The secret that explains the Quad Gods Olympic choke

The collapse of young Ilia Malinin — the US figure skater known as the Quad God — on Olympic ice Friday is the moment in this year’s games most watchers will remember. Few of us can imagine performing the feats of these athletes, but we can all relate to blowing a high-stakes moment.It’s part of the human experience. Why does it happen? Three rhesus lab monkeys — named Earl, Nelson and Ford — and the scientists studying them, have the beginning of an answer. And the research offers comfort to Malinin, and all of us, not to be too hard on ourselves. Blowing it, bombing at just the moment you need to be your best, is built into our brains.

All primates do it.Malinin, 21, came into the Olympics a sensation, undefeated over the last 2½ years, and universally expected to win the gold in men’s figure skating.He was a confident badass who did backflips on the ice and mastered quadruple spins no other skater tries.But on Friday, the ice seemed to turn to water, as he fell repeatedly, skipped the quads that he was programmed to do and made a mess of the entire performance. He held his face in his hands in disbelief and anguish as he exited the ice.“The pressure of the Olympics really gets to you,” he said, as he tried to answer the same question from reporters over and over again: What happened?A team of neuroscientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh have discovered that when the prize gets too big — like Olympic gold — the brain becomes overly cautious, slowing down the neuron activity that prepares the body for motor movements the body usually does smoothly and without hesitation.The neuroscientists implanted a tiny, electrode-covered chip into the brain of each monkey, enabling them to watch what happened inside the monkey’s brain as they increased the reward offered for correctly performing a task.Each monkey was tasked with moving a cursor across a computer screen to reach a target. But when the reward got too big, ...