Every casino game is a game of odds, but not always in the way you think. Work published this month in the journal Neuron shows that almost winning actually increases the odds – that we’ll keep playing.

The house always wins

Gambling is a widespread cultural phenomena that has spanned thousands of years and almost every civilization that’s appeared on the face of the planet. And as long as gambling has been around the odds have always favored the house to win. Logically it has to be this way; otherwise casinos would have gone out of business millennia ago. But with the odds stacked against us and our rational brain aware of this, why do we bother to gamble at all?

Even more perplexing is that for the majority of us, a wager here or there isn’t a problem, and the allure of gambling falls well into the realm of entertainment. But for some it’s a debilitating addiction that is not dissimilar to substance abuse.

What binds all of these together? It’s all about how our brain handles the wonderful sensation of reward.

Reward

In the current study, researchers from Cambridge examined the brains of 15 people with a fMRI machine while they gambled on a slot machine. What they found was that brain activity for winning spins was greatly increased in the ventral striatum and anterior insula; part of a neuronal circuit that is well known as the reward system.

In a nutshell the way our brain processes our feelings of reward and success at a job well done is: trigger > reward > reinforcement. In gambling the trigger is of course money, and this fires up the reward systems in your brain, which are largely governed by release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. This feels great, you are rewarded and you want to do it again and the trigger is reinforced as something that’s good.

This process isn’t limited to gambling or money of course; it’s also the same thing that happens when you eat delicious chocolate, or why I turn into a slobbering canine when I smell bacon. You might also have guessed that this is part of the mechanism behind addiction to heroin and other drugs of abuse, which we can define as uncontrolled reward and reinforcement.

Close enough is good enough

That gambling activates the reward system isn’t a surprise. But the astonishing observation from this study comes when we look at brain activity when the subjects “almost win”.
In this case “almost wining” was when the slot machine dials stopped tumbling and 2 out of the three symbols lined up on the payout line and the third matching symbol appeared just above the “win line”. When this happened, the pattern of activity was in the same brain areas as when they actually won.

It seems that a near-miss is enough to trigger the reward > reinforcement cascade, and is effectively encouraging us to continue gambling.

As if to drive the point home the brain pattern of near-miss activity was also very different from the patterns observed when the slot machine spin was still a losing spin but where none of the symbols were anywhere near close to matching – despite the economic result being the same: zero dollars won.

From an evolutionary perspective, being rewarded or encouraged by a near-miss can be very advantageous. Whether you are a Stone Age man throwing a spear or a couch potato playing guitar hero, almost hitting your target is a signal that you are improving, and should continue.

Knowing the odds

While it wasn’t previously clear how it worked, the near-miss phenomena has been known for some time. What is perhaps more insidious though is that the optimum rate of near-misses to keep people gambling has been calculated at 30% and subsequently implemented into the programming of many slot machines.***

It’s important to note that the people tested in this study weren’t problem gamblers, but regular people just like you and me. The cycle of trigger and reward is a normal one that helps us predict future successes by observing the outcome of our actions. Sadly, when games of chance are involved, we see patterns that don’t exist and fail to realize our actions do not influence the outcome.

***UPDATE: This was the subject of some lawsuits and in the comments below slotdesigner indicates that this is no longer allowed in many US sates. In other countries and online however the issue remains murky.

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original image by clintjcl remixed by Patrick

February 26th, 2009