Choking under pressure: Brain neurons misfire when the stakes are highest | Scientists have uncovered a set of neurons misfire when the stakes are at their highest, sending poorer signals to the body that affects our actions in high-stakes situations in Rhesus monkeys.
https://newatlas.com/biology/choking-under-pressure/
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From the article: Whether we’ve watched athletes do it or had the misfortune to experience it ourselves, ‘choking’ at an important moment when the pressure is on comes down to more than mental fortitude. For the first time, scientists have uncovered a set of neurons that misfire when the stakes are at their highest, sending poorer signals to the body that affects our actions in high-stakes situations.
[In a first](https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0896627324006081), researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that abnormal neural activity in the motor cortex of the brain – the area responsible for sending signals to direct how the body moves – increases when the reward payoff is greatest.
Steve Chase: Brain-computer interfaces for motor learning and skill acquisition
“By looking at the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex, we found a signature of choking under pressure, that at the precision of 100s of milliseconds, was indicative of whether or not a subject would fail in an upcoming trial,” said the study’s first author Adam Smoulder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. “We found that rewards interact with target preparation signals to drive neural activity toward a region associated with improved reach execution, and then, at the highest rewards, spread away from this region.”
Stupid monkeys can’t even gamble right
thats me except it happens all the time regardless of stakes.
>We studied rhesus monkeys performing a challenging reaching task in which they underperformed when an unusually large “jackpot” reward was at stake, and we sought a neural mechanism that might result in that underperformance. We found that increases in reward drive neural activity during movement preparation into, and then past, a zone of optimal performance. We conclude that neural signals of reward and motor preparation interact in the motor cortex (MC) in a manner that can explain why we choke under pressure.
Descriptive image from the study: [https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.08.012/asset/e9771201-d52c-404b-bc74-4b85ccdf9185/main.assets/fx1_lrg.jpg](https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.08.012/asset/e9771201-d52c-404b-bc74-4b85ccdf9185/main.assets/fx1_lrg.jpg)
>”If people trying to avoid choking under pressure were to benefit from our study, we suggest they could beat it by finding the right balance between self-awareness and self-control, and just generally keeping it loose when the stakes go up.”