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.

****************************************

Acting out

When I was (much) younger, I acted in a couple of low-key theater productions.  I won't say it was a bad experience, and I think I played my roles reasonably well, but to say I suffer from stage fright is an understatement of considerable proportions.  Frankly, it's a wonder I didn't hyperventilate and pass out as soon as I walked out on the stage.

Part of my problem is that I was never able to get past a feeling of "this is me out there on stage" -- to let go and become the character.  I've talked to some amateur (but dedicated) actors since that time, and one and all they say that once they get out under the lights, the fear evaporates, and they are able to be their character --who is, after all, not the guy whose knees are knocking together because he's terrified of being in front of an audience.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Comedy and tragedy masks without background, CC BY-SA 3.0]

This perception of good actors sinking themselves into their characters is apparently exactly what happens, to judge by a recent paper in Royal Society Open Science by Steven Brown, Peter Cockett, and Ye Yuan of McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), called, "The Neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: An fMRI Study of Acting."

In this study, actors were directed to portray scenes from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and then were hooked up to an fMRI scanner and then asked questions about how they would act in a variety of specific situations if they were the character.  And what they found was pretty intriguing:

[This is] a first attempt at examining the neural basis of dramatic acting.  While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person (1P) perspective.  Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours.  Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be.  In other words, they have to assume a ‘fictional first-person' (Fic1P) perspective.  In this functional MRI study, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing.  In the scanner, university-trained actors responded to a series of hypothetical questions from either their own 1P perspective or from that of Romeo (male participants) or Juliet (female participants) from Shakespeare's drama.  Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced global reductions in brain activity and, particularly, deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe, including the dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices.  Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a "loss of self."

Which is fascinating.  It also makes me wonder what would happen if the same experiment were performed on individuals who weren't trained actors, and especially on people (like myself) for whom acting is a seriously trying experience.  Is the problem that we can't deactivate our dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices enough to get absorbed into the part -- so we can't "let go" enough to stop being ourselves?

Steven Brown, co-author of the study, thinks that's exactly what's happening.  "It looks like when you are acting, you are suppressing yourself; almost like the character is possessing you," Brown said, in an interview in The Guardian.  "The deactivation associated with a reduction, a suppression, of knowledge of your own traits I think conforms with what acting may involve...  Actors have to split their consciousness, they sort of have to monitor themselves and be in the character at the same time."

So it's not simply a loss of self; it's a selective switch-off of the parts of your self that motivate your actions and feelings.  There's always the supervisor there, making sure things don't go too off-kilter, but apparently it's difficult to act convincingly if you don't on some level stop being yourself.

This also brings to mind cases of actors who did seem to lose themselves entirely.  Andy Kaufman comes to mind, best known for his role as the hapless Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi.  The boundaries between Kaufman the actor, Kaufman the comedian, and Kaufman the created fictional character seemed blurry right from the outset.  He was famous for strange stunts like challenging audience members in his stand-up comedy routine to wrestle him, reading out loud for two hours from The Great Gatsby instead of performing his shtick, and (once) inviting the entire audience out for milk and cookies after the show -- which enough people took him up on that it required 24 buses.

While no one ever did an fMRI on Kaufman -- when he died in 1984, the fMRI had yet to be invented -- I really wonder what was happening in his prefrontal cortex.  You have to wonder if those regions involved with the sense of self turned off while he was acting, and stayed off.

In any case, the whole thing is interesting, both from the standpoint of human behavior and that of neuroscience.  And once again it makes me realize how fluid our perceptions are -- and that our sense of self is, truly, a creation of our brain's biochemistry.

**************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an entertaining one -- Bad Astronomy by astronomer and blogger Phil Plait.  Covering everything from Moon landing "hoax" claims to astrology, Plait takes a look at how credulity and wishful thinking have given rise to loony ideas about the universe we live in, and how those ideas simply refuse to die.

Along the way, Plait makes sure to teach some good astronomy, explaining why you can't hear sounds in space, why stars twinkle but planets don't, and how we've used indirect evidence to create a persuasive explanation for how the universe began.  His lucid style is both informative and entertaining, and although you'll sometimes laugh at how goofy the human race can be, you'll come away impressed by how much we've figured out.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]