I love how you got downvoted twice LOL. People are really protective of their Great Recession Era operating systems.

Well a typical archery shot takes about 5-8 seconds. You wait for a living target to stop (typically to survey food on the ground) until you have a clear shot behind the shoulder blades, through the heart and lungs. In that amount of time you can settle your shot, aim, and wait for the surprise release to go off. Keep in mind you can also adjust the sensitivity and trigger point of a surprise release device, so that it doesn’t go off too unexpectedly.

It’s more so the fact that your mind is good at noticing patterns. This is why archers that start out don’t have target panic, but it always develops later on down the line. Once you shoot 1000 arrows your mind eventually says “when I see target I must hit button to release arrow”, because you’ve repeated the pattern over and over. It gets to a point where before you can even consciously settle your aim, your subconscious mind sees the target and instantly tells your fingers to press the release button. It’s at this point you have to find a way around your subconscious mind, and that’s why surprise releases are used.

I’m going to piggyback off of u/Raeandray and say a bow in modern times is more comparable to a sniper rifle. You don’t want to shoot a moving target, you wait until you have a clear stationary target.

The difference is what actuates the release. In a standard release, you use your fingers (index or thumb) to release the arrow. The problem is that fingers are sensitive and prone to twitchy behavior, which means anticipating the shot leads to premature releases (which we call “target panic”). Your eyes see the target and it tells your twitchy fingers “release the arrow NOW or you’ll run out of time!”. Releasing with the fingers is a conscious decision that eventually becomes an unconscious one due to anxiety, leading to premature shots. A surprise release device (also called a “back tension release”) uses a different muscle group to release the arrow. You see, with a surprise release device us archers are taught to use the muscles in our backs to pull the string (specifically the rhomboid muscle). Flexing the rhomboid is a slow and steady process, since the rhomboid isn’t a twitchy muscle. So what ends up happening is we squeeze our rhomboid muscle which at some point along that flexion of the rhomboid, it triggers the surprise release aid to release the arrow. We don’t consciously know when flexing our back muscle will trigger the release, so we can just focus on the target.

Is someone going to inform OP that sometimes people are named after locations they were born?