That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Competitiveness

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

What makes the Michael Jordans of the world different from the rest of us? In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind ultra-competitiveness. 

Hi, my name is Olaf Kregolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. I love basketball. I've played basketball all my life. A little bit harder as I get older due to some injury issues, but I started playing at a young age. I played in high school, I played in college, and I even played overseas for a while. And throughout all of it, I just thought Michael Jordan was the greatest thing ever. Like I had posters of him on my wall. I watched him play live. I watched him play on TV. I watched him in college. I watched him in the NBA. I even watched him at the end of his career

when he wasn't doing so well, but he was still Michael Jordan. One of the things about Michael Jordan, and I argue with my son all the time, was he the greatest of all time? It was his competitiveness. That's what I think made him the greatest of all time, at least in my mind, was the fact that he was so incredibly competitive. So on today's podcast, I'm going to talk about the neuroscience of Michael Jordan. But what I'm really going to talk about is the neuroscience of competitiveness. Now, in terms of being great, we've talked about expertise theory before. This is obviously a key part of being Michael Jordan. All right.

The whole 10,000 hours of practice rule. You know, when I talked about that episode and you could review it, the idea isn't just 10,000 hours, but it's 10,000 hours of what we call deliberate practice. It's a type of practice where you're focused, you're engaged, you're working on what you're not good at. And what we do know about Michael Jordan is he put more time in the gym than anyone else. The classic story was the first to arrive, the last to leave, right? And when he did work, he worked as hard as he could. So why was Michael Jordan one of the greatest basketball

players of all time? Well, quite simply, because he put the time in. Now, yes, physiologically, amazing body type, right? You know, his body fat percentage was ridiculous, even when he wasn't training, but he did train, he lifted weights and he did all that stuff. But I'd like to think it's the time in and the people that tend to be great in sport or anything else are the people that put the time in. So when you're talking about the neuroscience of Michael Jordan, you do have to embrace expertise theory in the fact that he put the time in. But like I said, what I want to really talk about is the neuroscience of competitiveness. Why are some people so competitive and why are some people not as competitive? Now, I'm going to ground this in terms of Michael Jordan, but I'm going to walk you through a few research studies. If you think of Michael Jordan,

you can think of the obvious one, which is on the court, he would do anything to win. So I'm going to use that as an operational definition of competitiveness, just that desire to win, that desire to be out in front. But there's other stories about Michael Jordan. For instance, when the Chicago Bulls used to travel, Michael Jordan used to bet his teammates whose luggage would come off first. They'd be standing there like everyone else, probably in a private part of the airport, waiting for their bags to come off. And he would bet and he would go, all right, I bet you my bag's going to come off first. And they'd be throwing out large amount of money. These are NBA players.

But what's interesting is that Michael Jordan, there are stories of him where he'd actually sneak behind the scenes and find the baggage guys and say, listen, here's some money. Just make sure my bag's the first one off. Now that sounds a bit narcissist. It sounds a lot of weird things, but to me, that's a sign of competitiveness. This idea that he would do anything to win. Okay, let's move away from Michael Jordan and try to figure out why was he so competitive and why are other people competitive? Well, there's some really cool research. Now, a lot of it's been done in animal models, but it translates to humans and there's research in humans as well. And these studies have focused on a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex. All right. And we've

talked about the anterior cingulate cortex before, but there's a key structure, the corpus callosum, all right, that connects the two halves of the brain. And the anterior cingulate cortex is sort of wrapped around the top of that towards the front, hence the name anterior. All right, but most people think a cortex is an outer layer. This is actually an inner level of cortex. And it's involved in human reinforcement learning, but it's also involved in decision making. And what researchers have found is that the anterior cingulate cortex, or the ACC, tends to become more active during decision-making, but when decisions involve competitive effort, like there's an actual competition going on,

it's more active yet again. So the ACC is believed to store information about whether of a course of action requires competition or not, the intensity of the competition and whether or not the competition is worth it. And all of these things have been shown through neuroimaging studies. There's more activation, all right, when a course of action demands competition versus when it doesn't. There's more activation in the ACC when you know that the competition is going to be intense. Like think about playing tennis against someone you know that's really good versus someone you know that's not. All right?

And then whether the competition is worth it or not, you know, if people are fighting to achieve a goal, but you don't care about the goal yourself, then the ACC won't be activated. But if that level of competition matters to you, then the ACC will be more activated. Now, one of the specific studies was done with rats, okay? But it does carry over to human models.

And they basically, they had rats foraging for food. So these rats were out looking to eat, all right? And basically, the rats were faced with a choice, okay? They could have a small amount of food and there was no competition for that food or there was competition for a larger amount of food. And basically what the researchers found is what I've told you

is that the anterior cingulate cortex in the rat was more active when they were making the decisions that involved competition. So when they were deciding to decisions that involved competition. So when they were deciding to compete for the larger rewards or not. Okay. What was interesting is that the activity in the ACC actually wasn't tied to the outcome of the competition, just the presence of the competition. And that's one of the things we think the anterior cingulate cortex does. It encodes this idea of competition.

All right. And it's not as tied to the reward itself. There's other parts of the brains that play a role there. And this is tied to the prefrontal cortex. So there you go. What's different with Michael Jordan and other competitive people? It's probably that their anterior cingulate cortex is more active than the people they're going against. And if we go back to Michael Jordan, I think it's more

of a nurture story than a nature story because there's these famous stories about him battling as a child against his older brother, Larry, over and over again in the backyard. So with Michael Jordan, you can imagine there was synaptic plasticity, and the function of the ACC actually changed. It became more active and more attuned to competition. And we know that this is a thing. People that play piano a lot have changes in their finger representations in the brain. So presumably, people that compete a lot have changes in the anterior cingulate cortex that attune them to competition. Now there's a social aspect to this as well with competition and that ties to social

hierarchy. Now we've talked about that in the past before. Again, now this is a study with animals. In this case, it was with mice, but they had mice who basically they were going to compete to for for a liquid reward all right i think it was a sweet juice of some kind and basically what the researchers did is they put all the mice together in one space until a social order sort of emerged the the mice figured out who was so and within any social situation you know we do this when we walk into a room or a meeting we're trying to assess you know who's who and where do we rank in this whole thing well mice and all animals do this right and then what they did they put the mice into a situation and to compete so the two mice were placed in there and there was one reward spot

and basically what they found is the dominant mice, the people that were higher up the social ladder, or the people, the mice that were higher up the social ladder, they were the ones that won the competition. And obviously, because it's mice, it's hard to tell. But the question is, you know, in someone that's less competitive, are they less competitive because of their perceived position within the social hierarchy? And again, if we go back to Michael Jordan, he believed he was the greatest basketball player in the world. If you asked him, no one was better than me. I was the guy. So his position in the social hierarchy of basketball was the very top. And that made him

that competitive. And it also meant people that competed against him at some level, at some level, they knew that. And if they question that, there's these famous stories of Michael Jordan. Like if you thought or said, yeah, I'm better than Michael Jordan, he would come after you. He would deliberately put you in your place in the social hierarchy. He would deliberately put you in your place in the social hierarchy. All right. And what's interesting, again, is with neuroimaging, we can determine this. If you look at the prefrontal cortex and specifically the medial prefrontal cortex,

we can determine where you believe you are in the social hierarchy. And that correlates with the activity in the ACC tied to competition itself. Now, what's different in people that are competitive or how do you become more competitive? Well, basically, you have to increase things, right? You need to work on your planning skills. You got to work on your decision-making skills. You got to work on your error correction skills. You got to learn how to troubleshoot problems. So if you have strong cognitive abilities and you think abstractly,

you tend to be more competitive. Now, of course, if it's more physical in nature, then you need to develop the physical skills. But the key thing here is competitiveness is something that can be learned. Now, I'll end with the nature and nurture. Of course, there's some people that are wired to be a bit more competitive than others. It's individual differences, just like some people are a bit shorter and some people are a bit taller. But the key part is there is a nurture element here. If you want to be more competitive, it is something you can practice and by acting and engaging in competitive situations you will become more competitive that's of course assuming that you've got the skill set to rebound

from the failures that might occur you know you need to be able to bounce back and keep going again which again is another hallmark of competitiveness this ability to get back up and keep going again now that's a bit on the neuroscience of competitiveness, this ability to get back up and keep going again. Now that's a bit on the neuroscience of competitiveness and the neuroscience of Michael Jordan. Don't forget the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com. There's links to Patreon and Etsy. Thanks to those of you that support us. It means a lot. We are getting ready to end the summer season and get ready for September. We want to know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. So email us, thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com or, of course, at thatneuroscienceguy on X and Threads.

And, of course, the podcast itself. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe if you haven't already. My name is Olive Krigolson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon for another full episode of the podcast.