A part of the brain linked to emotion may drive gambling addicts to keep trying their luck, research has shown.
Scientists homed in on the insula, a folded area buried deep within the cerebral cortex, by studying patients with damage to different brain regions.
Those whose insula was damaged did not exhibit the distorted thinking shown by most people who succumb to the lure of gambling.
The researchers believe this suggests that it plays a central role in gambling addiction.
Lead scientist Luke Clark, from Cambridge University, said: “We believe that the insula could be hyperactive in problem gamblers, making them more susceptible to these errors of thinking.
“Future treatments for gambling addiction could seek to reduce this hyper-activity, either by drugs or by psychological techniques like mindfulness therapies.”
Scientists believe a brain area called insula plays a central role in gambling addiction
Gamblers are susceptible to two key mental problems that keep them losing their money.
Firstly, they are encouraged to keep betting by what they see as ‘near misses’. Secondly, they believe that if something happens more frequently than usual it is less likely to happen in the future, and vice-versa. This is known as the ‘gamblers’ fallacy’.
For the study, the researchers gave patients with injuries to three different areas of the brain two gambling tasks designed to trigger both responses.
One was a slot machine game that delivered wins and ‘near misses’, such as a cherry one position away from the jackpot line. The other was a roulette game involving red or black predictions aimed at tempting players into the ‘gamblers’ fallacy’ trap.
All the groups, apart from patients with insula damage, reported a higher motivation to play after near-misses in the slot machine game, and fell prey to the ‘gamblers’ fallacy’ in the roulette game.
The findings are reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“While neuro-imaging studies can tell us a great deal about the brain’s response to complex events, it’s only by studying patients with brain injury that we can see if a brain region is actually needed to perform a given task,” said Clark.
The insula is largely responsible for what makes us human. It is involved in consciousness, em-pathy, social emotions, and possibly even appreciation of music.
Because of its inaccessibility, it remained something of a mystery until the development of brain-scanning technology.