A recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences points out that hyperactivity in the insula, an area of the brain related to the development of emotions, favors the appearance of frequent errors of judgment among gambling addicts.
They often suffer from cognitive distortions that prevent them from realizing their true chances of winning or losing. For example, these people are encouraged to continue playing when they think they have narrowly missed a bet, even though, in reality, there is no difference between narrowly or very narrowly missing .
This perception can also be seen in the so-called gambler’s fallacy : those who experience it believe that after a series of unsuccessful results a success will inevitably occur, although it does not have to be the case.
During the investigation, coordinated by Luke Clark, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, several individuals who had suffered damage in different areas of the brain, such as the amygdala, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex or the insula, were asked to play a roulette wheel and a slot machine specially prepared to show award-winning results and approximations.
Using neuroimaging techniques, the experts observed that only those whose insula was affected did not show the aforementioned tendency to continue gambling when they were “narrowly wrong”. These were also the least likely to get carried away by the gambler’s fallacy.
In the opinion of these scientists, all this suggests that activity in the insula is closely related to distortions of judgment that occur among gamblers . “In the future, therapies aimed at treating addiction could try to reduce hyperactivity in this area, either through drugs or psychological techniques,” says Clark.
