Brain regions: PFC, motor cortex, amygdala

1:15:02theory. Then there's um the explicit monitoring theory which is actually the opposite which says that okay athletes actually consciously control some automated practice skill and if you overthink that's when it hurts you. Okay. [clears throat] If you if you start consciously thinking about what you're trying to do that's actually what's bad. And then there's another one this which is this over arousal or over over motivation theory and that's the idea that there's actually an optimal amount of arousal when it comes to doing difficult and easy tasks. And if you want to do difficult tasks you should be aroused less than if you're doing easy tasks which is

1:15:43kind of incredible to think about. When you're doing an easy task you want to be more in it. But when you're doing a really hard task, it's it's kind of better to to to be a little bit out of it. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's kind of probably what people describe as that flow state. >> Exactly. It's the flow state versus the intense attentional control that you're putting on something. Right. Right. >> And so in the context of these theories, I wanted to talk about the brain regions. The main brain regions we're going to talk about is the prefrontal cortex, the motor cortex, and the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex is this sort of advanced mamalian part of our cortex right up here. This is something

1:16:24that is very big in humans. It's also there in primates. It's not so much there in lower order mammals. Okay, this is where um you have executive control, working memory. You delegate micro mechanics to the other subcortical structures. So this is kind of like our control center in some sense. I mean I remember there was this guy um he he's still there um professor Bujaki at NYU. He hates when people say this. He used to call it the prefrontal cortex the trash can of the brain because whenever someone I was like oh this this is probably the prefrontal cortex. But the reason is because it's such a highly evolved part of our brain that it seems that a lot of these higher functions are happening here. Right? If that makes

1:17:05sense. Yep. So there was an experiment that was done um about the prefrontal cortex and how the prefrontal cortex functionally disconnects with the other c with the other cortices during high stress. It was a pretty in pretty incredible paper um called out of control diminished prefrontal activity coincides with impaired motor performance. >> Here's what it was doing. Okay, they use fMRI data and they have this bimmanual visual motor tasks where um people like human beings are playing snake. >> Okay. And every once in a while whenever they get the snake game right, they get like 10 bucks. Every once in a while

1:17:46they'll get a jackpot of like 50 bucks. >> Mhm. >> And they want to they want to see how the how the participants do. >> They actually performed less >> on the jackpot tasks. It's the same