The Anatomy of A Gambling Rush

Americans love a gamble… any gamble apparently. While there’s no accounting for wins and losses at private poker games, we do know that the U.S. gambling industry takes in almost 66 billion dollars a year, which by comparison, equals the gross national product of Bangladesh. There are 36.7 million annual visitors to Las Vegas. And while only 5 percent of those visitors claim they’re coming to Sin City for the thrill of the dice, an astounding 87 percent of those visitors end up rolling them anyway. Did you ever wonder why?

To understand our desire to gamble, we first need to understand a bit of evolutionary biology. While they didn’t have slot machines out on the African veldt, they did have hunger. And it was the need to find out next meal that helped shape our need to play the lotto. For millions of years, our progenitors lived in a state of constant threat, taking exceptionally big risks, primarily in pursuit of food and sex. Those whose big bets paid off in extra calories became our forebearers, those who didn’t, died off. As psychologist and Psychology Today contributing editor Nando Pelusi points out, “risk-taking behavior began with foraging - and foraging is all about pattern recognition and pattern attribution.”

Pattern recognition is the term cognitive neuroscientists use for the brain’s ability to lump like with like, this allowing us to remember that flipping over chunky rocks often reveals tasty grubs, while flat stones often hide poisonous snakes. This is an attribute that helps us make sense of all of our experiences. It is the capacity that, as NYU professor of neurology Elkhonon Goldberg points out in his book on the subject, The Wisdom Paradox, “is fundamental to our mental world… without this ability, every object and every problem would be a totally de novo encounter, and we would be unable to bring any of our prior experience to bear on how we deal with these objects or problems. The work by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and others has shown that pattern recognition is among the most powerful, perhaps the foremost mechanism, of successful problem solving.”

So fundamental is the need for pattern recognition that it’s tied to the body’s need/reward system. When we recognize patterns, our brain releases a chemical that makes us feel a little better, so that the next time we confront the same patterns, we’ll remember them. It is this system that accounts for things like the tiny rush of pleasure that comes from noticing that the dealer’s latest “up” card pushes him over 21. And the pleasure chemical in question is one of the brain’s primary feel-good drugs, the neurotransmitter dopamine.

To give you an idea of how pleasurable that dopamine rush feels, we need only to turn to cocaine. That rush that users get from snorting up Bolivian marching powder is actually dopamine. What cocaine really does to the brain is cause dopamine to be released and then black the receptor sites that allow for its reuptake (much in the way that anti-depressants like Prozac block the reuptake of serotonin). So the reason the comic Robin Williams once said, “Coke makes me feel like a new man, and the new man wants some also,” is because it was dopamine that was conferring that amazing feeling.

So amazing is this feeling that, 50 years ago, neurobiologist Jim Olds found that if he put an electrode in the dopamine-releasing pleasure center of a rat’s brain then connected it via wires to an electric current generator and gave the animals a switch to stimulate their own brains, they would do so without pause. They would neglect all other activities (including eating) for this little rush. Rats would rather starve to death than walk away from dopamine.

It is for this reason that scientists long believed that dopamine was pure please. It was though of as the reward portion of the body’s need/reward system. You wanted something fundamental to survival - like a next meal or a sexual partner - and when you got that thing, the brain released a little dopamine, so the next time you were faced with a similar situation (like being hungry) you would remember that feeding yourself felt damn good. But lately, thanks to the work of people like Emory University associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences Greg Berns, we now know that dopamine is not released after you’ve gotten the thing you so desired, but rather when you take the risk to do the thing that gets you what you desire.

“Dopamine helps you learn by association; it helps you associate risk with reward.” Says Berns. And associating risk with reward is a gambler’s bread and butter. So much so that, in 2005, Mayo clinic psychiatrist M. Leann Dodd found that 11 of her Parkinson’s diseased patients developed pathological gambling addictions. The cause, she discovered, was the anti-tremor medicine pramipexole. Since dopamine also helps the body coordinate motor function, the drug works by blocking the reuptake of dopamine. Unfortunately, that extra chemistry boost was all it took to push these Parkinson’s patients over that big bet edge.

Dopamine further works against gamers because of something called “the gambler’s fallacy,” the idea that, odds being odds, a long losing steak can only mean that the next hand has to be a winner. But odds don’t work that way. Every spin of the roulette wheel is independent of every other; but the brain’s pattern recognition system is built around short-term gains, not long-term prediction. “The brain is good at understanding sudden environmental changes,” continues Berns, “but bad at lingering, slow developments - which is why people and animals always overestimate a long shot. Thus, we buy lottery tickets, despite odds against winning, which are often roughly 100 million to one.”

But that doesn’t change the fact that when you’re contemplating the next big bet, you’re both utilizing your pattern recognition system and gearing yourself up to take a risk that could bring a big reward- two of the need/reward system’s basic functions. The truth of the matter, as every gambler eventually learns the hard way, is just because you’re feeling lucky doesn’t mean you really are lucky.

What it actually means is you’re feeling dopamine.