Training Your Working Memory

You’re very confident about the things that you’ve shot the most of. And you don’t have to think as much about how you’re going to shoot it because you’ve shot them 10,000 times.

We as human beings like to be confident and comfortable when we’re out shooting. Therefore, we typically will practice things that are well within our comfort zone. Because you don’t have to recall a circuit that you’ve never done before.

 If you go to a range, and then number seven is a left-to-right chandelle, it’s about 30 yards and an incoming floater that lands 20 yards in front of you, they may change them a little bit, but they don’t change them very much. You’ve shot the same station eight weeks in a row. So, you don’t have to figure out how to approach it. You’re not forcing your brain to recall.

If, however, you can take the bucket and go 25 yards over there so that now the chandelle is a quartering away chandelle and the incomer is now a left-to-right crosser, now that’s a whole different settin’ of eggs that your brain has to figure out. Now it has to recall a circuit that you haven’t used before; it has to actually put it together.

So, the working memory sees it: “Wow, that’s now a quartering bird, and now that one’s a crosser.” And as the working memory analyzes it, the long-term memory goes to all the quartering chandelles you’ve ever shot and all the left-to-right low crossers you’ve ever shot and picks parts of each one of those circuits and puts them in a file that will break those two targets and hands it off to the working memory. And now the working memory has to fire a circuit that it’s never fired before.