Decoding the Phenomenon: Why Pressure Leads to Breakdowns

When faced with high-risk, high-reward situations, many individuals exhibit erratic behavior at critical moments, and this phenomenon is not exclusive to humans. Through experiments on monkeys, scientists have discovered that the "breakdown" under stress is linked to a decrease in neural activity responsible for motor preparation in the brain.

A research team from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States delved into the brain's performance under stressful conditions and published their findings in the latest issue of the journal Neuron.

The breakdown under stress is not limited to humans. Just as a tennis player might make a crucial mistake at match point, monkeys also falter in high-reward scenarios.

The research group devised a task where rhesus monkeys were rewarded for swiftly and accurately moving a cursor to a target. Each trial indicated to the monkeys whether they were about to receive a small, medium, large, or extremely rare "jackpot" reward. Due to the rarity and high value of the jackpot reward, this created a high-risk, high-reward situation.

Researchers implanted a tiny chip covered with electrodes in the monkeys' motor cortex to observe neural activity under different reward conditions. The motor cortex is responsible for preparing and controlling movements.

The results revealed that when faced with the jackpot reward, neural activity responsible for motor preparation decreased. Motor preparation is the brain's process of calculating how to execute actions, akin to aiming before releasing an arrow. When motor preparation is insufficient, the monkeys' performance also deteriorates.

Further analysis by the researchers of the relationship between reward motivation, neural activity, and monkey performance showed that as the reward increased, neural activity initially peaked. However, for larger rewards, the preparation began to decline, indicating that the brain could not sustain optimal performance levels.