Although more than one hundred neurotransmitters have been identified, from the standpoint of peak performance, only three are truly important: dopamine, noradrenaline, and acetylcholine. We call them the “DNA of Peak Performance”
DOPAMINE
Dopamine, as one journalist suggests, has become ‘the Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters’ for the way in which it has spiced up the science pages with tales of pleasure, addiction, and reward. It seems to have captured the public’s interest and imagination, probably because of its association with excitement, novelty, an risk.
Dopamine is involved in your ability to update information in memory and also affects your ability to focus on the task at hand. It provides a druglike reward that makes you want more. And, as with many drugs, the high wears off and you often need more the next time to get the same effect. That’s why dopamine is known as a novelty neurotransmitter. Its effects are strongest when the stimulus that generates it is new. This explains in part the enthusiasm you may feel when you start a new project and why the thrill isn’t usually as strong after you’ve been working on it for a while.
Dopamine plays a number of roles in the body, including aiding motor control. But in the context of the brain and peak performance, it’s the fun chemical. To truly be performing at peak level, you should be having fun. The experience should feel rewarding. IF you aren’t feeling this way, you may still be performing better than usual, but you probably haven’t reached your peak.
WHAT’S ALL THE RUSH? NORADRENALINE!
Almost everyone is familiar with noradrenaline (also known as norepinephrine), or at least thinks they are. It’s the rush we get both when we bungee jump ad when we react in surprise to the sudden lunge of a neighbor’s “friendly’ dog. Noradrenaline’s primary purpose is to ensure your survival.. It was evolutionarily designed to help you respond quickly to any threat, real or perceived. It does so by regulating your attention and alertness. Studies indicate that higher levels of noradrenaline lead to greater accuracy when detecting errors in a visual error-detecting task when we are awake, alert, and up to the task.
Noradrenaline is at an optimal level when you feel slightly overchallenged; it leads to a ‘this is tricky but I can handle it’ feeling. It is also released when you push yourself to perform a difficult task better, faster, or with fewer resources.
FROM SPOTLIGHT TO LASER: ACETYLCHOLINE
The third of the three neurochemicals that make up the DNA of Peak Performance is acetylcholine, which is found in abundance in a surprising segment of the population. In fact, there’s a very special group of human beings that can probably teach you a great deal about peak performance. Look around and you’ll find that they seem to practically everywhere. Are they dedicated research chemists? World – class professional athletes? Risk – taking entrepreneurs? Chess grandmasters? Award – winning sales reps? Politicians? Not even close. And yet, you might even have one of them living under your very roof. And no, it isn’t your mother – in – law. Or that sullen twentysomething who still lives at home and has mistaken your house for a combination all-you –can-eat restaurant and Laundromat. It’s an infant. That’s right: babies!
If you’ve ever spent any amount of time with babies, then you probably recongnize that they’re some of the most alert and observant little people on the planet. Although they may be excreting a lot of unpleasant stuff, they’re simultaneously soaking up sights, sounds, tastes, and smells like high-powered, turbocharged, diaper-wearing cognitive vacuum cleaners. The same mechanism you use to achieve peak performance every now and then, a baby is operating practically nonstop for the first few years of her life. And the chemical behind this extraordinary performance is acetylcholine.
Acetylcholine comes a part of the brain called the nucleus basalis. Babies release acetylcholine without even trying. Neuroscientists refer to this as the ‘critical period of neuroplasticity,’ a time when brand-new brains are extremely receptive to new information and are constantly establishing neuronal pathways. As neuroscientist Michael Merzenich explains it, during critical plasticity ‘the learning machinery is continuously on.” As adults we’re not so lucky. The automatic mechanism for extraordinary focus shuts down when we’re still quite young and must be operated manually from then on.
So how do we as adults flip the switch that turns on acetylcholine?. Once this critical period is over, there are only a handful of ways we can do it: when we make a conscious effort to pay attention, when we get physical exercise, or when we are exposed to something important, surprising, or novel – in other words, when our brain releases dopamine.
Another way to look at the DNA of Peak Performance is to think of it as a prizewinning photograph. Noradrenaline prompts you to point your camera in just the right direction, dopamine helps you to zoom in until you have a pleasing composition, and finally there’s acetylcholine, which enables you to sharpen your focus until it’s picture-perfect. Get only one or two of these elements just right and what you have is a snapshot. Add the third and suddenly it’s a work of art.
ONE SIZE DOESN’T FIT ALL – THERE’S NO UNIVERSAL STANDARD FOR OPTIMUM AROUSAL.
The depiction of the performance curve as a simple inverted U provides a clear and conscise explanation for how performance works. But as you may have already noticed, the graph doesn’t have any units. How do you measure arousal? In inches? In ergs? In Scoville units? In other words, exactly how much arousal is required to reach peak performance? The short answer is that we can’t really say. The longer answer is that it can vary dramatically from person to person and from one task or situation to another. There’s no universal standard for optimum arousal. In that respect, arousal has a lot in common with spicy food.
SPICY, BUT NOT AS SPICY AS HERS
Put yourself for a moment in the role of a server at a Thai restaurant in California. A well – dressed couple stroll in and sit down in a booth just below the framed pictures of the king and queen. When you come over to take their order, she orders “Thai basil with pork, very spicy,” while he asks for the same dish, but with chicken, adding, almost as an afterthought, “but not as spicy as hers.” What are you going to tell the chef? You have a hunch that if he makes the dishes ‘very spicey’ according to the standards of the small village outside Bangkok where he grew up, your customers may single-handedly worsen one of the state’s periodic droughts by constantly asking to have their water glasses refilled. Who knows? They may even sue.
The definition of spicy in a Thai restaurant is a bit like the definition of arousal in a Yerkes-Dodson graph. One person’s standards for what constitutes arousal can vary widely from another’s. Some of us are ‘right-side performers’ like Gordo Cooper. Others are ‘left-side performers’ like Louise Pasteur. Still others lie somewhere in between. Luckily, we have a kind of spiciness test that we administer to our seminar attendees to guage each one’s optimum level of arousal.
