Making mistakes at work? Maybe you have a boring job!

William Atkins
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 20:54

Science - Health

An international team of scientists has found, based on brain activity, that people with jobs involving monotonous duties and a lot of repetition have a greater risk of making mistakes. Could that be you?


The researchers' April 21, 2008 paper, “Prediction of human errors by maladaptive changes in event-related brain networks” is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

The abstract to their paper states, “Humans engaged in monotonous tasks are susceptible to occasional errors that may lead to serious consequences, but little is known about brain activity patterns preceding errors.”

To study these patterns in the brain in relationship to mistakes and boring jobs, the researchers asked subjects to perform what they called ”flanker tasks,” or jobs where visual clues were provided and quick responses were required.

As these clues were provided and responses made by the participants, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans to measure brain activity.

They found that certain parts of the brain contained increased patterns of activity that predicted mistakes would soon be made based on selecting the wrong answer to their clues.

The particular patterns inside the brain actually showed up about one-half minute before the actual mistake occurred. And, the subjects were not even aware of their pending mistake.

Thus, the researchers discovered that mistakes can be predicted up to thirty seconds before they are made based on activity patterns found in the brain. Specifically, blood flow decreased in the posterior medial frontal cortex of the brain, while activity increased in the areas of the brain involving the precuneus, retrosplenial cortex, and anterior medial frontal cortex.

Specifically, the researchers found “… a coincident decrease of deactivation in default mode regions of the brain, together with a decline of activation in regions associated with maintaining task effort, raised the probability of future errors.”

Their conclusion was, “Our findings provide insights into the brain network dynamics preceding human performance errors and suggest that monitoring of the identified precursor states may help in avoiding human errors in critical real-world situations.”

The researchers think that an “early-warming” system can be developed to help make people doing boring tasks less prone to mistakes. Please read on.