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Brain Patterns Give Clues To Why Some People Just Keep Gambling
Research from several UK universities, as reported by Time, indicates that the brain activity of compulsive gamblers shows a marked difference in response to pleasure-triggering behavior, which may help explain why they have trouble stopping:
[The participants] took an amphetamine capsule, which unleashes endorphins with similar effects to the rush you get from exercise or alcohol, the study says. An additional PET scan revealed that pathological gamblers responded differently to the drug. They released fewer endorphins than those who didn't gamble, and they also reported lower levels of euphoria on a questionnaire afterward. This might help explain the addictive part of pathological gambling: to get pleasure from the act, problem gamblers might need more of it or to work harder for it.
When are things like this going to start being used for good and bad ways? i.e. Your honor, my client is susceptible to gambling, so this should/should not be taking into account during sentencing. That is, if he is susceptible, he shouldn't be anywhere near a gambling table etc. This is the problem I see with comprehensive data. Correlations happen by coincidence all the time and humans are downright lousy at statistics, intuition and perception.
Reminds me of http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02246283 and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091305798000021. Bet you this will go nowhere and the use of theraputic amounts of opiates as a potential treatment will be ignored.
After all, they seem to get off on losing.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
As far as i know i have only known one person addicted to gambling. His personality was marked by acute depression, a desire to look good to others, a tendency towards violence and a tendency to commit serious crimes such as burglary or armed robbery. He lived in misery all his life although there were times when crime paid him rather well. His background and up bringing were awful but to me his difficulties looked like a brain disorder. Sadly his type of personality does not ask for mental health treatment. And I can see why anything short of long term observation in a controlled environment would reveal his personality. He could be charming and was good at manipulating people. It has to be some form of depression very similar to manic depression when on the dark side of the illness.
You don't suppose people get the same response to surfing the Internet, do you?
in b4 a hundred posts about how every mind is able to act as a perfectly rational, selfish agent and that any science which shows it's just another biological organ which substantially lacks free will must be hooey because otherwise the whole foundation for the Church of the Invisible Hand is rocked.
Article translated: Limey communists try to get gambling defined as a disease so the state can force - at gunpoint - (Eurpean's are not allowed to have guns) taxpayers to pick up their det's.
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urdachny
Investing in the stock market, is generally betting in a situation where there is a net win. That is, most of the time, even bad investments don't lose money in the long run, they just don't win as much as you could have one, or they have greater fluctuations than a portfolio with an equivalent return.
Day trading is however very addictivive. even people who only trade weekly will still check their stocks many times a day. As the problem goes on, penny stocks become a big lure as they have higher fluctuations giving one chances to Win big (a great feeling compared to inexorable index funds slow creep).
So does one have to be a masochist to be addicted to gambling? apparently not.
Even index funds are somewhat crazy. Right now the SP 500 trades at high price to earnings multiples even in stocks are unlikely to achieve earnings that can match that price. It's a combination of the greater fool theory along with the unusual condition that there's few "safe" places to put money right now. There's too few shares of stock in health companies (due to the slow economic growth) being chased by too many dollars. As long as the chase continues then it's "safe". But long term enormous growth is required to match those P/E multiples. Google and Amazon have essentially no earnings.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
But that's pragmatism! If you can't prove it from first principles it's unfair because [this improbable corner case] or [that theoretically possible but hasn't happened in recorded history case].
Otherwise you violate the fifth amendment, or one of the other ones.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Did they always need more gambling to achieve some baseline satisfaction or have they just gotten habituated to gambling and it merely takes more stimulus for them to achieve the same effect? Have they developed a tolerance through frequent gambling or have they always needed more gambling since they started?
I would think since lots of experiences become less appealing after a while and need to be done in more intense ways to get the same "fun" out of them that pathological gamblers may be reacting in the same way.
Yet maybe some people are ALWAYS that way, no experience is intense enough unless it's done in some extreme way -- your so-called adrenaline junkies. It's not enough to ski down a mountain, you have to heli-ski into some mountainous backcountry in Kazakhstan riding an avalanche the last half of the run. Maybe gambling just isn't enough, they have to play for big stakes on money borrowed from a loanshark or embezzled from their employer.
I kind of curious about the dislike of gambling. I have nothing against gambling morally, but I just can't do it even though some of the games like craps can be fun as games and have odds that are about as favorable as they come in most casinos. Yet I like most other adrenaline activities.
When are things like this going to start being used for good and bad ways? i.e. Your honor, my client is susceptible to gambling, so this should/should not be taking into account during sentencing. That is, if he is susceptible, he shouldn't be anywhere near a gambling table etc. This is the problem I see with comprehensive data. Correlations happen by coincidence all the time and humans are downright lousy at statistics, intuition and perception
As one who runs several businesses while investing in many others I can tell you that the "gambling mentality" can very much be applied to business as well
Many of the Silicon Valley upstarts do not even deserve one single penny of investments for their founders' strategy are so wrong, so narrow, and so stupid, but yet, they regularly got million-dollar injection because someone take a chance
You may think that many of the "angel investors" are seasoned investors, that whenever they "take a chance" they knew what they were doing. The reality however, is that many of those investments are based on nothing more than what TFA has pointed out, a "response to pleasure-triggering behavior"
Yes, I have had my own moments and I have invested my good money into rotten useless duds
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... of the brain pattern:
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It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
For the people I know who play it it's more about giving themselves hope to escape their miserable lives. It's also a social stabilizer, giving the lower classes the feeling that they have a way out.
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I have often wondered if some kind of boredom conditioning could help with gambling addiction.
My idle thought is based on experience my brother and I had about a decade ago while undergraduates. Around this time the online casino business was extraordinarily competitive and they were offering rather large incentives to sign up and play. At this time, although not any more, the terms and conditions of these bonuses were such that you could claim them, wager the minimum amount they mandated and withdraw a large proportion of the free money they had given you. Of course, to be profitable, you had to play a very short list of games with a low house edge and stick absolutely rigidly to the optimum playing strategy.
Over one summer this was our 'job'. Between us we gambled a cumulative total of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even accounting for various sites where we wrote software to do it for us, we played more blackjack than the vast majority of people ever will in their lives. To start with it was very exciting as the variance ensures a rollercoaster of upswings and downswings. By the end it was just another massively boring data entry job as we'd seen regression to the mean work its magic so many times. Neither of us ever wanted to see a casino game ever again.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
I guess because I'm good with math, statistics, and the law of probability. It doesn't take a genius to realize gambling is 100% certain to cause you to go broke. Even if on occasion you win a large amount, the over all trend is always to lose money.
It's strange, my dad just loves to gamble. Growing up we never were what I'd call poor, but we didn't exactly have money for everything under the sun. To this day, I still don't know why he likes it so much. Some things that may be interesting to psychologists or slashdotters:
1. He has a lot of siblings, and most of them are also into gambling. Yet none of his kids like to gamble.
2. My mom is the opposite of a gambler, as am I. I avoid odds that are not heavily heavily in my favor. My parents always argue about the gambling thing.
3. He was extremely poor growing up.
4. His father was a gambler and alcoholic to a degree and was somewhat (nothing I'd call horrific) abusive.
5. He tends to be a little obsessive compulsive, as I am.
6. Part of his personality is being a risk taker. He's also extremely social, verbal, and opinionated. I wouldn't call him terribly follow the crowd outgoing though.
7. He loves scrimping and cutting corners to save cash in the short run. Then turns around and blows huge amounts of money gambling. It's like it is "OK" to him if he plunks down a hundred bucks to bet on something that has a low chance of winning. Sort of like my wife who loves to scrimp and save, and then will randomly spend hundreds or thousands of dollars while on vacation. In her mind, it's "OK" to blow money on vacation.
8. Once he sets his mind on doing something, he has to do it immediately. Extremely impatient.
9. Few things get him out of the house since retirement, other than socializing. Gambling however will get him out of the house, and he prefers to do it in company.
10. Back to the siblings. So I try to find a reason for gambling based on his personality traits. Yet each of his gambler siblings have at least one opposite personality trait from what I listed above, except for the extremely talkative and social aspect. So I really don't know if there is something to put your finger on to say this makes a person a gambler. Maybe the chemicals in their heads are out of whack. I don't know.
UNDERactivation causes people to compulsively engage in disruptive acts. With OCD, occipital lobe activation doesn't extinguish after communication, in ADHD, general cognition mechanisms don't excite to coordinable levels, etc.