Biology of Brain May Hold Key For Gamblers
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: October 03, 1989
THE psychological forces that propel so many chronic
gamblers to ruin marriages, lose jobs, and even turn to
crime may spring from a biological need for risk and
excitement, a new study has found.
The biological findings suggest that pathological
gamblers suffer from an addiction like alcoholism rather
than problems in controlling impulses, as had been
thought by experts. If the findings hold up, researchers
say, they may one day lead to a treatment for compulsive
gambling, perhaps through the use of drugs.
When it comes to ordinary gamblers, though, the
underlying causes are quite different, researchers are
finding. While biology may explain the extreme gambler,
psychologists are finding that basic flaws in applying
otherwise useful habits of everday decision-making lead
millions of Americans to keep losing regularly at
lotteries and casinos.
The findings are part of a new effort to understand the
psychology of gambling as its spreading legalization has
led to a rapid growth in the number of people whose
obsession with games of chance is having ruinous
consequences. The number of problem gamblers in
America is estimated to have more than doubled since
1974, to at least two million.
While psychiatry's official diagnostic manual classifies
pathological gambling as a disorder of impulse control,
like the need to steal or set fires, new data directly
challenge that view. The first study of pathological
gamblers to use sophisticated medical techniques has
found that they may suffer from disturbances in their
central nervous systems.
The study showed that the gamblers had lower levels
than usual of the brain chemicals that regulate arousal,
thrill and excitement.
They may engage in activities like gambling to increase
their levels of these chemicals in the noradrenergic
system, which secretes them. Chronic gamblers, like sky
divers and those who take to other high-risk sports, are
more prone to thrill seeking than most people, studies
have shown.
''Pathological gamblers seem to be driven by the need
for the thrill; it stimulates an underactive noradrenergic
system,'' said Dr. Alec Roy, a psychiatrist formerly at the
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Dr.
Roy did the new study with the institute's co-director,
Markku Linnoila, a psychiatrist. It was published in the
August issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry.
In the study, 17 chronic gamblers, many of whom were
in legal trouble because of crimes they had committed to
pay gambling debts, came for tests and observation at
the institute. Using urine samples and spinal taps, the
researchers determined that there was a significant
deficit in levels of a byproduct of the brain chemical
norepinephrine.
Norepinephrine is secreted under stress, as in moments
of great risk or intense excitement. Some brain
researchers think such a deficit can lead to a need to
engage in activities like risky, exciting games that will
stimulate the brain to secrete more of it.
'Sensation Seekers'
Other researchers have found indirect evidence that
levels of norepinephrine are elevated in gamblers while
they play. And studies of gamblers done at the
University of Glasgow showed that while gambling they
showed physiological signs of excitement like increased
sweating and heart rate, which are typical of heightened
norepinephrine.
While Dr. Roy said the finding needs to be repeated by
other researchers before strong conclusions can be
made, it fits with a great deal of other scientific
evidence. The same abnormality found in the gamblers
has been reported in people whom Dr. Marvin
Zuckerman, a psychologist at the University of
Delaware, describes as ''sensation seekers.'' The
abnormality leaves them in a low level of alertness,
which they find uncomfortable - a state they may
describe as ''bored,'' for instance. Activities that excite
them raise the noradrenergic levels to a point they find
more satisfying.
In other words, Dr. Roy says, activities like parachute
jumping or high-stakes roulette, which would make
most people extremely uncomfortable, make these
people feel pleasantly alive. A 1984 study of people
gambling in a casino found that those who scored higher
on a test of sensation-seeking tended to make bigger
bets, and to have a greater increase in their heart rates
even if their bets were not particularly large.
''If gamblers have an abnormality of the adrenergic
system, it could make them seek the excitement of
gambling as a way to increase their norepinephrine
levels,'' said Dr. Roy. He noted that chronic gamblers
have told researchers that they gamble for the thrill, not
the money.
Findings Were Unexpected
The finding about norepinephrine was a surprise to Dr.
Roy. He had expected to find a lower level of serotonin,
which would indicate that gambling was related to poor
control of impulse. Low levels of serotonin have been
found, for instance, in people who attempted suicide or
impulsive acts of violence, and in pathological firesetters. But Dr. Roy found no abnormalities in levels of
serotonin among the gamblers. Now he, and a growing
group of other experts on the topic, believe gambling
should be reclassified as an addiction.
Even before the new biological findings, those who treat
gamblers had come to parallel conclusions. ''Compulsive
gambling is an addiction without a drug,'' said Dr. Sheila
Blume, a psychiatrist who is medical director of a
program for treating compulsive gamblers at South
Oaks Hospital in Amityville, L.I. ''The dynamic is similar
to alcoholism or drug addiction, but the high is the
thrilling, aroused state of anticipation, of being in the
action.''
''Gambling has all the hallmarks of an addiction,'' said
Dr. Valerie Lorenz, a psychologist who directs the
National Center for Pathological Gambling in Baltimore.
''It follows the classic course for an addiction: it becomes
chronic and progressive, tolerance levels increase, and
you lose all regard for the consequences of the habit.''
In a sense, many pathological gamblers may be turning
to the thrill of gaming as a way to treat an underlying
depression. ''Pathological gamblers get a rush, an
adrenaline high while in the action, then crash into
depression after they stop,'' Dr. Lorenz said. ''To stave
off the sense of depression, they go back to the thrill and
excitement of gambling. It's a classic addictive cycle.
Except money is the substance they abuse, not drugs.''
Dr. Blume and her associates have developed a
screening questionnaire to identify pathological
gambling. In a survey of 1,000 adults, the test found that
1.5 percent were pathological gamblers and another 3
percent had serious problems with gambling. The
results of the survey, by Rachel Volberg and Henry
Steadman, epidemiologists at the New York State Office
of Mental Health in Albany, were published in The
American Journal of Psychiatry in 1987.
For the vast majority of ordinary gamblers, the studies
show, the urge to bet again and again despite losses has
less to do with brain chemistry or addiction than with
faulty thinking. Gamblers hold a special fascination for
psychologists who study decision-making because of a
paradoxical question: why do otherwise rational people
persist in losing money at games whose odds they can
never beat?
The answer, psychologists say, is that gamblers rely on
rules of thumb that have proved highly successful in
other realms of daily life. One of these is the credo, ''If at
first you don't succeed, try, try again.'' Gambling is one
realm in which these principles do not work.
The persistence of unsuccessful decision strategies is
one result of illusions fostered by the design of games of
chance, says Dr. Willem A. Wagenaar, an experimental
psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
According to studies by Dr. Wagenaar and other
psychologists, reviewed in his book ''Paradoxes of
Gambling Behavior'' (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
1989), gamblers are also victims of beliefs that lead
them to overlook the laws of probability.
A Gambler's Illusion
A trick of memory helps the gambler cling to the illusion
that his chances are far better than they really are.
Studies have found that gamblers are much better able
to recall their wins than their losses. This skew in
memory is exaggerated, Dr. Wagenaar says, by the wide
publicity given to winners of lotteries and the attention
paid to jackpot winners in casinos. Such practices foster
the illusion that winning occurs far more often than it
does, and so leads gamblers to think the odds are far
better than is the case.
Dr. Wagenaar observes that lotteries are usually set up
with several classes of prizes, an extremely complex
structure ''that even baffles the statistician at first sight.''
This serves to make not only the largest prizes but the
large overall number of prizes very conspicuous in the
lottery player's mind. This in turn obscures the small
number of large prizes, the low value of most prizes and
the vast number of unsold lottery tickets that are
sometimes kept in the pool of numbers being drawn,
thereby raising the odds against winning.
Big Rise Since Legalization
The national trend toward the legalization and
promotion of gambling has vastly increased the number
of people addicted, Dr. Lorenz said. ''Fifteen years ago
the typical problem gambler was a white, middle-class
man who was a sports or casino bettor,'' she said. ''Now
the addiction is pervasive: you see it in teen-agers,
housewives, the elderly people we never saw before. I
have patients in their 70's who are facing criminal
charges, and who never gambled at all before their 60's.''
That information would seem beside the point to most
players anyway, Dr. Wagenaar points out: the most
common basis for deciding to play is that the prizes are
appealing and the price of the ticket seems right. Few
players, if any, pay attention to the abysmally small
chance of winning.