Why Does Prefrontal Activity Turn a Loser Into a Winner?

Andrew Huberman says activity in a top-down circuit from the prefrontal cortex drives persistence and winning when other factors stay roughly equal. Quiet that region in a mouse that always won and the mouse becomes the loser. Raise activity in the same region in the loser, in real time, and the mouse wins every time. Cortisol and testosterone levels do not explain the switch.

A fetal mouse still cannot beat an adult mouse, and stimulating Huberman's prefrontal cortex would not let him out-deadlift someone clearly stronger. Huberman calls himself reasonably strong and says the other person absolutely is stronger. When two competitors sit within 10 or 20 percent of each other's ability, the one with more activity in the region wins over and over. The reverse holds too.

In people, the area supports conscious strategy. The strategy can be anger, love, getting home for a child's birth, or hunger and the need for others to eat and survive. At mile 200 of a desert race, the thought that stops someone from quitting is that prefrontal, top-down push. Equivalent experiments in humans use virtual reality and brain scanners, and the pattern shows up in other species as well.