What Gambling Does To Your Brain
The brain of gambling addicts We need to understand brain function to address a gambler’s behavior and plan for recovery. Let’s take a brief look at what goes on in the brain, from the inside out, before taking a brief look at treatments that can be helpful in dealing with the immediate and long-term remediation of the effects of gambling. In fact, psychologists have performed multiple studies and experiments measuring the brain’s release of dopamine when gambling. Not only does the brain release dopamine in the same way it would as if you were using drugs, but the brain physically changes when you’re gambling. Does gambling affect the same areas of the brain as alcohol or drugs? Does gambling addiction progress in much the same way as substance use disorders, beginning with the development of tolerance and continuing to withdrawal in its absence? Is it easier or harder to recover from a behavioral addiction such as gambling?
- What happens when you gamble—Your brain on gambling
- Effect of casino design on your brain & sense
- How do casinos keep us gambling?
If you’re not a big gambler, or even if you are, you might’ve wondering why gambling is so popular?
Aside from being a fun, controllable vice that pairs well with sports-watching hobby, a way to spend time with friends, or a (hey, it can be) substance-free vice, gambling and psychology go together like peanut butter and jelly.
We’re here to take a look at the psychology behind gambling—Why we love it, what gambling does to your brain, and what makes us come back to the casino, time & time again.
Psychology & Uncertainty
Growing up in my small city, I once took a city tour with my elementary-grade class, and remember our tour guide explaining something to us about the local casino — “When you go in there, there are no clocks on the wall, so you can’t keep track of time and spend more money.”
Now, this was before it was the norm for everyone to have a cell phone, so maybe I’d receive this differently in a couple of years – but at the time, it seemed like a genius notion. Little did I know, there were plenty of tactics used by casinos to lull you into a timeless state, their main strategy to get you gambling – For example, window-less rooms and cheap alcohol.
But would you be surprised to find out this is just the tip of the iceberg? Turns out, our own brains have a big hand in getting us to play risky hands (See what we did there?), bet on sports and play casino games.
Your Brain on Gambling
Like we mentioned, casinos’ preferred strategy to get people placing wagers on sports and playing games is typically to ‘play’ with time, in a way that makes your brain lose sense of exactly what time, or what time of day it is—Another factor that gets people gambling is humans’ fundamental inability to understand probability.
Now, if you’re on the same page as professional poker player Maria Konnikova, this understanding of probability can come in handy when playing a game of skill that requires wagering, like poker, or when analyzing the outcome of things like election polls. Essentially, even though probabilities can be low, this doesn’t necessarily mean you should count them out, or that they’re impossible to beat.
What Gaming Does To Your Brain
On the flip-side, however, we look at some of the other factors that we might have a little less control over – that is, what goes on in our brains when we gamble, and how that affects the human brain. For example, the Law of Effect.
How does the Law of Effect factor into gambling?
This law states that when humans perform repeated behavior, we look for rewards — For example, the original one-arm bandit slot machine was designed with a simple lever-crank the player would pull in order to see if the cards lined up as a match. Modern-day slot machines also use this principal design.
Even though a win isn’t guaranteed, it’s the potential of a win that keeps the brain enthralled, and gamblers pulling the metaphorical lever. The human brain, is essentially wired to expect a win in an unpredictable number of pulls—This is known as a variable ratio schedule. You don’t know when you’ll get a reward, but you expect it at some point when you pull the lever, or push the button.
How Gambling Affects Your Brain
What else factors into the psychology of gambling?
Another factor that goes into the psychology of gambling is something called the sunk-cost fallacy. Basically, humans are loss-averse, and will try to regain losses. So, if someone loses more than they planned on losing gambling, they might try to keep gambling to earn more money.
It’s worth nothing that this ‘sunk cost’ fallacy extends to more than just money, too – for example, some people might stick with a hobby they dislike, like playing an instrument, just because they’ve sunk a considerable amount of time and money on it.
An extension of this, the gamblers’ fallacy is quite similar—Essentially, players have spent so much time gambling, that they believe a win must be just around the corner. This is just one reason why managing your bankroll is so important, and not wagering more money than you can afford to lose.
Another factor you might be less familiar with is availability heuristic or availability bias. Availability bias or heuristic is simply a humans’ likelihood to think whatever pops into their mind initially is the most relevant information.
For example: Let’s look at the fear that gripped people after seeing Jaws—many people who were unafraid to swim now found themselves terrified of the ocean. Instead of looking up how many shark attacks happen each year (or even at the place they’re swimming), all they can think of is an impending shark attack. This is an example of availability heuristic.
This could technically work both ways when playing at the casino, for example—If you remember that news story featuring a big winner in your local lotto recently, you might be inclined to gamble more. You might be less inclined to gamble if the first thing you think of is your last big loss.
Another way your brain can cause you to spend more time (therefore, money) in a casino is the design. Typically, they have a maze-like design, window-less rooms and strategic bathroom placement that requires patrons to walk past all their games, which can lower inhibitions, therefore getting you gambling longer.
What else does your brain do while gambling? Well, when you get a ‘reward’ (think a win) your brain releases dopamine, which leads to your brain graving more of it. Another chemical your brain releases during gambling (and many other activities) is adrenaline, that ‘rush’ you feel when placing bets or making a wager.
The psychology of casinos involves the design of the physical space – which is one reason online casinos can give the player more control over their gaming experience, since you can gamble anywhere, anytime – hey, even in the bathroom. We don’t judge.
There are many ways your brain works in conjunction with gambling, like releasing dopamine, losing sense of time and making you believe you’ll be luckier, or unluckier than you truly are.
It’s important to manage your bankroll carefully, set time limits, set an alcohol limit and adjust your physical environment if possible – if you know what to expect or the psychological effects gambling has on your brain, you can ‘prep’ yourself for a safe, fun and responsible gambling experience.
More often than not a trip to Las Vegas is not a financially sound decision. And yet every year over 40 million people hand over their cash to the city’s many towering casinos, hoping the roulette ball rattles to a stop on black.
Gambling and other forms of risk-taking appear to be hardwired into our psyche. Humans at least as far back as Mesopotamia have rolled the dice, laying their barley, bronze and silver on the line, often against miserable odds. According to gambling industry consulting company H2 Gambling Capital, Americans alone lose nearly $120 billion a year to games of chance.
Now a set of neuroscience findings is closer than ever to figuring out why. Ongoing research is helping illuminate the biology of risky behaviors—studies that may one day lead to interventions for vices like compulsive gambling. The recent results show an explanation is more complex than looking at dysfunctional reward circuitry, the network of brain regions that fire in response to pleasing stimuli like sex and drugs. Risking loss on a slim chance of thrill or reward involves a complex dance of decision-making and emotion.
A new study by a team from Johns Hopkins University appears to have identified a region of the brain that plays a critical role in risky decisions. Published September 20 in Current Biology, the authors analyzed the behavior of rhesus monkeys, who share similar brain structure and function to our own. And like us, they are risk-takers, too.
First the authors trained two monkeys to “gamble” against a computer to win drinks of water. Then they had to choose between a 20 percent chance of receiving 10 milliliters of water versus a far more reliable 80 percent chance of getting only three milliliters. The monkeys overwhelmingly took the gamble, even when they were no longer thirsty.
Previous work has shown a brain region called the supplementary eye field (SEF) is, along with regulating eye movements, also involved in decision-making. When the authors suppressed SEF activity by cooling the region with an external metal plate—a process that is harmless and reversible—the monkeys were 30 to 40 percent less likely to make risky bets.
Johns Hopkins neuroscientist and study co-author Veit Stuphorn says the findings were not entirely unanticipated, given the role the SEF and its neighboring areas play in decisions. Yet he is intrigued that an area of the brain is so tied in with processing the risk associated with a particular behavior without actually causing the behavior itself. “The specificity of the contribution of SEF to risky decisions was surprising to us,” he says. “We interpret this as a sign that SEF mainly reflects the contribution of higher-order cognitive areas…, such areas build a model of the environment and use it to predict opportunities and dangers.” In other words, the SEF appears to shape the attitude toward a particular risky behavior. It also, Stuphorn suggests, represents a possible treatment target for those prone to excessively risky pursuits like problem gambling.
But not just yet. “We do not understand the risk-taking network in the brain well enough to think about therapeutic implications,” he says. “But as our understanding increases, there is hope for better behavioral interventions based on a better understanding of the factors that drive risky decisions. And in the long run possibly direct interventions in the form of brain stimulation.”
Yale University neuroscientist Daeyeol Lee, who was not involved in the new research, is also optimistic. “Finding that excessive risk-taking might be influenced by the function of a specific brain area might be an important step in treating humans with severe risk-taking tendencies,” he says, adding that certain drug treatments for Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders can also cause risky behaviors. “The findings in this study might also have implications in reducing such unwanted side effects,” he says.
Typically, the brain’s “reward center” or “reward circuitry,” have not included the SEF but rather other brain regions that drive pleasurable responses via the neurotransmitter dopamine. Yet, as Daeyeol points out, reward is complex. The SEF is likely to be involved in the anticipation of reward and helping control dopamine activity in a reward area called the basal ganglia.
Another study published last week, also in Current Biology, adds an additional layer to the neuroscience of gambling risk—the feeling of regret. In 10 neurosurgical patients the authors measured electrical activity in a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex—part of the prefrontal cortex near the SEF—while presenting them with gambling scenarios. They used electrodes to analyze brain activity as each study subject decided whether or not to make a bet, right after a bet and when—a half a second later—they learned the outcome.
How Does Gambling Change Your Brain
By comparing the findings to previous brain recordings associated with regret, they deduced that during the split second between placing a bet and learning the outcome our brains frantically replay previous betting decisions. We recall the regret we felt from losing prior bets and from not betting more on those we won.
Senior author Ming Hsu, an associate professor in the Haas School of Business and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, both at the University of California, Berkeley, notes this rumination on past choices is probably an evolutionarily means of improving future decision-making. “This type of replay is particularly prevalent during the lull after one makes a decision and before finding out about the outcome,” he says. “But what we see is that the [orbitofrontal cortex] is incredibly active, and in particular processing how much regret the subject experienced on the previous decision.”
Scientists have long known the prefrontal cortex is involved in complex decision-making. An early clue was the case of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad foreman who, in some accounts, become wildly impulsive after an explosion drove an iron bar through the front of his brain. Hsu thinks the rapid replay of past decisions could explain why the prefrontal cortex is implicated in conditions like depression and addiction, both of which involve a willful neglect of negative consequences, an apathy toward risk.
Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis neuroscientist Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, who did not take part in either new study, comments, “Many monkey studies, including work from my lab, have found that decision computations [involve] the orbitofrontal cortex.” The fact this study showed the same thing in humans, he notes, is an important step toward understanding our own decision-making process.
As researchers like Hsu and Stuphorn gradually unravel the neurocircuitry of risk and reward, perhaps we will one day see better treatments for such conditions, most likely behavioral interventions or brain-stimulating technologies.
We may also see treatments that quell the thrill and compulsion of problem gambling and other risky behaviors and encourage a bit more fiscal prudence. If so, perhaps those at risk of draining their bank accounts on the Vegas Strip will find themselves cashing in their chips, not squandering them.