Do you think you have an addictive personality? No what about when it comes to games of chance are you fooled by the odds in your head?
New research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS reports that an area of the brain thought to be important for emotion may be hyperactive in gambling addicts. People who suffer damage to this area – the insula – do not appear to experience the distorted thinking that spurs people to keep gambling.
Dr. Luke Clark, of the University of Cambridge, and colleagues set out to explore whether there might be a neurological explanation for the erroneous beliefs seen in problem gambling. Medical News Today reports that to do this Dr. Clark and colleagues needed to examine patients with brain injury, as he explains: