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Why a healthy brain is no good for gambling |
27/09/2010 |
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Marc Abrahams |
Brain damage can
give gamblers an edge in certain circumstances, a study shows
Brain damage can sometimes give gamblers a
winning edge, an American study suggests. The researchers take a flier at
explaining how and why certain brain lesions might, in some circumstances, help
a person to triumph over others or over adversity.
The study Investment Behavior and the
Negative Side of Emotion published in the journal Psychological Science,
renders its tantalising, juicy question into lofty academese. The five
co-authors, led by Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University,
ask: "Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain
circumstances, to more advantageous decisions?"
The team experimented
with people who had abnormalities in particular brain regions the
amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the right insular or somatosensory
cortex. Medically, those can be a sign that something's amiss in how the person
handles emotions.
Each
brain-damaged person got a wad of play money, and instructions to gamble on 20
rounds of coin tossing (heads-you-win/tails-you-lose, with some added twists).
Other people who had no such brain lesions got the same money and the same
gambling instructions.
The brain-damaged gamblers pretty consistently
ended up with more money than their healthier-brained competitors. The
researchers speculate that when "normal" gamblers encounter a run of unhappy
coin-toss results, they get discouraged and become cautious perhaps too
cautious. Not so the people with brain-lesion-induced emotional disfunction.
Encountering a run of bad luck, they plough on, undaunted. And then enjoy a
relatively handsome payoff. At least sometimes.
The study notes that
this brain damage side-benefit might occasionally even save someone's life.
They cite the case of a man with ventromedial prefrontal damage who was
driving under hazardous road conditions: "When other drivers reached an icy
patch, they hit their brakes in panic, causing their vehicles to skid out of
control, but the patient crossed the icy patch unperturbed, gently pulling away
from a tailspin and driving ahead safely. The patient remembered the fact that
not hitting the brakes was the appropriate behaviour, and his lack of fear
allowed him to perform optimally."
Shiv has an eye for non-standard
ways of exploring human behaviour. He sometimes teaches a course called The
Frinky Science of the Mind.
In 2008, he and three colleagues were
awarded an Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating that expensive fake medicine is
more effective than cheap fake medicine.
Marc Abrahams is editor
of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel
prize
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