It takes commitment to be a volunteer firefighter and requires regular self and group training. Its great to help the community but one must stay up-to-date on their skills and knowledge as much as possible. Most of the time you don't have an issue but there may be one day where one of these skills might be useful. In emergency the stress levels rise and one must have the knowledge already in their muscle memory to as to avoid cognitive overload.
Firefighters (and others) often must be able to perform under serious stressful situations where there is lots of confusion and lots of pressure to get things done now with multiple unknown risks (Cognitive data overload based on multitudes of possibilities and not enough time to analyze.). That high cognitive load situation is easiest managed through preparation and training that helps embed information into multiple possible auto responses that would be the leading tools for an immersive environment.
Typically these trained responses are going to come from research into different situations to determine which actions will increase the overall likelihood of survival and effective completion of missions (i.e. saving people). Thus, one would train on those most helpful actions so as to create more neural pathways that leads to having certain options hit our conscious first versus being overwhelmed and confused the multiple unanalyzed choices in the midst's of chaos (VR training can help sort of reduce the load from certain types of stimuli due to familiarity. *If you ever played some of these games you can see how they are good training for robotics and cyber warriors. I'm looking around for firefighters VR program for training. Maybe put away for it and get a used VR system for the department. I'm going to try out a demo or two. If you have played some of these games they are lifelike. You might actually get a little sick to your stomach the first few times as your brain processes the new environment.)
Just like firefighters there are other fields like policing, EMT, and military members that often rely on the findings of such important training research. To the point, military researchers used Attentional Control Theory and the compensatory control and maximal adaptability models to try and understand the effects of stress on decision making. They found that stress impacts cognitive functioning from threatening limited reserves of effort and attention that slows down the efficiency of the decision making process (Flood and Kegan, 2022)
(There are also cognitive tricks and perspective switching that leads to the acceptance of the situation and in turn lower physiological responses. {i.e. physio-noise that clouds thinking} It can lead to greater clarity at the moment it is precisely needed. Some people's brains also have the capacity to speed up {adapt to higher cognitive loads through stress} and in turn create intuitive conceptual blending of the environment in a way that predicts environmental actions and in turn their responses {i.e. smell of gas, smoke color, wind, etc.. that we are not often consciously thinking about but can come forward during increased neural activity}. This becomes increasingly possible if one can uses logic quickly to rule out likelihoods as data/information presents itself in an unfolding situation of multiple unknowns. There are a bunch of theories that likely intersect here but in simplicity our brains can be trained to adapt to more dangerous situations with increased environmental accuracy. 😲 What the? It might not be true but it sounds good. Go fact check. Let me know. 🤷)
Repetition is important because it integrates increasing levels of knowledge and environmental stimuli into memories where internal and external pressures can be habituated. The more we habituate to stressful situations, the easier performance under such situations become. There is some advice on how to best train for these circumstances and much of that is about realistic replication of intentionally stressful practice. (Montgomery, 2022, para 25).
