PARADIGM SHIFT

As soon as things become too familiar, they tend to get “filtered out” by a part of your brain called the Reticular Activation System or RAS. Its purpose is to filter out the “noise” in the environment, like the birds in the trees so you could “hear” the rustle in the grass and know it could be a snake so you could get out of the way or the line-of-fire. And while this might have been a really good thing 60 to 100,000 years ago, it isn’t much help for things like driving at highway speed and trying to remain vigilant. So we talked about habits like leaving a safe following distance when driving to help “compensate” for complacency leading to mind not on task. But if you’re driving and you happen to see someone following way too close, you will find yourself almost automatically checking your own following distance as well. So, taking this idea a bit further, if we observe others for state to error risk patterns, every time we see one, we will think about risk, which will make us think about ourselves and the risk of what we are doing. And if we practice looking for these state to error risk patterns enough, it’s like training our RAS to “light up” whenever we see one. So the RAS isn’t all bad, because you can also train your RAS to see or find what you want to pick out of the noise.

Unfortunately, some people only use this “talent” to be able to find liquor stores or their favorite hamburger joint. And they can do this much faster than others who have not “primed” or trained their RAS to look for those “important” things. You can try it yourself: just look for anything you see that’s red before you leave the house. Say what it is out loud as you see each thing or item. Now pay attention to how many red cars you notice when you start driving (there’s lots). So provided you make a bit of an effort, you can train your RAS to look for risk patterns. And once you start to see them, you’ll see them everywhere. And it will really help to keep your eyes and mind on task. Or, to put it another way, this CERT will help you “fight” complacency.

The last CERT we need to cover is, “Analyze close calls and small errors”—so you don’t have to agonize over the big ones. The basic principle here is that there are so many little injuries or close calls compared to serious injuries. But they’re all caused by the same state to error risk pattern. So, if we could learn from the “free” ones we wouldn’t have to agonize over the serious ones (see Figure #1). So, whenever you make a mistake, bump into something, or momentarily lose your balance—even if you don’t fall down—ask yourself why. Was it a state like rushing, frustration or fatigue that you didn’t self-trigger on; or was it complacency leading to mind not on task. If it was complacency, then you probably need to work on improving a safety-related habit, or you might need to put more effort into observing others for state to error risk patterns. So that’s the basic or the fundamental part of this technique. But another part of this technique is to think about how this close call or minimal injury could have been worse. And by contemplating the worst-case scenarios (more and stronger) neural pathways are created in our brains, which eventually will give us that almost instant sense of danger. So getting people to tell stories about injuries and serious close calls that have happened to them, the states and critical errors involved, and then getting them to think about how it could’ve been worse isn’t “fear mongering”. It’s actually just using the neuroscience to our advantage.