OODA, Information Processing, and Mental Strength – Part 4

Welcome back!

Last week we finished with the stating that by developing mental strength in the knowledge of the five major premises of highly aroused states a tactical athlete can be in better control of their performance.

In this is last segment on OODA we’re going to look at these five major  states of high arousal that a tactical athlete might experience.

1) Competition

When an emotionally significant event forces a tactical athlete towards an urgent action, and if that response overrides task performance, then the responses triggered due to the arousing event are said to compete with the responses required by the task.

However, in some cases, exciting emotional responses make possible task performance if they help accomplish task-related goals. For example, when a football coach makes his team angry at the opposing team, it improves their performance (running, blocking, tackling with force) because these species-specific aggressive acts coincide with task (football) related goals. But too much of aggression could also impair performance as it may result in disorganization of performance and may also result in them earning penalties.

The “death blossom” is an example of a strongly motivated response provoked by a given circumstance event though it is not the ideal one. For example, the death blossom phenomenon has been observed among insufficiently trained soldiers of the Iraqi army because they fail in emotional regulation.

For instance, following a mortar, sniper, or an improvised explosive device, the Iraqi solder is provoked in emptying their 30 round magazine and fire whatever belt of ammunition happens to be in the machine gun [1]. Furthermore, Grunow [1] writes “that in 90% of the cases, there is no target and the soldiers always agree that this is extremely dangerous, in addition to being a grievous waste of ammunition. But they continue to do it.”

In a general sense, under the competition response, the more dominant responses interfere with the less dominant ones. More dominant responses are those that are unlearned as responses to the given situation, or better practiced, or more strongly motivated under the given conditions.

NOTE: In extremely stressful circumstances – the fight-or-flight response kicks-in – and the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes all available energy for survival. These results in nonessential activities – under the control of the parasympathetic system – such as digestion, bladder control, sphincter control being completely shut down. The body literally “blows its ballast” (stress diarrhea and\or involuntary urination) in an attempt to provide all the energy resources required to ensure survival. Next, the body must pay a physiological price for an energizing process this intense. The price that the body pays is an equally powerful backlash when the neglected demands of the parasympathetic system return. This parasympathetic backlash occurs as soon as the danger and the excitement is over, and it takes the form of an incredibly powerful weariness.

2) Attentional Capacity

Stimuli draw out or increase attentional arousal of the tactical athlete, and it does so in proportion to the significance, up to some upper limit. A stimulus with intrinsic conspicuousness or biological significance attracts attention, and in the process, restricts the range of cue usage.

That is, fewer cues are given attention to and many times peripheral cues are the ones that are usually neglected. This accounts for performance increase in some cases. Decrease in cues occurs, when the subject has other things to attend to than those relevant to the task at hand or is so preoccupied and doesn’t have the attentional capacity to invest in the creation of deliberate action, as opposed to simple, unlearned response.

3) Overflow

The suggestion here is that strong neuronal impulses due to arousing emotional stimuli disrupt other functions of the tactical athlete. Some examples are disorder in oxygen metabolism due to high epinephrine secretion under emotion response.

More obvious are disturbances of motor coordination by trembling and speech difficulties due to a dry mouth. An example of this might be seen in the study which found that artificially induced stress (simulated artillery fire) affected the accuracy of rifle fire among soldiers, probably due to inadequate motor coordination [2].

4) Disorganization

Emotional stress can be said to be disorganizing by nature and necessity, to the extent that it results from the incompatibility of needed and available responses.  Or information presented and available temperament to process it.

It is also envisioned that the inability to come up with appropriate responses due to high uncertainty or danger may mobilize the “behavioral inhibition system,” which blocks the execution of action, including thought.

A real life example of the disorganization, the incompatibility to response, can be best appreciated by a military advisor’s [1] experience with a newly constituted Iraqi army:

At another time, an enemy sniper attack triggered a reaction that had Iraqis “returning fire” nearly 90 minutes after the enemy had delivered one deadly shot. This “burst reaction” may be attributed to Iraqi’s experiencing denial, anger, and grief all at the same time….Their tool of choice is the blunt instrument of force directed liberally at all threats real and perceived.

5) Regression

It is speculated that high arousal results in a form of regression result in a person getting into a more primitive form of functioning as the intensity increases. This has been referred as “functional decortications.”

Simply put, the lower brain centers overrule higher centers because higher centers are unable to devise ways of coping. In addition, regression itself can be considered a response mode available when all else fails: taking recourse to childish passivity, dependent attitude, magical thought, or taking recourse to elementary preprogrammed behaviors such as shouting and foot stamping.

So to wrap this up, the physiological reactions described in these posts can be best appreciated from the experiential description of a marine in real combat [3]:

“We were only three kilometers south of the bridge. Every tree, every wall, and every building looked hostile (autovigilance11). I was afraid for the first time in Iraq. Against the white noise of the blood rushing through my head, I heard my feet tapping involuntarily on the Humvee floor (overflow hypothesis). My knees stitched up and down like a sewing machine (overflow hypothesis). My mouth felt dry and gummy (parasympathetic reflex).

Everything seemed to pass in a blur (attentional capacity hypothesis). I thought of war stories that talked about hyperclarity in combat, seeing every blade of grass and feeling colors more intensely than ever before. But for me, whole city blocks faded into gray fuzz.

I feared I was processing information too slowly, seeing only one of every ten things I should (regression hypothesis). I felt short changed. I wanted hyperclarity, too.”

Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Reference

[1] Grunow, C.D. (2006). Advising Iraqis: Building the Iraqi Army. Military Review. July- August 2006.

[2] Kramer, R.R. (1965). Some effects of stress on rifle firing, unclassified abstract of classified paper presented to the 11th Annual US Army Human Factors Research and DevelopmentConference.

[3[Fick, N. (2005). One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer. Boston, MA: Houghton Miflin Company.

Links to:

OODA, Information Processing, and Mental Strength Part-1

OODA, Information Processing, and Mental Strength Part-2

OODA, Information Processing, and Mental Strength Part-3