only time to act (which is the result of previous hours of practice, and a certain innate ability).

Also, your description of the nervous anticipation of Willie Mays perhaps corroborates with Phelps’ early diagnosis of disruptive ADD, and his family putting him into swimming to find a release for his very high energy. He also seems to have a high ability for concentration, where he stays away from everyone keeping a “rigid focus” until his races are over.

I haven’t played sports since high-school, but have been involved in modern dance and folk dance groups for a number of years.

One thing that a professional dancer told me once was how much focus and mental concentration it takes to make pirouettes. Unlike, say rhythmic dancing, she said that in order to make a turn, and on her toes no less, she had to work with her brain—she had to think—rather than use her sense of rhythm, or even musicality. I’ve often thought that this could be the upward direction of ballet (leading to the brain) and the more earthy downward direction of say, South African Zulu dances, especially the women.

David B. writes:

Hitting a baseball requires both instinct and reflexes. A hitter has to hit a fastball, and he can learn to hit a curve ball. Ted Williams had fast reflexes and practiced a lot. I used to know someone who knew Ted Williams personally, and he said that Ted was very intelligent, definitely smarter than other pro athletes.

Willie Mays was second to none in the intelligence needed on the baseball field. He was probably of about average intelligence, like many great athletes. Glenn Dickey, a San Francisco sportswriter who disliked Mays’ off-field personality, once wrote that Willie was of “uncertain” intelligence. Dickey readily agreed that Mays was the best baseball player he ever saw, and a very smart ball player.

Don writes:

This subject excited some curiosity in me as I am a recreational target shooter. I have a friend who is a neurologist at medical school in Philadelphia. He informs me that steadiness of nerves varies from individual to individual and that there is no gender varience that he has experienced in his practice nor does remember coming across any evidence for such in his reading on the subject. He is aware of one study that indicates that very good pool players are more often found among men, but as in all science this has to be subjected to repeated tests.

James W. writes:

You don’t want to compare shooting and hitting baseballs. Perhaps golf, or pool.

I wouldn’t know, but I have hit AAA pitching and there are too many factors involved having nothing to do with hand-eye. They mean to get into your head and expoit the weaknesses you have that your mother didn’t tell you about. It might be something like a target shooting back.

Ted Williams was a high intelligence hitter, Aaron a low one. Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, was once the best prospect in baseball, and the brightest. He always became confused in the batters box. His skills were made useless as his brain worked against him. It frustrated him that his minor-league teammate Lenny Dykstra, who is as dumb as a post, found hitting natural. It works and doesn’t work every which way.

I would guess shooting (not at a competitive level) is mostly attitude and approach.

Lazar writes:

It always seemed to me that good shooting required above all an instinctive overall “feel” for the target, the trigger, the projectile, breathing, distance, every linked element between shooter and bullseye, plus the ability suddenly and unconsciously to condense it all into a felt single thing so as to be surprised by the shot, the knowledge that you have hit the target the moment you belatedly realize the shot has been taken. The zen aspect, I suppose. I have a fair amount of long-ago experience to back this up. This applies to archery as well as to riflery.

Your ability to “feel” or gauge or intuitively sense the conceptual whole of liberalism, the gestalt, the big picture, might have something to do with your natural shooting ability at camp as a child. Transcendent intelligence as opposed to literal, mechanical intelligence. The kind that says “Of course, I sensed that all along, I just didn’t know it until now.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 16, 2008 10:48 AM | Send