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 fire-setters. 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.
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.''
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.
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.