Making Assumptions

A thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof; The action of taking power or responsibility; Arrogance or presumption; premise: a statement that is assumed to be true and from which a conclusion can be drawn, etc.

How fast can you get into trouble by making the most human error of an "assumption?" Where and why do assumptions kick in for humans - in general? I believe it happens for the reason of survival and our minds are geared toward finding answers to questions rapidly so decisions can be made quickly and decisively.

It can be said in most modern situations life and death are not on the table. It can also be said that mother nature has not evolved us to a point where such stimuli that trigger instincts has not been adjusted past the "life or death" trigger. Stress will hit the monkey brain who will trigger the lizard brain which accesses the survival instincts and kicks in things like the adrenaline dump, i.e. fight or flight.

Training and practice are geared toward martial artists learning to control the survival instincts and all that the dump brings up out of the lizards lair and into the forebrain with out full influence of the monkey brain. A very difficult method.

When a stimuli is encountered the brain will look quickly for some action to take. In a lot of cases it will cause us to react in a somewhat predefined manner, i.e. run like hell or simply freeze. When the brain pulls up from a more coherent and applicable memory an action then you can act. It is this moment that causes martial artists concern. Training should provide a form of action more appropriate to the stimuli and proper reality based training will reprogram or encode a new action. The idea is to get that dump to focus on that more appropriate response vs. the DNA ingrained survival response, especially the freeze response.

Take some of the video's you see on the Internet today that are edited to show only those more dramatized views  and the lack of the full story tends to make humans "assume" what their perceptive filters determine or interpret as true when in most cases it will be false.

Do you train for "assumptions?" If not, why? Should you? and How does this apply to your path in the martial arts?