How safe is your brain?

Brain-centred hazards

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General Health and Safety

How safe is your brain?

By Andrew Hale July 7, 2016

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Have you noticed that in the past year or so there has been a ‘new kid on the block’ as far as OH&S researchers and
consultants are concerned; the neuroscientist? An example is Dr Susan Koen from Dekra-Insight, on whose webpages
(www.dekra-insight.com) you can find an ‘e-book’ (actually a Powerpoint presentation) and a ‘white paper’, both on so-
called ‘brain-centred hazards’. Overlooking for the moment the rather eccentric use of the word ‘hazard’ in this context,
rather than ‘risk factor’, what is this all about?

She draws on the pioneering work of Daniel Kahneman who won the Nobel prize in 2002 (nota bene the Economics
prize, even though he was a psychologist). Unfortunately neither Dekra-insight document has any references for further
reading, so here are the details of his most accessible publication: Daniel Kahneman; Thinking Fast and Slow. Penguin
books, 2012. The essence of Kahneman’s (and many other’s) behavioural research is that there are two, to a great
extent independent, brain systems which react to inputs; the ‘fast brain’ in the more primitive limbic system which reacts
in milliseconds to well-learned input signals, including danger signals; and the ‘slow brain’ in the cortex which takes time
(even if that is only seconds) to analyse and reason about what it is seeing and hearing around it. The ‘brain-centred
hazards’ which the neuroscientist then identifies are the ones where the fast brain has reacted unsafely to the situation
based on what it sees as its key characteristics, before the slow brain has time to take in and more deeply analyse and
respond to its different or more nuanced interpretations. She also, rightly, identifies that fatigue (but also alcohol and
some drugs, which don’t get a mention) makes it more likely that the fast brain will take charge and the slow brain will sit
back and let it.
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But what is new about that insight? Surely it’s just pointing to the danger of ‘jumping to conclusions’ that psychologists
Accept
and ergonomists have known, and warned about, for decades, isn’t it? The key difference, however, is that we now
Accept
know much more, thanks to MRI scanning of the brain as it tackles decision problems, about which parts of the brain
are involved and how they interact. This may help to underline the reality of these neuroscience warnings of brain-
Be the risk
based first factors,
to hear but
fromit our experts:
doesn’t seemOPEN
to me to offer, at the moment, much more in the way of new solutions to the

https://www.hastam.co.uk/brain-centred-hazards/[10/12/2019 11:15:44 PM]

How safe is your brain? Brain-centred hazards

problem of how to design workplaces, information displays and safety procedures than the ergonomists and 
psychologists have been researching and recommending for decades. The book I wrote back in the 1980s with Ian
Glendon (Hale A.R. & Glendon A.I. 1987. Individual Behaviour in the Face of Danger. Elsevier, freely downloadable
here, deals with the need to take particular care when basing decisions on expectations (fast brain) rather than actual
situations (slow brain). Maybe what the neuroscientists hope for as an expansion of our preventive toolbox will come in
time as scanning of brain activity during its response to more complex presentations and decisions becomes possible
and affordable. Meanwhile, the practical preventive advice of the neuroscientist, as ‘new kid on the block’, does
reinforce the sort of advice ‘older kids’ have been giving for a long time, but doesn’t seem to me to offer much more that
is new. It is a case of making an inventory of what are the strengths and weaknesses of each brain system – the fast
and the slow – and playing to the strengths of each and being alert to the weaknesses of both and trying to compensate
for them.

What is certain is that we should not imply that we should always associate the slow brain with safety and the fast with
risk. Routine tasks would take far too long if we did them always under control of the slow brain. Many years ago safety
officers used the words ‘safety conscious’ to advocate what we now call slow brain control, but they overlooked the
necessity of unconscious, routine, overlearned functioning as essential for many of our activities, and indeed overlooked
the fast brain’s ability to spot, very rapidly at times, tiny differences from expectations which alert it to call for back-up
from the slow brain. Jim Reason in his classic work on slips, lapses and mistakes (J. Reason. 1990. Human Error.
Cambridge University Press) has a lot to say about the psychological mechanisms behind the different categories of
error. Above all the fast brain learns from the slow brain what can safely be turbocharged in responding to familiar
situations. We need to monitor and guide that learning process so as to avoid the fast brain learning unsafe short cuts.
We also need to build in to work routines deliberate pauses, like dynamic risk assessments and workplace inspections,
to give the slow brain its chance to pick up the signals the fast brain might otherwise miss.

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