Gambling and the Hero Journey

Engineering dopamine dependency to craft compulsive gambling experiences

We often think about problem gambling as a journey towards self-destruction. Which is why it is so difficult to understand why would one not stop gambling when faced with the dreary consequences that it brings. But what if we would look at extreme gambling behaviours through an archetypical lens and see it as something resembling a hero journey, an epic quest into the unknow? Would we understand the relationship ones build with their won gambling better? Would we be able to learn more about how we can help them reclaim and rebuild their lives free from gambling addiction?

Before we answer any of these questions, we need to briefly explore the role of dopamine in shaping gambling behaviour.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical messenger in the brain, that plays a crucial role in all kind of physiological and psychological processes, including our propensity for addictive behaviours. In essence, dopamine signals if you engage in behaviour and that behaviour produces a desired outcome. You get a dopamine kick that “feels” good, which is the generalised element, but the dopamine also preferentially encourages the neural structures that were active in the sequencing of that behaviour to grow and flourish.

If you get a totally unexpected reward from out of nowhere you can be sure that there will activation of dopaminergic reward pathways in your limbic system. This can create the illusion that dopamine is completely just about reward. Give someone cocaine and they will release more dopamine than any vertebrate in all of history has ever been or even will be able to do, and yes is all about reward. Until you then get a bit more subtle with your paradigm. And you take the same person and put them in a setting where you’ve trained them in a contingency. For example, a little light comes on and afterwards if they go over to a lever and hit the lever ten times then they will get a reward. Signal – work – reward. Signal – work – reward. And so on. And, as soon as they learned it, when does the dopamine go up? One would think that, learning from the first example, the dopamine will go up when you get the reward. Not at all. It goes up when the signal turns on. Because that is you sitting there saying, “I know how this thing works, I know what that light means, I am on top of this, I know that lever pressing, I am really good at it. I am in familiar territory and I have agency and this is going to be great”. The signal now shows that you are in a domain where the behavioural competences are matched to the environmental demands.

That would mean that dopamine is in fact all about the anticipation  and it makes all that sense in the world to be so. We cracked the code. But then you see this gigantic piece of vulnerability and lack of logic in this idea. So, the light comes on, the dopamine level goes up, it’s about anticipation. Really significantly though, if you block the dopamine rise you don’t get the level pressing. Therefore, it’s not just about anticipation, it’s also about the work that you are willing to do, propelled by that anticipation. This encapsulates motivation and goal directed behaviour. Now you can throw an extra wrinkle in the mix: when you get the signal and do the work, press the lever and all that, you get the reward only 50% of the time. It’s not guaranteed. At that point as soon as the signal goes on, you get a much bigger rise in dopamine than you got before.

You now entered an environment that is quasi predictable, but where there is also novelty. The advantage to have the dopamine signal kick in when novelty makes itself manifest is that it signals that is also more to be learned here through exploration that might signal extreme future reward if you can just map the territory properly. Because is good to have a good thing but it’s even better to have a potentially better thing.

The closest thing that is going on in your head when suddenly dopamine goes ten times higher is you've just introduced the word “maybe” into the neurochemistry of your brain. And “maybe” is incredible. What is always between the lines with maybe is the reinforcement of “if I keep pressing the lever I’m going to figure out what the maybe is about and be able to find the treasure. I am going the master this new territory”

The longer they can dangle the maybe in front of you the more they can manipulate you into thinking that what feels like a 50% chance of getting a reward in reality is one tenth of a percent or less, but they understand your psyche sufficiently that they can give you this intermittent partially reinforcement and it grips you. Because it falsely signals nearby novelty treasure. And this is how you can build the ultimately addictive slot machine. It started with the ones where the tumblers almost line up every single time. Then you are much more likely to get a dopamine kick. And then it went a step further. You can design  digital slots machine and code it to the player so the machine knows that there is the same player playing and that the proportion of almost lined up tumblers increases with game play. So then you would have intermittent partial reinforcement combined with a novelty indicator that falsely indicates that you were enhancing your mastery over the game. Because as soon as you switch from just going with “maybe”, incredibly powerful though that is, to going with “almost”, you get to a whole new level. And do that asymptotically and people will press a lever till they’ll drop or lose everything.

Understanding this intricate dance between dopamine and gambling may hold the key to helping those who find themselves ensnared in the complex world of gambling. Support can take many forms, but it most definitely must include education around the high addictive risk of certain gambling products and strategies to modulate dopamine levels and rewire the brain’s reward circuitry.