Vikram Chib

Doing an interview on the radio could feel as stressful as that person trying to get the gold medal for their figure skating competition or whatever event they're in.

It's subjective, right?

So for me, it could be the same thing as...

an Olympian in their, you know, gold medal event.

And that could be getting a gold medal, right?

Or it could be, you know, reaching for a cup of water.

Right.

So there are different types of fatigue that you could have, right?

There's cognitive fatigue.

Maybe you're sitting at your desk and you're doing a lot of spreadsheets or something, right?

Or writing.

And then there's physical fatigue, which is running, walking up a long flight of stairs, things like that.

And what we found is that there are areas in your brain that are involved in sensing your internal state.

And when those areas interact with motivational areas, that's kind of what gets you to feel fatigued.

So you sense that your body can't produce any more output, any more effort, whether that's cognitive or mental, and that gets you to sort of shut down and feel tired.

Yeah, so we haven't directly looked at higher or lower stakes.

What we do know and what we're starting to see is that offering a little bit of reward can push you out of that fatigue state a little bit.

So reward can sort of counteract reward.

the cost of effort that you have to do, right?

So you can think of any action that you're doing as like a trade-off between the effort costs that you're putting in and the reward you're getting out.