The Neuroscience of Olympic Performance and Pressure

The 2026 Winter Olympics are unfolding in Milan and Cortina and we can't look away: We're watching athletes fly down mountains on skis and glide — sometimes slipping and falling — on the ice.

Vikram Chib is a biomedical engineer and neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University.

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

And he says rewards aren't just for Olympians.

Reward is baked into basically everything humans do.

"That could be getting a gold medal, right?" he says.

"Or it could be, you know, reaching for a cup of water."

Those rewards — and the pressure that comes with them — can improve performance.

"You see a lot of Olympic and world records broken in the Olympics," Chib says.

"And so one way to think about that — I mean, this is just speculative — could be that…. added reward pushes them beyond their limit."

But even Olympians are human.

And that pressure can come at a cost to the brain.

Sometimes, we choke under the pressure.