Choking under pressure: Brain neurons misfire when the stakes are highest

Whether we've watched athletes do it or had the misfortune to experience it ourselves, 'choking' at an important moment when the pressure is on comes down to more than mental fortitude. For the first time, scientists have uncovered a set of neurons that misfire when the stakes are at their highest, sending poorer signals to the body that affects our actions in high-stakes situations.

In a first, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that abnormal neural activity in the motor cortex of the brain – the area responsible for sending signals to direct how the body moves – increases when the reward payoff is greatest.

“By looking at the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex, we found a signature of choking under pressure, that at the precision of 100s of milliseconds, was indicative of whether or not a subject would fail in an upcoming trial,” said the study's first author Adam Smoulder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. “We found that rewards interact with target preparation signals to drive neural activity toward a region associated with improved reach execution, and then, at the highest rewards, spread away from this region."

Homing in on motor control neurons in Rhesus monkeys, who had been trained to undertake challenging tasks in order to receive rewards of varying value, the researchers found that when there was a big 'win' promised, the animals underperformed when the pressure was on.

They analyzed the activity of hundreds of neurons involved in movement preparation as they undertook these challenging tasks in which the animals knew there was a large reward if they did well. The neurons fired as normal up to a certain point, but glitched when it came to completing a task for a 'jackpot' reward.

"So, it seems that increasing motivation by offering larger rewards can improve the discriminability of the neural signals, but only up to a point," he added. "Beyond that point, we actually see a collapse in neural information, and that’s tightly correlated with when the animals choke under pressure.”

While the most commonly observed 'choking under pressure' is seen in sport, it can also occur in many other arenas, such as sitting an exam or giving a presentation.

This latest study furthers the earlier findings by the researchers that identified how performance was inversely impacted by the size of the reward given by completing the challenging task.

“Choking under pressure is a really interesting example of when the brain gets it wrong,” said Steve Chase, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Neuroscience Institute. “Now that we understand a little bit about how the brain is failing under these high reward situations, we want to try and correct it. One way to do this would be to design techniques that leverage our combined brain-computer interface (BCI) experience to encourage the brain not to do those things and ultimately, rescue the behavior.”

So how much can we control these motor cortex neurons in high-pressure, high-reward challenges? The researchers say now that there's an acute area of the brain responsible for misfiring when the heat is on, targeting this region and working on methods to combat the unusual activity could help take the pressure off and, in turn, improve performance.

“It’s hard work to take something that everybody has an intuition about and relate it to neural activity,” noted Aaron Batista, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh. “Our data indicates that subjects seemed to become overcautious, self-monitoring to their detriment when the jackpots were offered.

"If people trying to avoid choking under pressure were to benefit from our study, we suggest they could beat it by finding the right balance between self-awareness and self-control, and just generally keeping it loose when the stakes go up, even if there is a natural tendency to clamp down," he added.

The researchers believe that by better understanding the neural mechanisms and how "the brain gets it wrong," in the high-stakes moments, there's a path to manipulating the brain in order to give people control over those reward signals, in order to perform optimally when they're most likely to choke under pressure.

In this ongoing study, the team is now working on specific ways to target and combat these adverse brain responses.

The study was published in the journal Neuron.

Source: Carnegie Mellon University