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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.
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.
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Given the current state of psychology research, "when the results have been independently replicated and have been shown not to be statistical artifacts, cherry picking, or outright fraud" would be a good first step.
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?
. Your honor, my client is susceptible to gambling, so this should/should not be taking into account during sentencing.
So there would be an expectation that the client should be treated more leniently? I don't understand why this should be an excuse if that is what you are suggesting (our brain patterns must be different - LoL). How about an analogy :
"Your honour, my client drove into someone because he is susceptible to drinking, so please sentence him lightly".
Anyway, since when was it necessary to study brain patterns to establish if someone is a compulsive gambler?
Really, it doesn't matter if the brain lacks free will. We necessarily must presume it does for our legal system to have any effect. It doesn't matter whether you're a thief or a diagnosed kleptomaniac, either way we need to find a way to keep you away from the personal property of others. Sure, the methods used may change, but we've determined (whether through free will or some reasonably complete facsimile thereof) that this is not acceptable behaviour in our society, and it must be caught and removed.
So there would be an expectation that the client should be treated more leniently?
No, more harshly. If it is part of his nature, then he will be less responsive to rehabilitation, and more likely to be recidivist, so the only alternative is to lock-em-up.
Psychology research since the mid-90s has actually become one of the more rigorous scientific disciplines. I don't know if you're thinking back to the mid 20th century, but I'm not sure where you're getting a notion that there's something wrong with the "current state" of psychology research.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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."
http://politicalsciencereplica...
http://www.nature.com/news/201...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04...
One example? Do you know how much psychological research is being done?
Just check the Slashdot frontpage over the past few weeks and you'll find a lot more instances of con men in Physics. Does this mean that the "current state" of physics research is rife with fraud?
How about economics? Biochemistry? You want con men? Parapsychology is a more rigorous discipline than economics.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
I gave three representative examples, two of which were connected. I could dig up more links but why bother when faced with wilfull ignorance.
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 !
Gambling is much more common in the UK, most activity is legal (and taxed), and the problems are treated roughly as alcohol problems are.
I gave three representative examples, two of which were connected. I could dig up more links but why bother when faced with PopeRatzo.
FTFY. Actually, never mind. They are mostly indistinguishable synonyms.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Anyway, since when was it necessary to study brain patterns to establish if someone is a compulsive gambler?
If you have to ask that question, you've not understood what the study was about. It's not about trying to find out if people are compulsive gamblers, it's about why they are.
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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
Another line of thought especially with more serious crimes is removal from society, if a criminal is locked up then it's very difficult for them to commit crimes against ordinary citizens.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
http://politicalsciencereplica... [wordpress.com]
http://www.nature.com/news/201... [nature.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04... [nytimes.com]
One example?
wat
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