Good morning. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here. And today I’m going to tell you a little bit about how our minds work. the goal is to use this knowledge to become more effective performers in whatever we do, whether it’s at work, at home or even on the back nine.

But I’m not just interested in why we perform well. I’m also actually interested in what happens in our brains and bodies when we fail to perform up to our potential. I talk about this as “choking under pressure.”

I’m not just talking about normal ups and downs. We all have those. But what my research as a cognitive scientist has been focused on are those moments where we do prepare, where we think we’re ready and we get into a situation that we find stressful and we just can’t show what we know.

What happens there? And, by peaking inside the brain, by better understanding chemicals flowing through the body, how we can use that knowledge to ensure that we, ourselves, perform at our best and that we can help our teammates, those at work, our kids and everyone else? Essentially, how can we hit it out of the park when it matters most?

So why do we choke? A lot of it comes down to the front part of the brain. This is called our frontal cortex. This front part of our brain sits over our eyes and it helps us do all the special things we can do as humans. It helps us hit a tiny little ball into a tiny little hole. It helps us plan for the future. It helps us juggle numbers in our head.

What my research team has found is that, in high-stress situations, this frontal cortex goes awry. It stops working in the way it should, but it stops working in some very predictable ways. And knowing this, we can start figuring out how to ensure that we perform at our best.

One thing that might be a little surprising that tends to happen in these stressful situations when we’re worried about performing well is we actually focus too much on the details of what we’re doing. You often hear coaches from the sideline yelling, “Concentrate,” or you want to get every word right as it comes out of your mouth. But actually, that attention to detail can actually be paralyzing. I talk about it as “paralysis by analysis.” It turns out, in the moment, you just want to let yourself go. Some of the most epic chokes, especially in sports history, we can trace back to this over-attention to what people are doing.

It’s like if you were shuffling down the stairs and I asked you to stop and think about what you were doing with your knee as you’re running down the stairs. There’s a good chance you’d fall on your face. It’s something that operates outside of conscious awareness. And, in pressure-filled situations, we want to perform at our best, so we start trying to control aspects of what we’re doing that should be left on autopilot.

A great example of this comes from golf, which I imagine some of you might be interested in playing here. This is one of my favorite chokes in sports history. This is Jean van de Velde. His name is now French for “choke.” He was going to be the first Frenchman to win the 1999 British Open and, on the 18th hole. he fell apart. He arrived at that hole three shots ahead. His drive ended up in the woods. The second shot hit the grandstand. The third shot ended up in the water. And this is the picture that was on every sports page the next day. He ended up taking his socks and shoes off and wading into the water and deciding whether he was going to hit the ball out of the water. He decided not to. Took the penalty, ended up in a tiebreaker round and lost. It was really an epic choke, especially given how well he’d been playing. The pressure was on and he just couldn’t pull it out.

But, if you go back and watch the tapes, what’s so interesting is how his performance changes. He sat over the ball in a way he hadn’t before. He seemed to be paying attention to every aspect of what he was doing. He was taking a lot longer in terms of how he was playing than he’d played on the previous 17 holes. This goes precisely back into what my research has shown is that in that high-stress moment after you’ve practiced, there’s something to the Nike motto, “just do it.” There’s a time and a place to focus on what you’re learning and, when you get out there, you just have to let go and do what you know.

We’ve shown that this is really helpful in our laboratory, with athletes, with people getting ready to give a pitch to a client. Paying attention to the outcome, where you want something to go rather than the specific steps you’re going to use to get there, can help. In golf, even a swing thought, something that takes your mind off of the step-by-step details of what you’re doing, can be important. And when you’re getting ready to raise your hand rather than thinking about every word coming out of your mouth, think about the one key point you want to get across. What this does is focus your frontal cortex and prevent it from going in to the details.

Of course, if you are playing golf and you’re on the back nine with your buddy and he or she is beating you, there’s a great way to get them to choke. You just say, “That was a really great shot. What were you doing with your elbow?”

That one’s for free.

So, this prefrontal cortex is almost hyper-energized and it causes us to focus too much on the details of what we’re doing. Another consequence of that over-attention is that we often have blinders on and we can’t think outside the box. We can’t understand the big picture, especially when we’re under the gun with time pressure or when there’s a high-stakes decision to be made. When that prefrontal cortex goes awry, we’re often not able to think in creative ways.

There’s a great example of a study looking at this. University of Cornell researchers took students who were studying for their med school exams, their boards, and invited them to the laboratory to have their brains scanned while they did some problems that really looked at their creativity. These med students were under so much pressure. They were getting ready to take their medical boards, which is just an intense time in their lives. They compared the medical students who were matched for everything. They were same in terms of their year. They’d slept the same amount. The only thing that was different was whether they were carrying the stress around of this upcoming test.

What they did is they had them do creativity problems and they actually looked at what was going on in the brain. Wat they showed is that, when the med students were under the gun, when they were getting ready for this big pressure situation, they couldn’t think in the most creative ways. That frontal cortex was not communicating as well with the rest of the brain, it was focusing on the details and they couldn’t see the big picture.

Here are examples of the kind of tasks that these students got. They were asked to solve problems. These are called matchstick problems. There are two different problems here. I’m going to have you be my guinea pigs. The goal is to move one stick on this top problem to make the equation true. You can only move one stick. What do you do? You can just shout out an answer. Yes. You move the first I to the right of the V. What about the second one? You can only move one stick to make the equation true. I’m seeing people say you take the sticks and make a V, but that’s actually moving two. It’s harder. The way to solve this problem is actually to take the plus sign, the vertical line of the plus sign and make it into an equal sign. Many of you maybe didn’t see that because you see the plus sign as one thing. But, if you can step back, if you can see the problem in a new and unusual way, you can get the answer.

What these researchers found was that the medical students under the gun were not able to see this creative solution. Now, nicely, once they had taken their exams, their brains were good as new.

What this suggests is that when we’re in a stressful situation, maybe it’s something at home or something at work, our ability to think creatively, to think outside the box, can be hampered. That frontal cortex is just not functioning at an optimal level. It’s not connecting with other areas of the brain that allow us to see different ways to solve problems. And that can be detrimental.

So, what do you do?

Researchers have shown that there are specific things you could do to get those connections back. One of that is really just to walk away. When we walk away for a moment and come back to a problem, we often see it in new and unusual ways. It’s like when your computer freezes and you have to do a hard reboot. You get rid of all the dead ends. Walking away and coming back allows you to face a problem in a different way. It doesn’t have to be forever. It can be five minutes. Anything where you turn your attention off instead of coming and banging your head against the wall, especially when you’re under the gun, can be really effective for making sure you’re seeing all the angles of a problem. This is the reason why when you have a fight with your spouse, you come up with the really good answer five minutes later. It’s the walking away and coming back. We often don’t want to do this, especially when we’re under the gun at work, but it can be really beneficial. Taking a break. Just walking around the office. Going to another task. It essentially allows us to think about the problem in an unconscious way and we’re better able to solve it.

Something else that’s really important is sleep. It turns out that there’s fantastic neuroscience work showing that when we sleep we not only are energized, but our brain is working at an unconscious level. We actually create connections and new ideas that we didn’t have otherwise. It’s oftentimes why, when you sleep and then you wake up, you think about a problem differently or you have the answer. Your brain is actually working while you’re sleeping, creating and making desperate connections that weren’t previously there. You can see how this is so important when we’re in stressful situations, when the pressure is on, when we’re trying to meet a deadline. These things go out the window. We focus, we concentrate, we bang our head against the wall to get something done. We often ignore our need to sleep or take a step away, and these are the very things that will allow us to come up with the best solution. So just keep that in mind.

When we’re under pressure situations, that frontal cortex goes awry, we often focus too much on the details. Something else that happens is that we have problems communicating with others. That frontal cortex also helps us understand what other people know about what we said. And we know what we said because we said it. But oftentimes what we’ve shown, especially organizations working to meet a deadline, the communication between two individuals or between two teams goes down in these pressure-filled situations.

One reason is because we actually don’t tell people what we’re talking about. We just tell them the information coming out of our heads rather than how we want it to get there. I’m going to give you an example of this.

Can you read this? Go ahead and read through this. No comment. So how many of you are confused? Yes, it’s a lot of information and we are limited capacity beings. We can only pay attention to so much information at once. How many of you have gotten an email from a colleague or a client and you read through and they’re long and you get to the end and you think, “What was this about,” or, “What do they want me to do?” This is an example of poor communication. What would happen, however, if I told you before I gave you this passage, that it was about washing clothes? Can you put the passage back up? Now it makes sense. Right? What I’ve done is I’ve given you a file in your head to put all this information in. That’s all I’ve done. And what we know is that when you tell people ahead of time what the take home message is, where you want something to go, they’re better able to understand everything you’re saying.

We often write these long emails and then at the end maybe tell them. Or we don’t tell them at all. And, in pressure situations, we forget because we know what we want to happen. We’re not focused on what other people know. What our research shows is that simple, just saying in the first few lines of an email, “Here’s exactly what I need to have happen.” Or, ‘Here’s exactly what I’m thinking,” and then give all the information. You give that file drawer to encode everything in.

Of course, an even better way to do this is to actually get on the phone. Then you can better understand what people understand from what you’re getting and not. You don’t have to do it in a rude way. You can say, “OK. There’s a lot going on. We have this deadline to make. Here’s what I’m trying to say. Can you let me know what you think I want you to do?” Something that will allow you to step back and understand whether you’re all going in the same direction. These little things have big effects.

In addition to this frontal cortex going awry and affecting our ability to perform and to focus on what we need, something else that tends to happen in these pressure situations is that we worry. We worry about the consequences. We worry about what others will think of us. We ruminate. And what my research team and I have shown is that these ruminations have a biological basis in the brain. You can actually see them rear up when we’re getting ready for this high-stress situation. They further serve to shut down this frontal cortex from performing at its best.

Often, it’s hard to create the kinds of worries that you would in a real-world situation in a laboratory, but we found one way to do this pretty easily. It’s a different talk for a different time, but unfortunately in our society, there are a lot of people who really are freaked out about doing math. You don’t hear people walking around, intelligent people walking around bragging that they’re not reading people. But you hear a lot of intelligent people walking around bragging that they’re not math people. Which is not great and I could talk about that forever. But for us what it does is allow us to look inside the brains of people before they take math tests, before they choke and see what’s going on. And we’ve done that because it tells us something really interesting about how these worries pop up, what they look like in the head and how we can start to tamp them down.

We use a technology in my laboratory called magnetic resonance imaging. You might have had an MRI on a knee or an elbow or maybe even your head. But that’s really what we’re looking at. We invite people to our lab. We are looking for people, some who are really fearful of math and some who are not. We ask them to come have their brain scanned. We don’t tell them it’s about math ahead of time, because then they wouldn’t come. Once they get there, we say, “Surprise. You’re going to be going in this big hollow tube and we’re going to show you some math problems and look at what’s happening in your head.

This is an MRI machine. It’s just a big magnet. That’s all it is. It’s about 50,000 to 100,000 times stronger than the earth’s magnetic field. This big magnet allows us to see inside our bodies. We can see the structure of the body or the brain because different tissue has different magnetic properties. With a slight tweak in this technology called functional MRI, we can actually see brain activity in real time. This is because brain cells are neurons. When they’re active, they need nutrients. They need water. They need glucose. They need things to fire and do their job. When the blood is carrying these nutrients to the brain cells, it actually has different magnetic properties than when it’s not. And the MRI can pick up on it.

What we’re able to do is peek inside the head, without actually opening the head, and see which areas in the brain are working the hardest in real time. This allows us essentially to peek inside people’s minds, so to speak, to understand how the brain is working at when they’re getting ready for something that they’re fearful of, like doing math.

We invited people into our lab, some were really anxious about math, some weren’t. We had them lie on the scanner and we had a computer screen in front of them so they knew something was coming and they had a button box they could press a button to answer. We said, “OK. You’re going to be doing math problems, like this here.”

They might have to answer, “Is this equation true?” “What’s the answer?” No. You practiced. You were there. Or they were doing word problems.

What we’re interested in is what was happening in the brain while they were getting ready to do these problems. We actually didn’t even care what was happening when they doing the math. We wanted to know if we could see evidence of this freaking out, the what-ifs, the worries and rumination when we just say, “Hey, you’re about to do a math problem.” If we could see that then, what that suggests is that neuro alarm signals might be going off when people are getting ready for a really stressful situation. And, if that’s true, maybe we can develop techniques and tips to help tamp down those neuro alarm signals, help calm down the worry and rumination so that when you’re in these pressure-filled situations, you’re ready to go. So that’s exactly what we looked at.

What I’m going to show you now are actually pictures of people’s brains who are really worried about math right before they actually got math. And we just told them it was coming. This is compared to people who weren’t worried about doing word problems. What you’re going to see are some activations, some hot areas in the brains of these individuals that are really quite interesting. What I’m going to show you are these brain slices and you’re going to see little dots of red and these are the areas that are most activated when people who are worried about math are just told they’re going to do a math problem. And these areas are really interesting, because they actually serve our neuro pain matrix.

When we tell people who are worried about doing something that they’re going to do it, it looks like they just stubbed their toe or pricked their finger with their needle. These neuro alarm signals are going off that are actually the same ones that would go off when they’re physically in danger. So, when people sometimes say, ‘Math is painful,” their brain actually thinks it is. And what’s so amazing about this is that these neuro alarm signals go off and then they shut down the frontal cortex’s ability to focus and do what it needs to do.

So here are two slices of brain. And if this is my brain, the top one you’re just taking my left hemisphere off and looking in at an area called the cingulate cortex, that little yellow and orange splotch. And if this is my brain on the bottom, you’re standing behind me. You’ve sliced off the top of my head and you’re peering over and you’re looking bilaterally on both sides of the brain in an area called the insula and the amygdala. What we show is that when people are really worried about something, these areas light up. This is our neuro pain matrix, our neuro alarm system. It shuts down that frontal cortex that allows us to do our best. We start focusing too much on the details, we can’t see in creative ways and our performance suffers.

So, knowing all this, what can we do about it? What are some tips to help us perform at our best, to help our organizations perform at their best in high-stress situations?

One has to do with the people that we put around us. It’s not just about building a team where everyone knows as much as you do or where everyone thinks like you do. One of the outcomes that we’ve found, one of the take homes that we found, is that building a team where you have complementary people at the table, people with different sets of knowledge, sometimes people who don’t actually know the answer to a problem can be really helpful. We talk about this as collective intelligence. And there’s been a lot of research done in organizations about how you can build the best team, especially teams that will help you perform your best and will perform their best in stressful situations. The research shows that it’s not just having a team of the smartest people or having a team of people who know the most. It’s having a team of knowledge and diversity that complements each other.

One reason is, when you are both on a team and maybe don’t know the right answer, talking to each other, exploring the different possibilities, can be a great way to come up with solutions.

There’s a great study showing that at a small level with college students where they were students at the University of Colorado were in a big biology class and they had clickers. Do you know what these are? The professor can put a question on the screen and the students can click in and answer. The professor put up test problems. The students clicked in the answer. And then they did an experiment. They had some students sit and think about the answer and then they could click in the answer again, maybe if they thought they hadn’t gotten it right. And they had other students randomly assigned to work together to come up with the answer. And what they showed is that when students worked with someone else, they were better able to come up with the answer the second time then when they sat and thought on their own.

Well, you might think well, maybe a student who didn’t know the answer worked with a student who did. But what the researchers showed is that when actually two people got together who didn’t know the answer, both of them, they were more likely to come up with the correct answer because they just open the search space. If you think about what happens when we’re focused, when we’re under pressure, when that frontal cortex has its blinders on, talking to someone, even if both you and that other person don’t readily know the answer, generates potential solutions that might not otherwise be there.

Again, often when we’re under the gun, whether there’s time pressure or we’re feeling stressed, we just want to find the answer. We buckle down. We focus. We bang our proverbial head against the wall. It’s better to step back, to talk to someone else. They don’t have to have the right answer. But just those conversations can open up the opportunity to find a better answer in the end.

What this organizational research has also shown is that teams where there’s more conversation, where there’s more turn taking are more likely to come up with the best answers to problems. Thinking about how you put a group together where everyone feels empowered and OK to speak at the table, even when their answer is wrong, is really important, especially if you’re the leader feeling empowered to be told that they don’t agree with your answer. These are the kinds of things that lead to the best solutions.

There’s one more factor that actually is really important in terms of having fantastic teams. Does anyone know what it is? Anything, the makeup of the team? It turns out that turn taking is really important. The number of times that people take turns. Do you want to know what the number one predictor of turn taking on teams is? How many women are on the team. Just the data. I didn’t make this up. But there is something to having different types of individuals on your team to have that balance allow for different things to happen.

What else can you do besides making sure that you’re putting the right teams together? Something else that’s really important is to make sure you’re preparing in the right ways. It’s not enough just to know material that you need for a presentation or for a big test or for a game or for an interview. You have to actually know the material under the kinds of conditions you’re going to perform under. The idea is to close this gap between training, getting ready for something and the competition. The only way you can do that is if you’re preparing under the kinds of situations that you will face.

This can happen in a lot of ways. If you have to give a talk, whether it’s a toast at a wedding or a pitch to a client, actually going through it, talking about it with someone else, having an audience, getting feedback in that way, is so important. What it does is not only allow you to know that you know that material but it enables you to get used to the kinds of pressure-filled bodily reactions, those worries, everything you’re going to feel in the moment. It gets you ready for what’s ahead. If you can’t find anyone to watch you, even doing it in front of a mirror or videotaping yourself. Anything that raises your level of self-awareness and self-consciousness can be a great way to ensure that you’re ready to go.

Something else that my research has found is something as simple as just jotting down your worries before you go into a high-stake situation, before you go into that important interview, can be a great way to download them from mind. They’re less likely to pop up and distract you in the moment.

These little things can have a big effect because as we saw when we worry, when we ruminate, there’s actually a biological trace of what’s going on. It changes how our brain is functioning, which doesn’t then give us the resources to perform at our best. But if we can employ some of these techniques, these neuro alarm signals tamp down and we’re better able to put our best foot forward when it matters most.

Another technique is actually to change your mindset. Change how you’re thinking about your physiological reactions.

I have a picture of team Canada up here because this Olympic team, in general, and this Olympic program is very into thinking about the psychological strategies they use with their athletes to perform at their best. And it’s been to great avail.

I actually went up to talk to the Canadian Olympic Committee a few years ago. One of my colleagues said, “Tell them the wrong thing.”

I said, “Science has no boundaries. I can’t do that.”

But what’s really interesting about team Canada is they do treat the mental just as important as the physical. And they’ve done some really interesting studies with their athletes.

One study with swimmers looked at how they could help their swimmers tamp down those neuro alarm signals, be less likely to worry before the meets. They did this in a really interesting way. They brought swimmers in who had choke at either the Olympic trials or the Olympics, who had times slower than what they’ve had in practice. They did something a little bit mean, but it was in the name of science. They had swimmers go in the MRI and they had them watch videos of their failed races. These athletes are tough, but they wanted to know what was happening in the brain. What they showed, just like our people who are worried about math, were that when swimmers watched these failed races, these neuro alarm signals, these areas the brain went off that were all about pain, that were all about worry. Then they did something really interesting. They had the swimmers think about their races in non-emotional terms. Rather than the fact that you might have let down your country or you’re disappointed in yourself, think about what you did in non-emotional terms. Maybe you didn’t get off the blocks well. Maybe something was wrong with your turns. Think about that and then one thing you’re going to change moving forward. That’s it. What, in non-emotional terms, happened and what you’re going to change moving forward. Every time the swimmers thought about their failed race they had them do this. They just had them change their mindset.

Then, they put them back in the MRI two weeks later and found that, compared to swimmers who hadn’t done this exercise, they had less of these neuro alarm signals. Team Canada thinks this is working. They now pull their swimmers out poolside after a bad race and say, “OK. That didn’t go as well as we planned. What happened in non-emotional terms and what are you going to change for the future?”

Anything that can help you think differently, that can change your mindset, really matters. Because that mindset is not some epiphenomenal thing, it actually has a biological basis in how we’re functioning. Our brain changes in a way that helps us perform better. Something as simple as just reinterpreting your physiological responses to stressful situations also can help. When you think, “My palms are sweating. My heart is beating fast. I’m about to choke,” likely you will. But if you can reinterpret that, that, “Actually, this means that my heart is beating really important and shunting really important resources to the rest of my body. It’s helping me ensure that I’m awake and ready to go. In fact, if I didn’t have these symptoms, I’d be dead,” all of that, changing how you’re thinking about it can actually change your mindset and how you perform. Something simple like that has been shown to have a big effect. Rather than dwelling on why you should fail, dwelling on why you should succeed and how these physiological symptoms can help, can be really important.

So, I’ve talked a little bit about tamping down those worries, getting prepared for the pressure situation, creating the right team. I’ve also talked about changing your mindset. There are also things we can do in our physical environment that it turns out are really important for pressure-filled situations. Something that actually we can take part in while we’re here is actually just to step back and be in nature. If you think of our attention, our ability to focus, what that frontal cortex does, like a muscle that wears out over time, then being in nature and taking a step back makes a lot more sense. Just like you wouldn’t train the same muscle group every day. When you’re constantly focused whether it’s on your phone or what you’re doing at work or what’s happening at home, you’re not giving that frontal cortex time to rest and replenish. There is really interesting research showing that when you take a step back, and especially when you can take a step back into nature, even looking at nature, you’re better able to get that frontal cortex back.

The idea is that when you take that step back, you are giving yourself time to just rest and replenish. That step back does not mean walking to your car or walking home while you’re on your Blackberry or your phone. What it means is actually stopping for a second to just be distracted by whatever is around you. If you think about it, we’re constantly on, whether we’re in our office or anywhere else. We have our phone. There are so many demands on that frontal cortex, on our ability to focus, that it doesn’t get time to taper. But there’s really fantastic research showing that when you step back it, does give it time to rest and replenish. You’re actually more creative in really interesting ways.

And you don’t have to take a walk through the woods. We don’t always have time to do that. Actually, just looking at pictures of nature or looking out your window has been shown to have some of the same benefits. The point is to remember your brain just like the rest of your body, is a muscle that needs to be taken care of. And when you’re constantly pushing it, you sometimes don’t get the best out of it. This is one of the really important reasons why kids shouldn’t study with their cellphones next to them. We all think we’re actually good multitaskers. But all the research shows that when you do two things at once, both get worse. The only thing that gets better is your confidence in your ability to do it. But that is wrong. You need to let this rest and replenish.

Finally, it’s really important to remember that how you hold yourself, how you hold your body actually matters in these situations. Not only does our brain send information down to the rest of our body, our body actually sends information up to our brain. And it also tells a story to other people that is sometimes even more important than say, what we’re seeing on our face.

This is a great example that I like to show. It’s professional tennis players winning and losing at Wimbledon. Can you tell from the faces who’s won or lost the point? It’s really hard. What about number one? Won or lost? First of all, you’re not agreeing. Number one is lost. Number two? Won. Three? Won. Four? You’re still not agreeing. Lost. Five? OK. Again not agreeing. Won. Six? Lost. It’s hard to tell from what’s happening on the face.

But take a look at the bodies. The top one, won or lost? Won. The bottom one? Lost. It’s really easy to tell. Our bodies communicate to other people how we’re feeling. If we walk into an important meeting or we walk home and we’re like this, we’re sending signals not just to our brain about how we feel, we’re sending signals to other people about whether we’re ready to go.

All that practice, all that preparation you put into knowing your material matters but everything you do with your mind, with your body matters too. So, keeping some of this in mind and some of the techniques we talked about can help make the difference between performing up to your potential when it matters most or not being able to put your best foot forward.

So just as a wrap, there are lots of things you can do to ensure success. I talked about the power of putting the right groups together, the power of teamwork. I also talked about how we should prepare. Prepare, prepare, prepare. And prepare in the kinds of situations you’re going to perform under. I talked about the power of mindset. That how we think matters. It’s not just some fluffy thing to have confidence or anxiety, but it actually changes how our brain functions. The goal is to tamp down those neuro alarm signals and be able to focus on what we want to focus on most. To get rid of those details and in the moment really just do it.

And I ended with how our environment matters. Whether it’s taking a step back, being able to talk to other people, being out in nature and even our environment being our body, how we hold ourselves. All of these things together come to put our best foot forward. When you have knowledge about how the mind works, you’re in such a different position to apply a whole toolbox techniques to ensure that you’re performing at your best.

Thank you very much.

Sian Beilock explores the science behind why people choke in pressure-packed situations. Specifically, she examines factors in the brain and body that influence performance in stressful situations, ranging from test-taking to public speaking to sporting events. Using a variety of research methods, including neuroimaging techniques, Beilock’s work is aimed at better understanding how our cognition and reasoning skills change when we are under stress. Beilock’s research is routinely covered in the media, including CNN, NPR, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. In 2017, the National Academy of Sciences honored Beilock with the Troland Award, in recognition of her pioneering work in experimental psychology.