T22a - Human Factors Underground- Hijack your brain for safety

Date : 21/06/2026    Time : 13:00 - 13:50Claire Graf

Location : Grinton Church - SE 04616 98433

Details : 

Working underground puts you in an environment your brain was never designed for — dark, confined, repetitive, and often deceptively familiar. In these conditions, it’s not usually dramatic failures that cause accidents, but small, predictable quirks in how we think and make decisions. This talk looks at how your brain can quietly get you into trouble underground. We’ll explore common cognitive traps like confirmation bias (seeing what you expect to see) and the Concorde fallacy (pushing on because you’ve already invested time and effort), and how these show up in real mining and exploration contexts. The focus isn’t on blaming individuals, but on recognising patterns that affect all of us. More importantly, we’ll look at how to turn that knowledge into something useful. Instead of fighting your brain, you can work with it — building simple habits, checks, and cues that make safer decisions more automatic. This includes practical techniques for catching early signs of trouble, such as self-checks for emerging hypoxia or hypothermia, where your judgement may already be compromised before you realise it. The aim is to give you tools you can actually use: ways to sense-check your decisions, spot when something feels “off,” and create small systems that back you up when conditions get harder. Underground, you can’t rely on perfect thinking — but you can design for safer thinking. If we understand how our brains behave down there, we can make them work for us, not against us.

Claire Graf is an interdisciplinary researcher specialising in human factors, safety, and real-world decision-making under pressure. With a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and additional qualifications in employment law and occupational health and safety, they focus on how systems actually function in practice — particularly where human behaviour, communication, and environment interact. Alongside their academic work, Claire is active in Scottish cave rescue and involved in mine heritage and underground environments. Earlier in life, they trained and served as volunteer paramedic, an experience that continues to inform their understanding of risk, triage, and decision-making in time-critical situations. This combination of research and operational exposure shapes their approach: practical, systems-based, and grounded in what really happens when plans meet reality. Their work centres on the “implementation gap” — the space between what procedures say should happen and what people can realistically do in complex, high-risk environments. Drawing on aviation human factors, Claire examines how cognitive load, attention, fatigue, and stress influence behaviour, often in predictable ways that can be designed for. A core strand of their work is communication and neurodiversity-informed practice, alongside disability as a systems issue rather than an individual one. They develop practical frameworks that translate policy into everyday reality, using human factors to build environments where safe, effective behaviour is supported by design rather than relying on constant individual effort.