Chapter 1: 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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Chapter 2: 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?
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Chapter 3: 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. So if I boost up that reward a little bit, right, it might motivate me more to overcome some of that feeling of fatigue and do the task that I'm set out to do.
Right. So like thinking of Everybody at the Olympics right now, maybe an athlete might be totally exhausted, but if they know that if they push a little more, they could win gold, maybe they're more likely to actually be able to overcome that fatigue.
Yeah, that's right. So like you would think about like a speed skater, right? You see these people getting their Olympic records or gold medals, right?
And
You know, they've for four years, they do their World Cup events, you know, and they do OK. Right. Sometimes they they they break world records. But you see a lot of Olympic and world records broken in in the Olympics. Right. And so what one one way to think about that? I mean, this is just speculative. Could could be that like, OK, that added that little added reward pushes them beyond, you
That makes perfect sense, right? You have this offering of a reward and you sort of do something superhuman. You can do better than you've ever done before. What about the flip side? What about when Olympians choke and they mess up on something that they've been able to do before just fine? Is that related to mental fatigue or is there something else going on?
Well, we've sort of looked at that in terms of the heightened reward aspect of it as opposed to the fatigue aspect of it. So what we've done is we've kind of set up these like choking scenarios in the lab where we use incentive. And the incentive we've used is money. So we pay people like a lot of money. We tell them, okay, you're going to do a single trial like of a skilled motor task. Okay.
essentially playing a video game. And on certain trials, we're going to give you $100 to do this trial. And what we find is that people do, you know, as the incentives increase, you know, $25, $50, people get better. And when you give them $100, they tend to choke under pressure. Their performance goes down. And we looked in the brain when that happened.
And what we found was that there's this area deep in your brain that's responsible for reward processing called the ventral striatum.
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Chapter 4: What role do rewards play in human behavior according to Vikram Chib?
Ventral striatum?
The ventral striatum, yeah. And so it activates when the rewards are high and it actually tends to deactivate when you have potential losses. And what we found was that what would happen is when people were playing a task and really high incentives were on the line, they would begin, they would see that incentive. They'd be like, oh wow, I have $100 to win.
They would see that really high incentive and they would view it as a loss. They would get worried about actually losing the really high incentive. And that worry about loss was related to how they choked under pressure. So the people that tended to worry more about that loss tended to choke under pressure more.
They essentially reframed this positive thing, the $100, as, oh my gosh, I could lose that $100, right? So it's in their mind, right? Now, what's interesting is the ventral striatum not only does reward processing, but it also does motor processes as well. So it initiates motor action.
And so what we think is that there was some crosstalk between those reward signals or those worry of loss signals and the motor signals. And that's what got people to do poorly when the stakes were high.
Yeah. So if you're thinking that you might win the gold medal, that's great. And if you're thinking, oh my God, if I mess up, I don't win the gold medal and I lose, then suddenly your brain can't work the same way?
Yeah. So essentially, it's like a reframing, right? So your brain is reframing that incentive, and that reframing can get you to do poorly. Now, we've also found that if you train yourself to reframe the task in a different way and say to yourself, okay, I'm going to go into this trial, and I'm not going to think about this individual trial.
I'm going to think about the portfolio of all the trials I have to do. So like, For example, the portfolio of all the races I have to skate. If you do that, you don't focus on that loss as much and you see less brain activity associated with this fear of losing, and you tend to do better under pressure.
So cognitive reframing can sort of get you to overcome that choking behavior, or at least we've seen that in the lab.
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