Mining has made substantial progress in reducing harm through engineering controls, critical control management, fatigue management and the integration of human factors into safety systems. Despite these advances, the effectiveness of every critical control depends on the quality of the decisions made by the people responsible for implementing them. In operational mining environments, workers are required to perceive changing conditions, interpret complex information, and make timely decisions under uncertainty and pressure. Contemporary safety science recognises that human performance is shaped by the interaction between people, technology and organisational systems, rather than by individual error in isolation (Reason, 2016; Hollnagel, 2018). At the same time, evidence from cognitive neuroscience shows that prolonged stress and sustained cognitive demands can progressively disrupt the neural processes underlying executive function, attention, working memory, and decision-making before measurable behavioural decline becomes apparent (McEwen, 1998; Arnsten, 2009; Girotti et al, 2018).