Jonah Lehrer’s Neuroscience of Gambling

Jonah Lehrer is the Editor at Large for Seed Magazine, and he has his first book being published this November, “Proust was a Neuroscientist.” But what makes Lehrer unique is the fact that he has worked out a whole science based on neuroscience and the effect of slot machines and gambling.

He references a recent story that shows how gambling has increased in New Orleans because people don’t have as many places to spend their money. Less people are spending more money at their slot machines which is working out to a 13.6% increase for the casinos. He says that the correlation between slot machines and gambling and smoking is scarily similar.

He says that both are addictive behaviors and someday we might just see them as the same kind of addiction. He says that they are both “dangerous consumer products” and that he hopes someday we will see them as such. He says that it all has to do with the dopamine neurons that are in your brain and that the way they fire in your brain determine how addictive you can become to something.

If the dopamine neurons are firing when they are supposed to, you get a kind of a jolt from any kind of reward. The way it works, you hear the sound from the slot machine and then get the reward - which is the win. Each time you play the neurons fire at that sound, waiting for the win at the slot machine. Soon you are hooked on the sound of the slot machine and it is a kind of drug to you. Therein lies the addiction, and what are called “prediction neurons.”

Even though most of the time you don’t win at slot machines, you are still programmed by your neurons hoping for the win, so you are getting a high off of something that does not even happen. Then when you do win, the high is even bigger. Slot machine addicts know rationally that they cannot win, but that doesn’t stop them from playing the high.

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