There have been many, many attempts made to explain why teaching people to shoot well is so difficult. Most of it ends up being very dry and detailed academic work explaining how our autonomic nervous system works, and wading through that can put even the best of us to sleep once the scientific terminology get to be too much.

In this video, James Yeager does a masterful job of getting past the jargon to explain why the thinking, questioning part of your brain (which he calls the “scientist”) can get in the way of training the “caveman” brain that takes over in high stress situations after your “fight or flight” response kicks in.

From my point of view as an instructor in a much less stressful kind of shooting, I can tell you that what Yeager says is absolutely true.