When a Big Goal Paralyzes. Why Does the Brain Fail in the Face of Enormous Benefits?
In heated debates, during job interviews, or when one step away from victory, a person can freeze up. They can freeze, literally start to choke, or play it safe instead of taking the final step and snatching victory. And it’s not just a matter of mental toughness. For the first time, scientists have discovered a group of neurons that malfunction when the stakes reach their peak. And this is a clear biological mechanism for how a grand or large-scale goal can frighten and slow a person down.
The brain is an amazing organ, with its own specific control. Periods of incredible productivity can be followed by terrible procrastination. And some simple questions require enormous efforts to solve. How to work in different situations and use your brain to the maximum – community materials tell. Subscribe to stay up to date with new articles!
Overvaluation and inhibitory activity
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have for the first time discoveredthat abnormal neural activity in the brain's motor cortex—the area responsible for sending signals to control body movements—increases when the reward is greatest.
By studying the activity of populations of neurons in the motor cortex, we found a “pressure-suppression” signature that predicted, with a precision of hundreds of milliseconds, whether a subject would fail an upcoming trial. We found that the magnitude of a future reward determines how a person prepares to pursue a goal. Depending on the activity of neurons in a region associated with assessing the salience of a desired goal, when the salience of a desired goal is greatest, inhibitory activity radiates outward from that region.
The study's first author is Adam Smolder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon.
By examining the motor control neurons of rhesus macaques trained to perform complex tasks to receive rewards of varying value, the researchers found that when a large “win” was looming, the animals performed worse under pressure. Perhaps this could be addressed Basics of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Desired Values and Brain Functioning
The scientists analyzed the activity of hundreds of neurons involved in preparing specific actions when the animals performed complex tasks and knew that a large reward awaited them for successful completion. The neurons activated as usual up to a certain point, but failed when it came to completing the task for which the “jackpot” was assigned.
So, increasing motivation by offering larger rewards will work, but only up to a point. Beyond this “fact of awareness,” we see a collapse of neural information, and this closely correlates with when animals choke under the pressure of choice.
The study's first author is Adam Smolder, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon.
The most common situation of “choking under pressure” is in sports, but something similar can happen in many other situations, such as during an exam or an important presentation. Or when meeting a hot girl/guy.
Reward, productivity, achievement
This study confirms earlier findings by researchers who found that performance may also be inversely related to the amount of reward provided for completing a difficult task.
Choking under pressure is a really interesting example of a situation where the brain gets it wrong. Now that we understand a little bit about how exactly the brain fails in high-reward situations, we’ll try to fix it. One way to do that would be to develop methods that use combined experience interfaces brain-computer interface (BCI)to encourage the brain not to act in that way and, ultimately, to correct the behavior.
Steve Chase, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and the Institute for Neuroscience.
But how much control can we have over these motor cortex neurons under high-pressure, high-reward conditions? Researchers now say there's a specific brain region responsible for malfunctioning under high pressure, and suppressing this unusual activity improves performance.
How to avoid being stunned by the reward?
We had an intuition that similar processes were taking place in the brain. The data showed that subjects seemed to become overly cautious when they saw the size of the reward. And their caution worked against them. Every time jackpots were offered. If people suffer from the paralysis of huge success, our study would give them a balance between self-awareness and self-control. And it would be easier for them to retain free will when the stakes are high. Even if they have good reasons to restrain themselves.
Aaron Batista, professor of bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh.
Researchers believe that understanding the neural mechanisms behind this “victory paralysis” could open up more opportunities for people with the disorder to achieve their potential.
Read more articles about the strange connections between the brain, consciousness, psyche and ways to find the keys to these processes in the channel materials. Subscribe to stay up to date with new articles!
