2023-05-12 02:43:06
Researchers claim to have identified a change in the activity of neurons in the motor cortex, which would put you at greater risk of failing when the stakes are particularly high. The motor cortex is the region of the brain that plans and executes movements.
Everyone has been able to experience situations where the prospect of a reward becomes a stimulus to “perform” better. But also other situations where the pressure to succeed becomes too strong: it contributes to an error, a false maneuver, a distraction. The typical example, in hockey or soccer, is the penalty shot, which can decide the fate of a match.
But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania didn’t want to test this in human brains, but in the brains of rhesus monkeys. In their research Recently pre-published—meaning it has not yet been reviewed by other experts—they describe a series of experiments that involved having these monkeys perform a difficult task that might earn them a reward: sugar water. The failure rate increased…with the value of the reward.
in 2021, they had made a series of experiments which had arrived at similar results, but this time, they examined at the same time, via microelectrodes, the cerebral activity of the monkeys. It shows that the activity of these neurons increased when the monkey might see that a larger reward was possible, and decreased in the case of smaller rewards.
The analysis of this activity made it possible to identify the “signature” of the “planning” of the movements. However, when the reward was the highest, the difference between this planning and the actual movement became blurred. “We conclude that signals from neurons associated with reward and movement planning interact in the motor cortex in a way that explains why we crumble under pressure. »
As to whether there’s a biological reason why the brain acts this way, neurons don’t reveal their secrets. Perhaps it’s dopamine, sometimes dubbed the happy hormone—a molecule that is produced by some of our neurons to send messages to other areas of the brain. An overproduction of this molecule might “unbalance our motor cortex at the key moment”, speculate in the New Scientist one of the co-authors. Certainly, researchers are convinced that the same thing happens to humans when they, too, crumble under the pressure.
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