Brain Science Safety

Author: Jessica Paton
Training Facilities and Simulator Specialist
Queensland Rail

As a human being, in the course of a normal day, we’ll be exposed to around 1850 bits of information every 3 milliseconds. That’s 616666 bits of information a second. How do we decide, from all those bits of information, what’s important and what’s not? How do we avoid becoming completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of colours, shades, sounds, textures, smells and internal thoughts? The key is the maintenance of accurate situational awareness through focus and attention.

The human ability to focus on key critical aspects of our surroundings is thanks to a part of the brain called the reticular activating system (RAS). Over the course of our lives, through learning, experience and deliberation, we’ve developed a keen sense of what we need to know, versus what’s not critical; the RAS keeps this list in order. The RAS processes all the things we encounter against 4 categories: things that are Dangerous, Interesting, Pleasurable and Important (DIPI). If we encounter something that falls into DIPI, we’re hardwired to pay attention to it. For example, most of us will respond if we hear our name called in a crowded room (Important!). DIPI things get our attention, and by paying attention, we can respond in the appropriate way. Anything that doesn’t fit into DIPI won’t demand our attention, which means we won’t really think about it, which lessens the likelihood that we’ll react to it.

The relevance to our industry is that the majority of us will work in or around a safety critical environment. Us, and our workers, will be exposed to a vast array of hazards in the normal undertakings of our daily (or nightly) work. In these environments, we’re vigilant to the things that are DIPI. We recognise our train number being called over a busy radio (important), we respond changes in the sound of an engine or piece of plant (interesting), and we can hear the squeal of a siren above the din of a warehouse (dangerous).  However, a side effect of ongoing exposure to these work environments is that over time, we can become desensitised. If our work fails to stay ‘interesting’, if we no longer get enjoyment from what we do, if we’ve become desensitised to danger, we become less likely to actually pay attention to what’s going on around us. We can begin to move away from paying attention and thinking about what we’re doing, to a habitual, auto-pilot mode of dealing with things. Our brains and bodies are extremely good at adapting, and we can do millions of things without requiring conscious effort.  Going through the motions is all well and good for tasks like walking, getting dressed, reading, writing, etc. Of concern is the human tendency to begin to process complex or safety critical tasks in similar automatic, mechanical, thoughtless ways. Treating a complex task as a mechanical one, and managing critical situations without critical thought has the potential to substantially increase the risk of errors and incidents.

Given that loss of situational awareness has been implicated in up to 80% of workplace accidents, the benefits of maintaining quality, conscious focus on safety critical elements is clear. HSE UK, under the Leadership and worker involvement project, developed a simple model for workplace awareness; the SLAM model. SLAM consists of four simple steps:

STOP: Engage your mind before your hands. Look at the task in hand.

LOOK at your workplace and find the hazards to you and your team mates. Report these immediately to your supervisor.

ASSESS the effects that the hazards have on you, the people you work with, equipment, procedures, pressures and the environment. Ask yourself if you have the knowledge, training and tools to do the task safely. Do this with your supervisor.

MANAGE: If you identify something unsafe, stop working. Tell your supervisor and workmates. Tell your supervisor what actions you think are necessary to make the situation safe.

The beauty of such a simple process is not only in the risk mitigation associated with applying these 4 steps, but in the conditioning of ourselves and others to actively think about our regular activities. By thinking about our regular activities, we engineer our brain to add these activities to our DIPI register, thereby increasing the likelihood that we’ll pay attention in future. The more vigilant we chose to be about something, the better our ability to consciously register it and see it in future. And just in case you’re not yet convinced of the human capacity to focus on the important and block out the non-DIPI, I’ll leave you with this; right now, as you peer at whatever screen, paper or device you’re reading this sentence from, you’re able to see your nose. You just haven’t been paying attention to it…

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