Professor Ian Robertson

speaker

69 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 2 Aug

Professor Ian Robertson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

TED Talks Daily · Sunday Pick: How to Survive a Losing Team | Good Sport · 2 Aug 2026 podcast

And that is the winner effect.

Part of the mechanism of that is confidence, the confidence that comes.

But there are also biological effects on the brain of winning, increasing aggression and motivation.

You know, the boxing world has a word for that.

It's called tomato cans.

Mike Tyson, when he came out of prison, they gave him a couple of tomato can fights.

That is fights that were against people who had no hope against him, simply to give him that experience of winning.

To get the benefits of confidence, remember confidence treats the belief that you will achieve something as having achieved it.

And so you get the performance enhancing effects of that.

So it's important to go in believing that you can win without hanging everything on that.

So you want to get the brain enhancing benefits of believing you can do it.

without having the confidence sapping effects of feeling despair at the first setback you get.

You have this emotional reaction to losing, which in the brain corresponds to...

decline in dopamine activity in the brain's reward network.

And it's actually very close to some of the pain centers of the brain.

So it feels like pain.

Not only is it an absence of reward, it's a failure to get an expected reward.

And that lowers your mood and it lifts your anxiety.

And so it's much easier for us to default to very imprecise modes of thinking.

Thinking big thoughts like, I'm useless.

Showing 21–40 of 69 · page 2 of 4