How Gambling Addiction Affects Your Brain August 14, 2018. Most people love gambling because of the awesome experience and the possibility of winning huge prizes. However, some gamblers (3%) don’t have fun because of the negative impacts of gambling on their life including financial problems. How Gambling Addiction Affects The Brain When one thinks of addiction, an inability to curb a craving for alcohol, heroin, cocaine, or other illegal drugs is usually what comes to mind. With these types of addictions, an individual develops a tolerance, then a physical dependency, and then can’t stop using. Gambling doesn’t just affect your wallet. It impacts your relationships, health, and wellbeing. Individuals who are addicted to gambling tend to have worse health due to ingesting caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, even other and illicit substances. It can also negatively affect your mental health. Gambling can cause anxiety, stress, depression, and even suicide. Riding the highs.

• How Gambling Affects The Brain
• How Gambling Affects Your Brain Tumor
• How Gambling Affects Your Brain Damage
• How Gambling Affects Your Brain Problems

When Ann Klinestiver, a high school English teacher in Milton, W.Va., was first diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, she was desperate for anything that might calm the tremors caused by the disease. She found relief in a new drug called Requip.

'At first, the drug was like a miracle,' Klinestiver says. 'All my movement problems just disappeared.'

Over time, however, Klinestiver needed higher and higher doses of the drug in order to ease her symptoms. That's when she became a gambling addict. Although she'd never been interested in gambling before, Klinestiver was suddenly obsessed with slot machines. Every day, she would drive to the local dog racing track and play slots until 3:30 in the morning. After a year of addictive gambling, Klinestiver lost more than $200,000.

Klinestiver's medication worked by imitating the effects of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain. Parkinson's is caused by the death of dopamine neurons in brain areas that control bodily movement. But dopamine also plays a central role in the pleasure centers of the brain, influencing how we see the world and respond to it. Recent medical studies have found that anywhere from 3 to 13 percent of patients on the kind of medication Klinestiver was taking develop severe gambling addictions or related compulsions. In early 2006, Klinestiver was taken off Requip. Her tremors worsened, but her gambling addiction vanished. 'I haven't gambled in 18 months,' she says. 'I still think about the slots, but the obsession isn't there.'

Stories like Klinestiver's, and research into dopamine's role in the brain, are helping neuroscientists understand the temptation of gambling and the scourge of gambling addiction. This research may also change the way we see casinos, and help shift the debate over whether the government should further regulate slots, roulette wheels, and other games of chance. From the perspective of the brain, gambling has much in common with addictive drugs, like cocaine. Both work by hijacking the brain's pleasure centers -- a lure that some people are literally incapable of resisting.

'Gambling games grew up around the frailty of our nervous system,' says Read Montague, a professor of neuroscience at Baylor University. 'They evolved to exploit specific hiccups in our brain.'

In recent years, gambling has spread across America, with gambling generating revenues of $2.9 billion in New England in 2006. The question of gambling is of particular relevance for Massachusetts. Last month, the town of Middleborough voted in support of a massive new gambling complex, to be built on lands owned by the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. Governor Deval Patrick is currently considering proposals to expand gambling across the state, and several developers are looking at sites in Boston.

The growth of the gambling industry has been accompanied by a large amount of new scientific research explaining the effects of gambling on the brain. The neural circuits manipulated by gambling originally evolved to help animals assess rewards, such as food, that are crucial for survival. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter involved with the processing of these rewards. Whenever we experience something pleasurable, such as winning a hand of blackjack or eating a piece of chocolate cake, our dopamine neurons get excited. These neurons help the brain learn about the pleasure, and attempt to predict when it will happen again.

Gambling: Why Can’t I Stop?

One reason why gambling is hard to stop is because it affects your brain.

Gambling is like pressing the gas pedal of your car. Your brain’s reward hub ‘fires up’ as you think about a win.

Your brain also has a brake system. The ‘top-down control network’ is used when you want to stop gambling.

How Gambling Affects The Brain

When your gas and brake pedals work, it’s easier to control your gambling.

How Gambling Affects Your Brain Tumor

For some people though, gambling no longer ‘fires up’ the brain with excitement. So, to feel pleasure, they ‘floor it’ by gambling more.

Meanwhile, their brakes may be faulty. They might not notice it’s time to stop gambling. Or, if they try to stop, the brakes may not work.

How Gambling Affects Your Brain Damage

How Gambling Affects Your Brain Problems

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