How Gambling Affects the Brain
26 Feb
According to University of B.C. researcher Catherine Winstanley, the thrill of risk and reward experienced by gamblers is said to ‘hijack’ the brain’s natural reward systems.
“Gambling has a tendency to become very addictive in the same way that crack cocaine does,” said Winstanley. Gambling has now been associated with the release of dopamine which is the same chemical that is associated with drug addiction.
Winstanley goes on to say that winning is not the only aspect of gambling that is addictive, it is also the rush players get by taking such big risks.
In tests done on rats it was noted that when given the choice of activity with small but consistent rewards, they quickly learned to maximize their benefits, but when these rats were given amphetamine, in order to simulate the rush of gambling action, they developed a tendency to go for the high-risk options with bigger, yet infrequent, rewards.
On an evolutionary level, humans and other animals are said to have evolved to seek rewards in order to help them learn how and where to get and maintain access to primary rewards like food, shelter and sex. Winstanley says that gambling hijacks the need for people to be rewarded for satisfying these primary needs: “all of our behaviours become focused on attaining that [gambling rush or win] rather than on the things that help us to survive.”
There has been a surge of gambling because of increased accessibility to gambling through state-sanctioned lotteries and casinos, online betting and poker, and risk takers will be drawn to this.
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