Brain part behind gambling addiction found

Cambridge scientists have found that the activation of a part of the brain, called insula, is responsible for gambling addiction.
New research led by Dr Luke Clark shows that brain damage affecting the insula - an area with a key role in emotions - disrupts errors of thinking linked to gambling addiction.
During gambling games, people often misperceive their chances of winning due to a number of errors of thinking called cognitive distortions.
For example, 'near-misses' seem to encourage further play, even though they are no different from any other loss.
In a random sequence like tossing a coin, a run of one event (heads) makes people think the other outcome (tails) is due next; this is known as the 'gambler's fallacy'.

There is increasing evidence that problem gamblers are particularly prone to these erroneous beliefs.

Researchers from the University of Cambridge examined the neurological basis of these beliefs in patients with injuries to different parts of the brain.
"While neuroimaging studies can tell us a great deal about the brain's response to complex events, it's only by studying patients with brain injury that we can see if a brain region is actually needed to perform a given task," said Clark.
Researchers gave patients with injuries to specific parts of the brain (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, or insula) two different gambling tasks: a slot machine game that delivered wins and 'near-misses', and a roulette game involving red or black predictions, to elicit the gambler's fallacy.

For the control groups, they also had patients with injuries to other parts of the brain as well as healthy participants undergo the gambling tasks.
All of the groups with the exception of the patients with insula damage reported a heightened motivation to play following near-misses in the slot machine game, and also fell prey to the gambler's fallacy in the roulette game.
"Based on these results, we believe that the insula could be hyperactive in problem gamblers, making them more susceptible to these errors of thinking.
"Future treatments for gambling addiction could seek to reduce this hyperactivity, either by drugs or by psychological techniques like mindfulness therapies," Clark added.

The study was published in the journal PNAS.