 In this module, we are going to look at how human factors can affect our decision-making process. Although the study of the human mind has been around for centuries, the term human factors only made its way into the wildland fire community after the 1994 South Canyon fire. Shortly after that fire, Dr. Ted Putnam helped organize the first human factors workshop. The recommendations from this workshop were published in 1995. This is not an easy subject to grasp, but it is becoming more and more apparent that we need to understand how our minds work and the part it plays in our decision-making process, especially when we're under stress. Dr. Ted Putnam started his career on a district fire crew and was then a smoke jumper for 11 years. He earned his PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Montana and combined this with his wildland fire experience when working at the Missoula Technology and Development Center. Dr. Putnam is considered by many to be the pioneer of human factors. Although now retired, he continues to share his knowledge with the fire community. So sit back and relax as Dr. Putnam introduces you to the concepts of human factors and why it is so important to understand how our minds, both positively and negatively, affect the decisions we make when we're under stress. If you look at accidents and fatalities worldwide, the accepted statistic is that 80% of all the accidents and fatalities are caused by human error. 20% would be caused by physical things. Historically, all of our accident investigations primarily look at 20% of what the causal factors are and hardly ever look at the 80%. So the importance of the 80% being driven by your mind is that we really have to start paying attention to that 80% or we're forever going to stay, you know, keep making the same mistakes. Trying to get people to start attending to the human factors, it arose, I think, from having a lot of experience doing entrapment investigation and wondering, well, why do people keep making what we would later call dumb mistakes? And if you really look closer, those people aren't making dumb mistakes. They're focused on something at the time and whatever they're focused on and then what they then do as an action, they're related and they're doing the action that they think best meets the needs at the time. But they just happen to be focused on maybe the wrong elements. And when I make the statement that 80% of all accidents are due to human error, we have to be very, very careful and correctly say that upstream of those errors are human minds. And so if we're going to look for a solution to that 80%, we have to look at the human minds. And so far, the whole fire organization hasn't did that. Integrating the psychology of the human mind into the culture of the wildland fire community and how it relates to fire line decision making is long overdue. It's a complex subject that warrants much more time than we have available in this video. However, we will let Dr. Putnam introduce you to how the human mind works and how easy it is for us to fall into poor decision making practices. Human factors can be a deceptively complex subject. So listen closely as we continue on and try to gain insights into our own decision making process. And so one of the first principles about how your mind works is that you can only attend to one object at a time. And it's just one single object and then there's a space and then another one. But your mind can operate so quickly you can do hundreds of those objects per second. And that gives you the illusion that you can multitask. And if you actually look at what's happening, say neurologically, your eye will take a picture and it's kind of like a camera where it only takes one snapshot, it shuts down. And when it shuts down, then you can hear. And those things can alternate something like 60 times a second, but you then have the illusion that you hear and see at the same time. If you lose the ability to see, it isn't that you suddenly get better hearing. You simply have one thing that doesn't compete with the other objects, classes anymore. What happens when you get under stress, the stress tends to be subconscious and it's occupying more and more of that processing capacity. And because the stress is eating up so much processing capacity, you have less and less to try to be aware of the dynamic environment you're in. And it becomes frustrating so what you do, you simply start to shut down and lock in on one action, one object. And so if you're out digging line, you may just forget about what the fire is doing and just concentrate on digging line. And that's probably okay, but somebody needs to be watching out for the larger picture and keeping their focus there. Knowing how the brain works is one aspect of human factors, but knowing the tendencies of human thought is another. Dr. Putnam will now take about 10 minutes to explain what it means to be on mental autopilot and how it can affect decision making. When we can talk about everyday mind or call it autopilot, but what a mind on autopilot means is like you're driving a car is a good example because when you're a teenager or whenever you start to learn to drive a car, you have to pay very focused attention and it's kind of a jumpy sort of a task and we see this in the movies all the time, you know, people, you know, the car jerks along because they'll focus on one thing and then lose something else like the gas and as they go back and forth the car either accelerates or backs off. And fortunately over a certain amount of time all of that gets automated and then your driving skills get very, very fluid. And so after that you can drive without hardly any mental effort whatsoever. And that's, you know, kind of an automated response and they're wonderful things because we don't want to get up every day and have to learn to drive the car again. But it's also a warning because everything we do gets automated and we tend to think of it as good when it comes to physical skills and especially sports or like in music, you know, when things get so good they just flow naturally. It's wonderful. But your mind and your body do that with everything and we tend to be unconscious about how your mind automates everything and unless you start some sort of a process to be aware of that or to counter that all that unconscious elements from your past they're driving you ahead in the future and they don't necessarily take you where you would want to go if you could kind of look back from a different perspective. Yeah, what autopilot implies is that if you do nothing you simply go ahead with whatever you've been wired to do and how it affects you on the fire line is that a lot of your autopilot habits are acquired in an office environment or maybe at home with your family and whatever those skills are and partly it's like letting yourself be distracted and if you're distracted getting up in the morning and an example of that would be getting in the shower and when you're in the shower if you're thinking about what you're going to eat for breakfast what you're going to do, well your mind's off doing something that isn't related to taking the shower on the fire line as you then go out you have the same exact mind on the fire line that you've had all day long and so all those mental habits that you have in everyday environments at home and in the office that's what you take into a high-risk environment it's just saying that whatever you do habitually during the day all year long even off season you don't see it as affecting what's going to go on the fire line but it does and you just want to be aware of what that is so the way that you usually introduce paying attention to your own mind is get a person to say pay attention to a discrete object and the discrete object the simpler the better and the one that I've used personally and can't really say why is a red circle or a red disc but if you think about a red disc or have a red disc in front of you you can close your eyes and then try to see the red disc in your mind's eye and you can actually do it and if people think that they don't have a mind's eye you can hook electrodes up to your brain and it's actually an area discrete from your visual center so there is kind of a real experience of trying to see something in your mind's eye and if you don't have that skill it's something that you can get so when you focus on a discrete object the goal is to keep your mental awareness purely on that object and while it's on that object then you don't want to be on any other object so you don't want to hear anything, you don't want to think anything you just want to see in your mind's eye what that object is and the very first thing that's going to happen is all of a sudden your mind's going to go someplace else and you've lost the object, that's autopilot and then you remember through mindfulness to come back to the target and so when you come back to the target that's exerting the skill of mindfulness to pull it back to the say the red disc target so you can go days, weeks, months and that's all you're ever doing whenever your mind goes off the target starts to go off on autopilot you as someone that are trying to improve your concentration skills bring it back to whatever the target is and the point here then of all of this is you're actually learning a skill and you'll be able to think better and concentrate better in any environment having did this but the interesting thing and interesting question is that if you can't keep your mind on that object why not? I mean isn't that kind of strange because if you can't do it why can't you if I can't keep my mind on that red disc what's pulling it away? and it's an interesting question because you think you have control of everything in your life but here it's got to be fundamentally probably as simple a task as you could ever have and you can't do it and if you can't lead yourself then I always say can you lead other people and it's something that you really want to ask the question because if you don't realize that you don't realize why it's so important to fight that autopilot because you really don't have a choice autopilots just taking you where long term habits want you to go or it's just an automatic process and it's sometime useful but the more complex the environment the more useless it is and one of the reasons it's not quite as useful is because for the most part it's that autopilot is formed in a non stressful environment and there's a huge body of research that shows your mind's attending to all kinds of things that you're consciously unaware of and I mean it's fairly staggering that like 95% or more things are all on autopilot and there's very little that you have conscious intent for but if you look at your own autopilot because it would bother you to realize you're not fully in control one of the things autopilot does is puts a thought in your mind kind of like ah that doesn't really matter or if it does bother you just go watch TV and you'll forget all about it there's autopilot at work or out on the fire line it's action tunneling you don't want to think about the risky environment or what's really going wrong and it's simpler just to cave into autopilot and that's what you're going to do just out of habit had some prior experience with pulling yourself off autopilot so it may not seem like keeping your mind focused on a red disc has anything to do with fight and fire but what you're trying to do is create the chance to do something different in that different environment and not get trapped by the autopilot because autopilot I mean it's too often to put you to places like that action tunneling right at the time you need to be maximally aware of your environment well that's the reason like I've recommended mindfulness meditation is because it's activity orientated and if you're driving a car and you can learn to drive a car mindfully take a shower mindfully and things like that attend to the fire mindfully I would bet anything that firefighters ever have the terminology and have looked in their own minds that would be some very interesting discussions and I think it would bring so much more to it it would bring in to play that other 80% and I honestly think that's where we need to go a link to Dr. Putnam's article called deep psychology the quiet way to wisdom as well as other suggested resources on this topic can be found in your student workbook