The neuroscience of cracking under pressure
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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?
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.
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.
And that could be getting a gold medal, right? Or it could be, you know, reaching for a cup of water.
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.
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What is the significance of the 2026 Winter Olympics in this discussion?
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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?
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.
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?
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?
How does pressure affect athletes and everyday individuals?
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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–2:48
2
What is the significance of the 2026 Winter Olympics in this discussion?
2:48–4:43
3
How does pressure affect athletes and everyday individuals?
4:43–7:04
4
What role do rewards play in human behavior according to Vikram Chib?
7:04–13:36
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Short Wave
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