The neuroscience of defeat

"The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brains of 14 swimmers, 10 women and four men, who didn't make the 2004 Canadian Olympic team. Inside the scanner, the swimmers each watched a video clip of themselves swimming their failed qualification race and another clip featuring a different swimmer. Not surprisingly, the swimmers rated their own videos more wrenching to watch. And their brains showed signs of their emotional pain, with heightened activity in the parahippocampus and other emotion-related areas that have been implicated in depression. (None of the swimmers had a prior history of depression). Moreover, the premotor cortex--a region that plans actions such as the arm and body movements needed to swim--seemed to be inhibited when the swimmers watched their bad race, the researchers reported here 9 April at a meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. "