Researchers claim to have noticed a change in the activity of neurons in the motor cortex that increases the risk of failure when the stakes are particularly high. The motor cortex is the region of the brain that plans and executes movements.
Everyone has experienced situations where the prospect of a reward becomes an incentive to perform better. But there are also other situations in which the pressure to succeed becomes too great: It leads to a mistake, a wrong maneuver, a distraction. The typical example in ice hockey or football is the penalty kick, which can decide the fate of a game.
But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania wanted to test this not on human brains, but on the brains of rhesus monkeys. In their recently pre-published research – which means it hasn’t been verified by other experts – they describe a series of experiments in which these monkeys had to perform a difficult task that could earn them a reward: sugar water. The failure rate increased… with the value of the reward.
In 2021, they had conducted a series of experiments that yielded similar results, but this time they used microelectrodes to study the monkeys’ brain activity at the same time. It turns out that the activity of these neurons increased when the monkey could recognize that a larger reward was possible and decreased when the rewards were smaller.
The analysis of this activity made it possible to identify the “signature” of the “planning” of the movements. However, when the reward was at its highest, the distinction between this planning and the actual movement became blurred. “We conclude that signals from neurons associated with reward and motor planning interact in the motor cortex in a way that explains why we collapse under pressure.”
Whether there’s a biological reason the brain reacts this way, the neurons won’t reveal their secrets. Maybe it’s dopamine, sometimes called the feel-good hormone — a molecule produced by some of our neurons to send messages to other areas of the brain. Overproduction of this molecule could “throw our motor cortex off balance at the crucial moment,” speculates one of the co-authors in New Scientist. Researchers are certainly convinced that the same thing happens to humans when they collapse under the pressure.