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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, shortwavers. Camila Dominosky here, filling in for Emily and Regina.

The 26 Winter Olympics are underway in Milan and Cortina, and I don't know about you, but I know I'm holding my breath, watching them fly down mountains on skis,

or slip and fall on the ice.

So I can only imagine how the athletes must feel competing with the whole world watching.

And yet, I feel like no matter what we do, whether we're attempting quadruple axles on the ice or just showing up to work, we all experience pressure, right?

Doing an interview on the radio could feel as stressful as that person trying to get the gold medal for their figure skating competition or whatever event they're in.

It's subjective, right?

So for me, it could be the same thing as an Olympian in their gold medal event.

Vikram gets me. Vickram Chib is a biomedical engineer, neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins.

His lab studies performance and how the brain responds to rewards.

And he says reward is baked into basically everything humans do.

And that could be getting a gold medal, right?

Or it could be, you know, reaching for a cup of water. The stakes just vary a lot.

So today on the show, what happens in athletes' brains when those stakes are at their highest?

And what science tells us about how our brains respond to rewards, pressure, and millions of people watching you strive for gold?

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

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