Camila Domenoski

Hey, Shortwavers.

Camila Domenoski here, filling in for Emily and Regina.

The 2026 Winter Olympics are underway in Milan and Cortina, and I don't know about you, but I know I'm holding my breath watching them fly down mountains on skis or slip and fall on the ice.

So I can only imagine how the athletes must feel competing with the whole world watching.

And yet, I feel like no matter what we do, whether we're attempting quadruple axles on the ice or just showing up to work, we all experience pressure, right?

Vikram gets me.

Vikram Chib is a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins.

His lab studies performance and how the brain responds to rewards.

And he says reward is baked into basically everything humans do.

The stakes just vary a lot.

So today on the show, what happens in athletes' brains when those stakes are at their highest?

And what science tells us about how our brains respond to rewards, pressure, and millions of people watching you strive for gold?

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

All right, we are talking to Vikram Chhib, a biomedical engineer at Johns Hopkins University.

You have studied people's brains to understand how they respond to rewards like gold medals or whatever your own personal gold medal is.

And you've also looked at what happens, what's going on when people feel tired.

And I wanted to ask you to tell us about that.

What's actually happening in the brain when we are fatigued?

And does that fatigue, does it look different inside the brain when the stakes are higher or lower for somebody, when that reward is more on their minds?

Right.