Grace under pressure

In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was an eighteen-year-old French figure skater named Laëtitia Hubert.  She was a wonderful skater, even by the stratospheric standards of the Olympics; she'd earned a silver medal at the French National Championships that year.  But 1992 was a year of hyperfocus, especially on the women's figure skating -- when there were such famous (and/or infamous) names as Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, and Surya Bonaly competing.

What I remember best, though, is what happened to Laëtitia Hubert.  She went into the Short Program as a virtual unknown to just about everyone watching -- and skated a near-perfect program, rocketing her up to fifth place overall.  From her reaction afterward it seemed like she was more shocked at her fantastic performance than anyone.  It was one of those situations we've all had, where the stars align and everything goes way more brilliantly than expected -- only this was with the world watching, at one of the most publicized events of an already emotionally-fraught Winter Olympics.

This, of course, catapulted Hubert into competition with the Big Names.  She went into the Long Program up against skaters of world-wide fame.  And there, unlike the pure joy she showed during the Short Program, you could see the anxiety in her face even before she stated.

She completely fell apart.  She had four disastrous falls, and various other stumbles and missteps.  It is the one and only time I've ever seen the camera cut away from an athlete mid-performance -- as if even the media couldn't bear to watch.  She dropped to, and ended at, fifteenth place overall.

It was simply awful to watch.  I've always hated seeing people fail at something; witnessing embarrassing situations is almost physically painful to me.  I don't really follow the Olympics (or sports in general), but over thirty years later, I still remember that night.  (To be fair to Hubert -- and to end the story on a happy note -- she went on to have a successful career as a competitive skater, earning medals at several national and international events, and in fact in 1997 achieved a gold medal at the Trophée Lalique competition, bumping Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski into second place.)

I always think of Laëtitia Hubert whenever I think of the phenomenon of "choking under pressure."  It's a response that has been studied extensively by psychologists.  In fact, way back in 1908 a pair of psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, noted the peculiar relationship between pressure and performance in what is now called the Yerkes-Dodson curve; performance improves with increasing pressure (what Yerkes and Dodson called "mental and physiological arousal"), but only up to a point.  Too much pressure, and performance tanks.  There have been a number of reasons suggested for this effect, one of which is that it's related to the level of a group of chemicals in the blood called glucocorticoids.  The level of glucocorticoids in a person's blood has been shown to be positively correlated with long-term memory formation -- but just as with Yerkes-Dodson, only up to a point.  When the levels get too high, memory formation and retention crumbles.  And glucocorticoid production has been found to rise in situations that have four characteristics -- those that are novel, unpredictable, contain social or emotional risks, and/or are largely outside of our capacity to control outcomes.

Which sounds like a pretty good description of the Olympics to me.

What's still mysterious about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and the phenomenon of choking under pressure in general, is how it evolved.  How can a sudden drop in performance when the stress increases be selected for?  Seems like the more stressful and risky the situation, the better you should do.  You'd think the individuals who did choke when things got dangerous would be weeded out by (for example) hungry lions.

But what is curious -- and what brings the topic up today -- is that a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that humans aren't the only ones who choke under pressure.

So do monkeys.

In a clever set of experiments led by Adam Smoulder of Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that giving monkeys a scaled set of rewards for completing tasks showed a positive correlation between reward level and performance, until they got to the point where success at a difficult task resulted in a huge payoff.  And just like with humans, at that point, the monkeys' performance fell apart.

The authors describe the experiments as follows:

Monkeys initiated trials by placing their hand so that a cursor (red circle) fell within the start target (pale blue circle).  The reach target then appeared (gray circle with orange shape) at one of two (Monkeys N and F) or eight (Monkey E) potential locations (dashed circles), where the inscribed shape’s form (Monkey N) or color (Monkeys F and E) indicated the potential reward available for a successful reach.  After a short, variable delay period, the start target vanished, cueing the animal to reach the peripheral target.  The animals had to quickly move the cursor into the reach target and hold for 400 ms before receiving the cued reward.

And when the color (or shape) cueing the level of the reward got to the highest level -- something that only occurred in five percent of the trials, so not only was the jackpot valuable, it was rare -- the monkeys' ability to succeed dropped through the floor.  What is most curious about this is that the effect didn't go away with practice; even the monkeys who had spent a lot of time mastering the skill still did poorly when the stakes were highest.

So the choking-under-pressure phenomenon isn't limited to humans, indicating it has a long evolutionary history.  This also suggests that it's not due to overthinking, something that I've heard as an explanation -- that our tendency to intellectualize gets in the way.  That always seemed to make some sense to me, given my experience with musical performance and stage fright.  My capacity for screwing up on stage always seemed to be (1) unrelated to how much I'd practiced a piece of music once I'd passed a certain level of familiarity with it, and (2) directly connected to my own awareness of how nervous I was.  I did eventually get over the worst of my stage fright, mostly from just doing it again and again without spontaneously bursting into flame.  But I definitely still have moments when I think, "Oh, no, we're gonna play 'Reel St. Antoine' next and it's really hard and I'm gonna fuck it up AAAAUUUGGGH," and sure enough, that's when I would fuck it up.  Those moments when I somehow prevented my brain from going into overthink-mode, and just enjoyed the music, were far more likely to go well, regardless of the difficulty of the piece.

 

One of my more nerve-wracking performances -- a duet with the amazing fiddler Deb Rifkin on a dizzyingly fast medley of Balkan dance tunes, in front of an audience of other musicians, including some big names (like the incomparable Bruce Molsky).  I have to add that (1) I didn't choke, and (2) Bruce, who may be famous but is also an awfully nice guy, came up afterward and told us how great we sounded.  I still haven't quite recovered from the high of that moment.

As an aside, a suggestion by a friend -- to take a shot of scotch before performing -- did not work.  Alcohol doesn't make me less nervous, it just makes me sloppier.  I have heard about professional musicians taking beta blockers before performing, but that's always seemed to me to be a little dicey, given that the mechanism by which beta blockers decrease anxiety is unknown, as is their long-term effects.  Also, I've heard more than one musician describe the playing of a performer on beta blockers as "soulless," as if the reduction in stress also takes away some of the intensity of emotional content we try to express in our playing.

Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that a monkey's choking under pressure is due to the same kind of overthinking we tend to do.  They're smart animals, no question about it, but I've never thought of them as having the capacity for intellectualizing a situation we have (for better or worse).  So unless I'm wrong about that, and there's more self-reflection going on inside the monkey brain than I realize, there's something else going on here.

So that's our bit of curious psychological research of the day.  Monkeys also choke under pressure.  Now, it'd be nice to find a way to manage it that doesn't involve taking a mood-altering medication.  For me, it took years of exposure therapy to manage my stage fright, and I still have bouts of it sometimes even so.  It may be an evolutionarily-derived response that has a long history, and presumably some sort of beneficial function, but it certainly can be unpleasant at times.

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Acoustic illusions

Some years ago I was in a musical trio called Alizé that specialized in traditional French folk music.  One weekend we played a gig at a local music festival, and we were approached by a very nice fellow named Will Russell who told us how much he'd enjoyed our playing -- and said he thought we should record an album.

Will is no amateur music enthusiast.  He runs Electric Wilburland, a recording studio in Newfield, New York, not far from where I live.  Will is a Grammy-winning sound engineer, and as we soon found out, is truly gifted at making musicians sound their absolute best.  He also has some nifty tricks up his sleeve, which we discovered when we were working on the audiofile for a four-tune medley we'd just recorded.

"What's your concept for this one?" Will asked.

We explained to him that the first tune is solemn, almost religious-sounding, and it gradually ramps up until reaching a peak in the last tune, a lightning-fast dance tune called "Gavotte des Montagnes."

"So we start out in church," our guitarist explained, "then there's the recessional... then there's the party."

Will frowned thoughtfully.  "Okay, for the first bit, in church.  Do you know what church you want it to be in?"

I thought he was joking.

"No, really," he explained.  "I have acoustic sampling from a bunch of different cathedrals.  Do you want to sound like you're in St. Paul's?  Or York Minster?  Or Chartres Cathedral?  Or...?"

"No way," I said.

He proceeded to play our track to us, applying the acoustics of various different cathedrals.  We ended up picking Chartres, not only because it sounded awesome, but because it seemed appropriate for a French song.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Marianne Casamance, Chartres - Cathédrale 16, CC BY-SA 3.0]

With all due modesty -- and with many thanks both to Will and to my bandmates -- the album (titled Le Canard Perdu) came out sounding pretty cool, and if you're so inclined, it's available on iTunes.

The topic comes up because of a paper this week in Science Advances by a team led by Theodor Becker of ETH Zürich, which has looked at the question of how we know what kind of space we're in acoustically, and then seeing if there's a way to mimic that by altering the qualities of the sound -- characteristics like reverb, interference patterns between whatever's producing the sound and the various echoes from surfaces, and so on.  The ultimate goal is to achieve whatever kind of acoustic illusion you want, from being in a particular cathedral to being underwater to having the echoes (or even the original sounds) cloaked entirely.

I don't pretend to understand the technical bits; but the results are mind-boggling.  The authors write:

[W]e demonstrate in 2D acoustic experiments that a physical scattering object can be replaced with a virtual homogeneous background medium in real time, thereby hiding the object from broadband acoustic waves (cloaking).  In a second set of experiments, we replace part of a physical homogeneous medium by a virtual scattering object, thereby creating an acoustic illusion of an object that is not physically present (holography).  Because of the broadband nature of the control loop and in contrast to other cloaking approaches, this requires neither a priori knowledge of the primary energy source nor of the scattered wavefields, and the approach holds even for primary sources, whose locations change over time.

The military applications of this technology are apparent; cloaking the sound of a surveillance device (or other piece of equipment), or creating the illusion that it's something (or somewhere) else, are of obvious utility in military settings.  As a musician, I'm more interested in the creative aspects.  The ability to create what amount to acoustic illusions is a significant step up from Will's already-impressive magic trick of teleporting us to Chartres Cathedral.

The purists in the studio audience are probably bouncing up and down in their chairs with indignation at the idea of further mechanizing the process of making (and recording) music.  I've heard plenty of musicians decrying the use of features like auto-tune -- the usual objection being that it allows second-rate singers to tune up electronically and sound way better than they actually are.

No doubt it's sometimes used that way, but I'll throw out there that like any technology for enhancing the creative process, it can be used as a cheat or it can be used to further expand the artistry and impact of the performance.  One example that immediately comes to mind is the wild, twisty use of auto-tune in Imagine Dragons' brilliantly surreal song "Thunder:"

But for innovative use of technology in music, there's no one better than the amazing British singer Imogen Heap.  Check out her use of looping for this mind-boggling --and live -- performance of her song "Just for Now:"

I've been a musician for forty years and have been up on stage more times than I can even begin to estimate, and I can't imagine having the kind of coordination to pull off something like that in front of a live audience.

So I find the Becker et al. paper exciting from a number of standpoints.  When you think about it, musicians have been experimenting with new technology all along, and not just with electronic tinkering.  Every time a new musical instrument is invented -- regardless if it's a viola da gamba or a theremin -- it expands what kind of auditory experience the listener can have.  When electronic music first gained momentum in the 1960s with pioneers like Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita, it elicited a lot of tut-tutting from the classical music purists of the day -- but now just about everyone recognizes them for their innovative genius.  Masterpieces like Carlos's Switched-On Bach and The Well-Tempered Synthesizer and Tomita's Firebird and The Snowflakes are Dancing have rightly taken their place amongst the truly great recordings of non-standard performances of classical music.

I'll be interested to see where all this leads.  I'll end with a quote from Nobel-Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi.  He was speaking about science, but it could apply equally well to any creative endeavor.  "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what nobody else has thought."

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London in the nineteenth century was a seriously disgusting place to live, especially for the lower classes.  Sewage was dumped into gutters along the street; it then ran down into the ground -- the same ground from which residents pumped their drinking water.  The smell can only be imagined, but the prevalence of infectious water-borne diseases is a matter of record.

In 1854 there was a horrible epidemic of cholera hit central London, ultimately killing over six hundred people.  Because the most obvious unsanitary thing about the place was the smell, the leading thinkers of the time thought that cholera came from bad air -- the "miasmal model" of contagion.  But a doctor named John Snow thought it was water-borne, and through his tireless work, he was able to trace the entire epidemic to one hand-pumped well.  Finally, after weeks and months of argument, the city planners agreed to remove the handle of the well, and the epidemic ended only a few days afterward.

The work of John Snow led to a complete change in attitude toward sanitation, sewers, and safe drinking water, and in only a few years completely changed the face of the city of London.  Snow, and the epidemic he halted, are the subject of the fantastic book The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Cities, Science, and the Modern World, by science historian Steven Johnson.  The detective work Snow undertook, and his tireless efforts to save the London poor from a horrible disease, make for fascinating reading, and shine a vivid light on what cities were like back when life for all but the wealthy was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (to swipe Edmund Burke's trenchant turn of phrase).

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