I suspect a large part of the ability to deal with stressful situations relies on pre-established cognitive shortcuts that free up more of the brain for flexible analysis. One part of this I imagine involves what psychologists call "chunking", the ability to fit large data sets into the mind by unifying disparate data points into unified chunks.
Chess grandmasters, for example, can memorise the complete positions of twenty or more chess boards and play them out blindfolded, as long as the board positions are sensical and distinct, and they do so by remembering the board as chunks of interrelated data. They do not remember the position of each piece individually, but rather they remember clusters of pieces that are interacting: "this knight threatened by that bishop, who is near those pawns, who are protecting the queen from the rook" is a cluster and is remembered as such.
I suspect that those who practice dealing with specific stressful situations use such mental constructions to model the situation using less of their brain's processing time, freeing up more run-time for observation and prediction. So part one of dealing with stressful situations might be practising them until you can "chunk" them.
I also suspect that a large part of it is simple habituation to stressful stimuli and the human body's stress responses.
In my own experience doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, when I first started wrestling other people 90% of my mind was taken up with being distressed because someone was sitting on me trying to put me in an unpleasant submission hold, 9% was trying and failing to remember any of the moves I had been taught and 1% at most was analysing the situation dispassionately. Over the course of four years or so that changed to the point where almost none of my mind was taken up with distress, I had a ready move for most situations and in some cases a library to choose from, and my opponent's exact position and intentions were "chunked" from relatively small amounts of data. This freed up most of my brain for strategic thinking, positional awareness of other wrestling pairs nearby on the mat and mentally rehearsing whatever new moves I was trying to functionalise.
So as far as shortcuts go all I can offer is an anti-shortcut. Spend years deliberately putting yourself in a specific stressful situation, and you will become good at handling that specific stressful situation. Possibly this habituation generalises to other stressful situations. I tend to avoid them so I have no data, and I don't think that I handle high-stress situations better than anybody else as a result of wrestling but I don't know for sure.
In a third and more nerd-specific vein, playing World of Warcraft in a group at a competent level largely boils down to simultaneously moving strategically to position yourself correctly in the game world while playing a rhythm game to activate your abilities in the optimum pattern. Doing these two tasks at once is non-trivial, and practise at the rhythm game element frees up more cognitive space for panning the camera around to maintain situational awareness, strategic thinking on the rare occasions when some kind of strategy is needed and deviating from the standard rhythm game pattern when it is optimal to activate some rarely-used button.
So practising relevant skills until "muscle memory" takes over also frees up more cognitive room for situational awareness and forward thinking.
Hypothesis: Practising isolated skills to build up "muscle memory" should help deal with stressful situations that use those skills to some extent. Habituating yourself to stress and distress should also help to some extent. Deliberate efforts to see the interrelationships between relevant stimuli to develop the ability to "chunk" data should also help to some extent. People who act effectively under stress are probably stress-habituated persons who have freed up a large part of their brain for situational awareness by automating or chunking the mental processes that take up most of the brain-space of neophytes in such situations.
For some reason, I've always imagined that "nerd-type" people would have less ability-to-react than the general population. Maybe it's partly the stereotype of the awkward geek, or the fact that programmers, in particular, spend long periods of time alone without social interaction to impose thought-deadlines. But this population also (stereotypically) plays a lot of online multiplayer games. I wonder if playing games like World of Warcraft could lead to transferable skills, like better awareness/awakeness to immediate events.
*Note: this post is based on my subjective observations of myself and a small, likely biased sample of people I know. It may not generalize to everyone.
A few days ago, during my nursing lab, my classmates and I were discussing the provincial exam that we’ll have to sit two years from now, when we’re done our degree, in order to work as registered nurses. The Quebec exam, according to our section prof, includes an entire day of simulations, basically acted-out situations where we’ll have to react as we would in real life. The Ontario exam is also a day long, but entirely written.
I made a comment that although the Quebec exam was no doubt a better test of our knowledge, the Ontario exam sounded a lot easier and I was glad I planned to work in Ontario.
“Are you kidding?” said one of the boys in my class. “Simulations are so much easier!”
I was taken aback, reminded myself that my friends and acquaintances are probably weirder than my models of them would predict (thank you AnnaSalamon for that quote), and started dissecting where exactly the weirdness lay. It boiled down to this:
Some people, not necessarily the same people who can ace tests without studying or learn math easily or even do well in sports, are still naturally good at responding to real-life, real-time events. They can manage their stress, make decision on the spot, communicate flexibly, and even have fun while doing it.
This is something I noticed years ago, when I first started taking my Bronze level lifesaving certifications. I am emphatically not good at this. I found doing “sits” (simulated situations) stressful, difficult, and unpleasant, and I dreaded my turn to practice being the rescuer. I had no problem with the skills we learned, as long as they were isolated, but applying them was harder than the hardest tests I’d had at school.
I went on to pass all my certifications, without any of my instructors specifically saying I had a problem. Occasionally I was accused of having “tunnel vision”; they meant that during a sit, treating my victim and simultaneously communicating with my teammates was more multitasking than my brain could handle.
Practice makes perfect, so I joined the competitive lifeguard team (yes, this exists, see https://picasaweb.google.com/lifeguardpete for photos of competitions). We compete in teams of four. In competition, we go into unknown situations and are scored on how we respond. Situations are timed, usually four minutes, and divided into different events; First Aid, Water Rescue, and Priority Assessment, with appropriate score sheets. It was basically my worst nightmare come true. And thanks to sample bias, instead of being slightly above average, I was blatantly worse than everyone else. It wasn’t just a matter of experience; even newcomers to the team scored higher than me. I stubbornly kept going to practice, and went to competitions, and improved somewhat. When I had my first nursing placement, something I had been stressing about all semester, it went effortlessly. There are advantages to setting your bar way, way higher than it needs to be.
There are various types of intelligence. The kind I have, the ability to soak up new information and make connections, is only one kind. But this ability-to-react must come from an actual difference in how my brain works compared to the brains of my teammates who perform well under stress, don’t get distracted, don’t suffer tunnel vision, and can communicate as a team and divide their labor on the spot. It’s another facet of the multi-sided phenomenon we call intelligence. As far as I’ve seen, it isn’t discussed much on lesswrong.
The following are my speculations. Hopefully some of them are testable.
1. Reacting in real time requires focus, but not the same kind of focus needed for, say, writing or programming. My evidence: I seem to be above average when it comes to the latter, but below average for the former, so they can’t be entirely the same thing.
2. The difference is related to the ability to silence your internal monologue, so that your thoughts are reactions to the outside world of the moment instead of reactions to, say, something you read a week ago. Based on the questions I’ve asked and the answers I’ve gotten, most people don’t notice specifically that they have to do this; it’s automatic.
3. People who are bad at reacting can be at either end of a spectrum; either they’re too open to stimuli and get distracted before they can plan their response, or they’re too closed and react in a stereotyped way based on their first impression, ignoring any new information. I’m in the second category. Watching other lifeguard teams compete in situations, I can pick out who leans which way. The first category people tend to be looking around constantly to the point that they can’t treat the victim in front of them. The second category people plant themselves, look at their victim, and don’t watch or listen to what’s happening around them.
4. If someone is very bad at reacting, we call them shy. Even having a conversation challenges their ability to think in real-time, so that they find social interaction stressful. I’m basing this hypothesis on how I used to feel talking to people, although I wouldn’t consider myself shy now.
5. You can improve your actual performance by memorizing chunks of your responses, which you can then string together appropriately. The chunks can’t be too small, or stringing them together will be more work than it’s worth. They can’t be too big, or they become stereotyped and create tunnel-vision. In guard team, we memorize “speeches” that we recite to every victim. When my section prof for my nursing lab demonstrated a head-to-toe examination, I’m pretty sure she had a similar kind of speech memorized, although she probably never thought of it explicitly that way. This kind of practice is obviously non-transferable; I can’t use the same speech for guard team and my nursing lab.
6. You can improve on your innate reaction times by practicing. With considerable effort, I’ve learned how to shut off my internal monologue, to a degree, and keep my ears and eyes open. I’m pretty sure this is transferable.
I don’t know how ability-to-react correlates with “school smarts,” the ability to absorb and integrate information. Most of my friends are better in one area than another, but the people I’ve known who are exceptionally good at reacting are usually quick learners as well. Is it a positive correlation? Negative correlation? No correlation? Can it even be measured reliably.
I would assume that this affects people’s career choices, too. Fighters and paramedics need good reaction times; they need to be able to focus on external events. Programmers and scientists need to focus on internal events, on their own thought process. I have no real evidence to support this, though.
These are my questions.
1. Has anyone else noticed this? If so, which area do you think you’re better in? It would be interesting to gather some lesswrong community statistics.
2. Is there anything in the literature? I’m hesitant to give ability-to-react a name, because it almost certainly has one already that I can’t find because I can’t think of the right keywords to put into Google.
3. Does anyone have short-cuts or practice tips that have improved their ability to react? I’ve read a lot about study methods, which apply to “school smarts,” but less about this.