But Chritchley says that the goal is to better understand how “to use feedback to improve performance, ultimately to use the audience as an informative tool.” He notes that there are “implications for musicians and athletes but also for safety and success in other occupations.”

Ideally, Chritchley hopes that this small pilot study using fMRI to investigate performance anxiety will lead to deeper questions about “the mechanisms underlying human consciousness and self-representation within a social context.”


He says that understanding what aspects of brain function assist or interfere with motor skills can impact educational, rehabilitative and prognostic thinking about neurological disorders that inhibit skilled action, and how pharmaceuticals or interventions that modulate neurological function can be more targeted and specific.

Chritchley believes that the study points to “attuning oneself to the goal-related behavior of the audience; projecting one's actions on to the audience and interpreting appraisers reactions in a positive goal-oriented way.” He says the data shows that we can “practice to respond to the feedback from the audience so that you own it, as a skilled performer might perform to and thrive off the audience’s feedback.”

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