Michael Souza - Psychology of Gambling

I'm really excited about today's lecture more than usual because we get to talk about something that fuses what we've learned in this class in a way that's very ecologically valid and today we're going to talk about the

psychology

of play, so there's a lot to this and to do it justice in 50 minutes is difficult, but certainly today we'll take a look at the surface and uncover some really important biological, cognitive and social mechanisms that underlie impulsive risky behavior and, in this context, the game and I think what you will see is that they are applied in such a way that you can also see other forms of addiction, a sex addiction, a drug addiction, an alcohol addiction, what you will find is that Many of the mechanisms that are true in

gambling

are also true in other forms of addiction, so what I want to do is start by talking a little bit about why we're talking about

gambling

and then we'll proceed to the various mechanisms on a couple of levels. different, so I first want to start with the idea that gaming for much of its history has been compartmentalized and what I mean by this is that there have been a certain set of places where gaming is acceptable, other places often They don't allow it, not even looking at Las Vegas.

Las Vegas has a history of sin. and it has been less than a hundred years where gambling has been acceptable and certainly the culture has changed quite significantly. You may have heard of Monaco in France, really stylish casinos, the Monte Carlo Bay Casino is one of them, very stylish and high caliber, really everything. Being five stars, you've probably heard of Atlantic City. Atlantic City, right next to New York, is kind of the Las Vegas of the East, it has many of the same luxuries, including gambling, that you could find in Las Vegas and the time it was. east coast style in the United States to keep people on that side of the country and not fly to Las Vegas why go to Las Vegas when you can go to Atlantic City?

You certainly have the Las Vegas Strip, how many people have been there? Las Vegas show fans Wow Wow good 60 70% I can see between 200 people Las Vegas is so much fun. I think one of the things you'll notice about Las Vegas is that there is no place like it in the world and that means a lot of different things, this place is open 24 hours a day, it has some of the most incredible architecture you'll ever see , see just a little bit you can bet 24 hours a day and not only can you bet but you can also bet your entire life savings a story that you may have heard about a couple of years ago is that a man in England He was a little fed up with his life and sold everything he owned and took every possession he ever had for about $70,000 each.

I fly on the way to Las Vegas and I bet everything on roulette, I bet everything on one color, he bet it on red and you think about this, it's a big decision that you have to make right, if you win, incredible, you double your value if you lose, Well, let's not think about that. who won and changed his life Las Vegas can change your life who started Macau Johanns fewer hands but still a significant number around 50% of the class Macau is a state-approved Republic of China in Macau you also have a strip that rivals The Las Vegas Strip certainly rivals it in terms of revenue because after this year Macau makes more money than Las Vegas.

This is the new gambling mecca. Asia's Las Vegas is quite interesting, making more money and undergoing massive development. The coat I wear the most. and more casinos, many of the same people who own casinos here are taking advantage of this incredible opportunity. It is a booming industry. You can win an incredible amount of money. Certainly, it is also portrayed in movies and you have seen it several times. In different contexts, you've probably seen it in James Bond. We are betting huge amounts of money and poker is very sexy and risky. He's betting millions of dollars like it's nothing.

Most of us would say that's more than anything except for it's a game and he fights terrorism with it, at least in the context of Casino Royale, maybe you've seen the movie Casino and Casino is a really interesting movie that talks about some of the dark sides of casinos and gambling, but the way you see people gambling is what I want to take note of Robert DeNiro in this case, he's the casino manager, he talks about how stupid It's the people for gambling, who spend all this money to go to Las Vegas, they throw away all their money and leave with no money it's almost like gambling is a really stupid thing for people to do, that being said, a lot of people still do it, it's fair say bachelor party in Las Vegas, often places like Las Vegas or Reno or places like that are seen as places where you can go, have fun, have fun and do whatever you want and somehow, when you leave that place, everything What you did, no matter how bad it is, you are somehow absolved of it and can go back and live your normal life.

Well, you have a vacation in Las Vegas. I showed a short clip before class started. This one is really interesting because Chevy Chase, here in the context of the movie, has a bit of a gambling problem. He loses $26,000. It includes a charge on his flights along the way. At home, his family is clearly distraught, but somehow it all comes together and he takes a winning Hino ticket from a man pretending to die and gets all the money back and suddenly the game looks in a very positive light that you can just like this your luck changes you can have bad luck things may not be working out but a good bet changes everything well you see it in the context of the movie 21 many of you probably saw this movie where a group of MIT students this happened Strategies of real life practice in blackjack that are known to reduce the house edge and win millions of dollars.

They eventually got caught and got into trouble, but it was seen as a way to beat the system and make exorbitant amounts of money. in this case you made enough to go to Harvard Medical School for four years $300,000 in real life you made a lot more easy money pretty interesting right you're hungover of course top right really interesting you know the premise of that one movie they need $80,000 to They get their friend and simulate what happened in the movie Rain Man, where Rain Man was a wise man. Ah, our little friend posed as Rain Man, took the skills from him and suddenly made $80,000 in about an hour and then he's fine. go well for easy money and then you get the realistic side.

Vegas is something incredibly beautiful for many people, it is also something very dark, sad and scary. Documentaries like this. The American Las Vegas Experience looks at how amazing Las Vegas is and how it makes you feel. feels and what it does to people's psyches, but it also talks about the dark side, how it has ruined people's lives and therefore provides perhaps a more balanced view of the game and perhaps my favorite quote. I know you've all heard this, even if you have. If you haven't been to Las Vegas, you've seen this commercial, you heard about it from a friend.

What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. You can go to Las Vegas and be someone else. Moral boundaries are expanded and one of the ways you can apply that is. With gambling, certainly, other things are possible in Nevada. Now the idea with this is that the game was first more compartmentalized, but the idea has changed and the game is becoming more available, even driving here from San Francisco when I moved here for my work, what I noticed is that Casino density has increased dramatically, especially when you get into Washington, where you can throw a rock and hit a casino, go to that casino, throw another rock and hit another, they seem to be everywhere and that's certainly true in British Columbia.

There are also several casinos. I'm sure you've seen River Rock, maybe been to it. There is actually a sky train stop at River Rock in case you don't have a car, so you can still get there. Well, you have Edgewater Casino in downtown Vancouver, so between games you know you're watching the Canucks game and you can get down for less than a few hundred dollars. Come back and have a great time. It's also true in Washington, just a few miles south of the border. when you cross into Washington you have the Silver Reef casino. As you continue descending, there are many interesting opportunities to make decisions however you want.

I now have a personal connection with gambling. Gambling is the reason I couldn't go to college when I was 18. My father is old and he was a pathological gambler and he gambled away my college funds and I got into UC Dave and there was no money to go, so gambling in that sense was also what got me to college because I worked at a casino. for a year and worked about 60 hours a week and made enough money to go to college for three years working in a casino for a year as a blackjack dealer and then as a blackjack supervisor.

A unique life experience, extremely interesting. I'd love to talk about it in more detail, but suffice it to say that I think there are social reasons to consider gambling, but there are certainly personal reasons as well. They certainly differ for different people when you look at the effect in Canada, it is striking in terms of gambling income. increased several times, so if you look between 1992 and 2008, gambling revenue in billions increased to just over 14 billion and this considers Canada as a whole during this period and if you break it down by province , British Columbia does. It's a fair share if you look at gambling profits in 2008, $1.1 billion a year and the government, because gambling is regulated, gets a cut of that, so it's a highly profitable business.

Canada and other places in the world, here is the question not only is there a casino near you, but also is there one on your computer and you see this commercial? How many people have seen this Play commercial? Now calm down, if you watch TV, you see it, you can't help but see it, especially at night, you see this, wow, this is so much fun, look at these sexy people with all this money and you can sign up and get $100 and you could win, You know, 50 million dollars and blah, blah, blah, blah, it's really amazing, there are incredible opportunities here.

You no longer even have to leave the house to bet and play any game you want. Location and travel are no longer a restriction on this behavior and because of that many more people play, it doesn't have to be a bad thing but in some cases it can be quite destructive and today's goal is to talk about some of the mechanisms by which people begin to gamble, but also, more importantly, the mechanisms by which they continue to gamble despite even large losses, both personal and financial. What are some of these mechanisms? quite a few, so in any casino, I MGM Grand, for example, has a Players Club called M life.

If you join this exclusive club, you get benefits, maybe you get money back for betting a certain amount, you get a discount, if not, you get free dinners. tickets, hotel rooms, etc., etc., and light credit cards do the same when they return a certain amount for the purchase. Gambling institutions will return you a certain amount, they call them compensations, a type of fringe benefits that are given to reward you for your gambling. The more you play and the more money you play, the more you will win, like when you have a credit card, the more you use it, the more rewards you can get depending on what you are using.

This is interesting because it's one of those things. what people think about when they lose, well I may have lost $1000 but I got to see that show with Celine Dion with my wife and I and we had an amazing dinner, the value of that may be a few hundred dollars a cash loss. certainly more, but this is something people often consider when losing money. Well, it could have been worse, at least I got this out. You feel like you are winning something even if you lose money and if you win money, you still win. things so it's even better some mechanism to win even if you're not winning at the tables look at this approach motivation this is an Aria casino how many people have been to Aria shows fans only a handful this is part of the new center called center of the city in Las Vegas, the casino on the outside looks like this, it is absolutely modern, absolutely beautiful and this is a view of the inside of the casino and it will draw your attention to a couple of things, one is that you see that the casino curves, This is the main floor and you walk this way the casino curves for a reason, it curves because they don't want you to come into the hotel and they have seen everything they want you to come in to explore because the more time you spend in a casino the higher the possibility that they can win money by buying food shows that the scene is certainly gambling, we know that many casino games favor the house, some more than others, the more you play, the more time you can lose, so I want to create an environment that makes you feel welcome, that youmake you feel powerful, make you want to be there, because if you don't want to be here you can't make money, the lighting is a certain way, many times you see that the tables are structured. around bars or where young people congregate right, it's informational influence right other people are gambling having fun boy that looks like fun I should do it too they create a culture that makes you feel powerful and maybe you've played before maybe you've done a little bit of money maybe you've tasted that power just when you know more about the game, so it seems that where you have a lot of money where you have more power it feels good for casinos to create a culture to cultivate that is no accident Certainly, when you come in and you see people playing like you do here, you see a lot of people playing different games, you see machines working, you know we are social creatures, we look at other people for cues on how to behave and whether a guy has a lot of money or a girl in front of her, they are playing and they are having a good time, a lot of people think and rightly so, boy, that looks like fun.

I should do that too, maybe I could make 20 bucks or a hundred bucks or whatever I can manage to be with the crowd if other people are doing it having fun, why shouldn't I? let's create a culture that reflects on this idea and casinos are extremely effective in this regard, you know, in casinos in the past they used to make sounds to make it seem like more coins were landing correctly because it would make it sound like more people were winning everything at once. Maybe you think God, you know Jack over there and Joey over there making money.

I might be too and this is the interesting thought. By not betting, I'm actually losing because I could be making money. A really powerful form of logical change. Let's talk about some of the cognitive characteristics. I think this is the most surprising one: money doesn't mean the same thing in a casino and you might think that of course it does. You are playing with money. Casinos are pretty smart. It's an incredibly clever structure, so if you go to a table game like blackjack and you want to play, let's say you have $100, they don't let you put the hundred dollars on the table to bet, but instead you exchange the hundred dollars into chips, maybe it's these colorful Flamingo chips that are worth five dollars each and you get 20 of those, okay, okay, slot machines do the same thing.

I put my hundred dollar bill in the machine, if it's a five dollar machine, I have 20 credits. tokens or I have credits is no longer money, you might think well, you know, people are very smart, they still know that that is money. I agree people still know that chips are money but the value of chips seems to have changed and I love this quote during game money loses its economic value it doesn't go away but it certainly changes put another way I know that $20 in chips is more than $10 in chips I know $20 in cash can buy a t-shirt but $20 in chips and the relationship with the t-shirt is distorted now in college I don't know if you use a metric like this in college I used to rank things in terms of burritos I used to do it is a true story I love Chipotle and back in the day you could get a delicious burrito for five bucks so $20 would buy four burritos so I'm thinking well I could buy that desk for $100, but it's 20 burritos.

That's how I would calculate things a little strange, but for me it worked mathematically, possibly my calculation is correct. If this logic is followed, $100 here doesn't equal that many burritos in the same way, maybe this explains why when someone has a pot of chips they are more likely to just shove them in, maybe it's a lot less likely to do so. You have to take a bunch of money, a bunch of wads of bills and put them in the circle, but the tokens are smaller, it's much easier to do. which is a $100 token. I've seen $25,000 chips at Bellagio.

I've seen the $100,000 chip and it's a very nice chip, don't get me wrong, but suddenly that huge, exorbitant amount of money, piles of cash, is now a chip that distorts our view of what that really means. Maybe you've seen Casino Royale, the James Bond movie where they have half a million dollar chips, the money is really big, their chips are right again, it's the same idea that the money changes to a different object and that different objects of They somehow mean that it is worth less than what is really interesting, one of the most notable things seen in games of chance.

It is an illusion of control and more specifically it is that people believe they can control events that they cannot write about in the past. This was a problem for some unfortunate blackjack dealers, which is why the term dumping comes from the dealers and basically says this when I say I'm trading and I lose all the time and I pay all the players I dump. I'm throwing all my money at the players and of course that's a wonderful thing if you're a less exciting player, maybe. If you are a casino and in the past dealers who folded or lost a lot were actually fired and this doesn't make any sense because the dealer can't control what cards come out of that shoe, but the bosses still take the blame and lost their works, a real world example, it's really interesting how many people play Yahtzee, anyone plays dice or anything with dice, I only a handful, well my mom plays Yahtzee.

I love my mom to death and what she does when she needs sixes. she shakes them like this and blows on them, shakes them, maybe rubs them against the cat and then throws them as if doing any of those things would really influence the outcome, but it's funny, because one of my moms does this stupid thing. thing and rubs it against the jack and rolls and gets a six, she thinks yes, it works well, you're making that link even though there's no causality there, that silly behaviors don't necessarily affect the outcome, you can believe that it does. do. and this affects people in the real world when they play if they have the special role if they feel lucky they are more likely to bet more if another person has rolled several times and the person seems less likely to bet less and therefore based on On these things that have absolutely no relation to the outcome, people change their betting behavior.

However, one of the interesting things here is even in a coin toss game when people toss a coin and guess if it's heads or tails if you get the first ones right, even if you're not a player you're much more likely to attribute this to skill, meaning that you are good at guessing which coin, which side of the coin will appear in the In the real world, this applies to slot machines. If you win a few times at first, you're more likely to think yeah, I picked the right machine. I'm good at this. Slot machines are my thing, although that has nothing to do with it. the result and this is especially true of pathological gamblers which is when good events happen they are more likely to say wow it's because I'm a skilled gambler I have experience I've been down this road before when something bad happens they're most likely to say it's just bad luck, my bad, so they really focus on the positives, they really discount the negatives and therefore the negative learning doesn't affect anything to the extent it should.

We talk about the players' fallacy in roulette. It's actually pretty common, so black has come up eight times and there's a good chance someone thinks, wow, I should bet on red because if black and red are 5050, reds have to come up and we commit that fallacy and a lot of Sometimes we lose, we use poor probability, but I think even more notable is the superstitious behavior. I used to work late morning shifts and would often sit at a table with no customers and, like many people, would observe others and watch people do. the silliest things about slot machines and these are all true stories, a person before pulling the reel went like a waterfall and then he pulled and the funniest but true story, a young woman who must have been 19 or 20 years old, had a cowgirl She put the hat on and what she would do before she turned is she would do this and then she would press the button and I really enjoyed watching this and I was thinking to myself, why was she 18?

Why would she think the lasso's behavior? It actually affects the outcome and I was still at the table there was no one there and she walked by and she had a big smile on her face and I said, excuse me, I said she was just curious about her superstitious behavior. I did something in the past to help you with that and she said yes, in fact, I think she got a little discouraged. I didn't mean to insult her. She said the last time I was here I did that and I won $1500. She said that was fair and I said well, okay, I said do you really think the lasso behavior led you to win and she said no, maybe not, but it doesn't hurt and I was thinking to myself, yeah, but it doesn't either. help and It seems a bit silly, right, that said it's true.

I didn't tell her that she was having a great day. Who am I to ruin it? But it was very real for her and I'm sure the next time she went to Jackson. Rancheria, she did the same, very well, she reinforced the behavior. $1500 is a lot to make, so if you think you can do something to help make that happen again, why wouldn't you? you're reinforced at a random time and she happened to be reinforced when she was doing this lasso for luck, that's what I called it and she continued to do it in the future she saw an association that maybe wasn't there, what about the bias?

In assessments we came to this a little bit in the past and so this is often the process of discounting the losses, making the losses as small as possible and really focusing on the winds and, for example, a large example of this with poker. Poker is a big deal when I was in Italy, the only station that was in English was poker and it was broadcast 24 hours a day, so I watched a lot of poker, it was interesting and this cattigan from 2008 I think won 10 million dollars per win the sinky World Series of Poker. Wow, that's an incredible amount of money.

I'd love to win ten million dollars, right? I was thinking. Wow, when you look at it's one person and you think about how many people they lost, thousands of people lost, but somehow we put more importance on the good event and less so late in the event, you know, not so good, other people They lost, it's interesting how we do it and so when you ask people who play regularly to think out loud while they play, you see this exact pattern when they win. I attribute it to well that was a good play I made boy that was just a sharp thought when they lose they'll probably say I just had bad luck that was impossible no big deal it's a lot easier to dismiss bad luck than a bad move, interesting.

The Downside of Optimism I was reading this article and it is really very interesting. Optimists are more likely to continue gambling longer than they probably should because they often have the belief that eventually the problem will be solved with the money. You have to go? It is no coincidence that when you enter a casino there are ATMs. You can cash your payroll check at the cash register. You can upload and withdraw money from your credit card with a cash advance. Maybe you've seen it. those old machines with a little phone where you call your credit card company you say yes, I really want to withdraw this money and they give it to you, interesting, how far do you have to go?

Pathological gamblers will go thousands deep, many thousands deep. they could lose their house etc, seeing as that happened optimism, I'm not saying be an optimist, let me clarify, I'm just saying it can be a dangerous thing when applied to certain topics, sometimes you have to know when to quit, okay, close the near miss is my favorite maybe you've experienced this before maybe you have a big bet on blackjack and you have a thirteen and you say "hit me" and you get a nine and you barely lose you're very close to 21 or maybe you're on a machine slot machine you're on the wheel of fortune slot machine this happened to my wife she was playing it was amazing so you get seven a seven and then blank ah you're so close because you had two sevens it's really interesting we call these near misses where You are very close to winning, but maybe one little thing is wrong.

Here's the thing, casinos and slot machine manufacturers know that this really reinforces things and that's why they designed slot machines that generate disproportionately high numbers of near misses and the reason for this is that a near miss reinforces your behavior as much as win well, what is the key difference between them winning? You don't actually make money when there's a near miss, right? from near misses, it induces something really powerful we call cognitive regret and you think you know my wife took the 7/7 Blanc and you can't help but think, what if it was a third seven?

What if she won $2,000? Be amazing, you feel bad for being so close,TRUE? The only way to feel better after something like that is to keep playing and pursue it correctly and in fact that's what we do and even more powerfully after a near miss, people bet more on blackjack. and slot machines will bet more because maybe they think you hear this all the time with slot machines, slot machines are getting hot, right? Have you heard that before it gets hot, my time comes? I have a few thoughts because maybe you've heard of it. That's the type of thinking and then you increase your bets, the problem is that the more you bet, the more you can lose, certainly the more you can win, but also the more you can lose, okay, really, very interesting, so what happens in the brain ?

So we have a well-documented system. pleasure center in the brain this pleasure center is in the midbrain, we will simply call it midbrain and this part of the brain lights up or activates when you feel something pleasant when something good is happening, in effect, this is what research can be done. and early research in rats showed that if you stimulate this part of the brain in a rat, the rat feels amazing. Also, you can place an electrode on the rat's brain and connect it to this lever and when you push the lever it activates. this part of the brain rats will push this lever and push it often at the expense of food and other vital necessities some rats will push this lever to death because they refuse to eat or do other things that save their livesbehaviors it's interesting how it looks like a slot machine, I'll surprise you, you know, this observation is really funny, it comes from behaviorist BF Skinner.

I said as you listen, you know people are betting because they have been strengthened in the past, they won in the past, it feels good and that's why they play in the future to get similar results, nothing surprising, really interesting, although how the fuck, how the Slot machine behavior looks pretty much the same and this is what I want to argue that perhaps understanding this area of ​​the brain and other related areas of the brain is the key to not only understanding gambling behavior but even broader addiction such as I mentioned the onset of substance dependency, alcohol, drugs, sex addiction, etc., and so on.

In Canada alone, between 1 and 2 percent of Canadians have a gambling addiction and would be considered pathological gamblers by the APA. There are about 600,000 people in the United States. The estimates are even higher, depending on which estimates you look at, more than five percent, if not more, and so on. you're looking at fifteen million people and this is something that affects a lot of people. You go to Nevada and you go to the gas stations, they have slot machines. You go to the grocery stores, they have slot machines, they are everywhere at the airport. and there are slot machines, you open the slot machine and there is another slot machine, they are available everywhere, availability is not the problem, so this creates a unique challenge.

If you think about people who seek rewards, we all seek rewards, things that feel. Well, if gambling and winning money is something you especially enjoy, it's very hard to resist that in an environment where it's everywhere you can't fill up your gas tank without seeing a slot machine and the sounds they make make the new sounds you already have. you know. like that and falling coins are everywhere, so what happens in the brain is really interesting. We have video games, you know, maybe they come on the Nintendo Wii, maybe they come in another form, a handheld game and you can play blackjack or poker or whatever game you want.

I like it and you can play four points and the goal of the game is to win as many points as you can. This is also real and there are casinos where you can play those same games electronically, video poker, video blackjack, whatever, but you are actually playing for real. money and then what happens when you imagine the brains of people who are pathological gamblers and compare it when they win points with real money? What you find is that when they win real money, this rewards center is on fire, very, very active. much, much more active than a non-pathological gambler, the brain's response to these monetary opportunities is vigorous and perhaps that is associated with cravings, they are a kind of desire to gamble, obsessive thoughts.

I can't help it, but what if I could go out and make money? a strong brain response could explain a lot of things, very interesting here, negative correlation between the degree to which you are a pathological gambler and your brain activation, here, what do I mean by that? Well, let's look at the task, very, very simple task, you have two. piles of cards that you choose from one of the piles and they are red or black and your job is to guess if they are red or black. It's like flipping a coin and guessing whether it's heads or tails.

Heads or tails. You can do this on the computer and you can create a program that has people write occasionally and occasionally incorrect and so you can compare essays when they are correct and when they are incorrect, which you see in control subjects, people who are not pathological gamblers. So you see really strong activation in the reward center that we just mentioned, but also in these frontal areas, these orbital frontal areas. We talked about this a little bit earlier in the course, that the orbital frontal cortex helps encode value, so if I have a delicious cupcake in front of me or a dr. pepper I can watch the activity in these frontal and frontal lobes and it will predict with relative certainty which one I'll choose before I even move, so maybe this engagement is thinking quite a bit about the value of the outcome, thinking about what I might win.

This focuses a lot on the fact that people who are pathological gamblers have much less activation and the less activation they have in these reward centers, the more likely they are to be a serious pathological gambler and so what does that mean? Maybe we pathological gamblers need more stimulation to get the proper activation of this reward circuit correctly and therefore bet five or 10 dollars, oh that's good and you can win five or ten dollars, but what happens if you bet 50 ? What if I bet a hundred? What happens if you bet 6000? I remember seeing ah, so I told him. you guys the other day in class I remember seeing a guy who came up to me when I was playing roulette put six thousand dollars in the red because the last six shows were black oh he lost and left like it was no big deal I didn't lose that money and I had a strong emotional reaction.

I wanted to vomit. I could not believe it. He couldn't believe someone cared so little about money, but for him, he walks straight to another table and takes out another piece. and you get it back or it's not really interesting maybe they need that extra stimulus maybe that explains why they bet so much and play so often. It's amazing when you work in a casino you can't help but notice human behavior, one of the things I noticed that horrified me is that some people were wearing dependent diapers so they wouldn't have to get up from their machine or get lucky at the table and you would think that It's crazy that people get it right and it's one of those things that only has to happen once, maybe this has happened to you, you're playing on a machine for an hour and you lose your money and move on to the next one, a guy walks up, puts $1.00 in there and wins. $1,000 and you're thinking, oh, I can't believe what I got if I had played a little more to avoid having to get up, but you know those annoying things like eating and using the bathroom, things like that that people use. diapers and gambling for 36 hours, wasn't that all in common at the casino he worked at?

I saw the same people every weekend, they would come and stay for 72 hours, they would be there when I arrived, they would be there when I left, they would be there the next day, they wouldn't stay in the hotel, they would play all the time, they would play all the time. As long as they could, they would take as much money as they could to play, the busiest time of the month for a casino is when starting in the middle or at the end is the beginning of the month, that's when people get paid, that's when welfare checks are being sent out its really worrying this is what I want to focus on guys gambling doesn't have to be something terrible just like the brochures that casinos often offer you you have to know your limits, You bring fifty dollars if you lose fifty dollars, get it over with, put your head down and go home, the problem is that people don't stop at that point, they continue, what if, what if, what if that feeling of power? that feeling of being in the crowd that possibility, what would happen if I win?

Think about these machines, these Willa Fortune machines where the jackpots are two hundred thousand three hundred thousand, if not more, it's a very sexy thing to think about, what if I won that? it would change my life Las Vegas was built on this principle, the principle of what if, true, it's not likely, but if it happened, it happens to people and that's why casinos often have their wall of winners. Jackie, from here, from Tennessee, won 700,000, they customized. If your name could be next, why not give it a try? That's the idea behind creating this course that I would like to do next year.

There are many different things we can see and we are really just scratching the surface today. You can see the social influence that initiates but also perpetuates the game. You can look at the cognitive mechanisms that distort this realistic perception, this tendency to enjoy the gains and savor them and savor them, but also to discount the losses and be in that phase as such. as little as possible to look at reward and addiction and it's pretty certain that if you look at the literature, a lot of these different addictions share the same neural architecture. How many people would say they are addicted to raising their hand on their smartphone?

Was. I'll take one for the team. I had an iPhone in Berkeley. I love iPhones. Is incredible. I get probably 50 to 100 emails a day and if you have your iPhone set up for email, I can be the kind of thing that's so convenient. It could also be what drives you completely crazy and I found that I was checking it every ten seconds because I normally get an email every 10 seconds but more often I need to react. I want to answer. emails I want to be good about this, we often put ourselves in situations where addiction is possible, if not probable, for me.

I don't even have a cell phone anymore. I may sound like a caveman, but for me it was great for my mental health. could change the situation for what it's worth and look again at the casino strategy, this is getting into neuroeconomics, neuro marketing, how can you create situations that make people feel good, that make them feel powerful, that make people want to spend money? people are going in this direction, whether they are in gaming or another industry, I think the same principles apply and many high powered companies, Hershey's, etc., hire people like this to study what others will find most attractive for you.

In the brain you can observe the level of behavior and explore past, present and future treatment options for this addiction and also for other addictions. This is something that affects a couple percentages of Canadians. You can imagine that number will increase. What can we do? about that, okay and I hope this evolves into a two out of seven psyche, whether it's next year or the year after that. If people are interested enough, ah, you ask, yes, there are several things you can do and depending on your therapeutic approach, you can give people medications. to reduce the impulsive you and that's kind of the feeling of oh I want to play right now, maybe something could suppress that feeling a little bit, also cognitive therapy, right, you can change the way people think about the situation, Take a step back and realize that the way you think about winning and losing and whether or not you have skill in these situations doesn't exactly align with reality and therefore you can reframe the way you think.

Behavioral therapy can punish gambling behavior and reward more positive behavior, etc. Depending on the therapeutic approach, you can go in one direction or another, yeah, okay, so everyone heard that. Wow, this is a man who knew he had a pathological gambling problem and asked the casino to put him on a no-gambling list. He came in. He gambled anyway and is suing the casino for allowing him to gamble. I'll leave it at that with the other questions, okay, thanks guys.