Gambling Addiction: Enter the (Twilight?) 'Zone' Where Winning is a Distraction?

"We can spend an awful lot of time pursuing a pleasurable experience that is far from "mission critical" — like discovering how a piece of machinery is assembled, or nutting out the pattern to a sequence of symbols.
This kind of puzzle can be frustrating, but the pleasure of eventually solving it spurs us on — and crucially, our brains process the anticipation of that understanding as a form of pleasure.
Chemically, even though we've done nothing useful, this is the same reward we get for achieving a survival goal.
And it's that anticipatory pleasure pathway which goes into overdrive when we gamble. It can lead us to a place that addicts call "the zone", where even winning the jackpot is a distraction from the game."
Gambling addiction: Enter the 'zone' where winning is a distraction

""If you give them a predictable set of rewards, then they lose interest quite quickly; if it's unpredictable, they tend to establish behaviour which is very hard to extinguish."
The second manipulation is called classical conditioning — discovered way back in the 19th century by Anton Pavlov.

He found that feeding a dog, and associating that food with a sound, meant that the dog would eventually salivate at the sound alone."

A little less conversation

A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me baby
Baby close your eyes and listen to the music
Drifting through a summer breeze
It's a groovy night and I can show you how to use it
Come along with me and put your mind at ease
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark
A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart and baby satisfy me
Satisfy me baby
Come on baby I'm tired of talking
Grab your coat and let's start walking
Come on, come on
Come on, come on
Come on, come on
Don't procrastinate, don't articulate
Girl it's getting late, gettin' upset waitin' around
A little less conversation, a little more action please
All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
A little more bite and a little less bark

A little less fight and a little more spark
Close your mouth and open up your heart...

A parallel universe with real-world consequences

"It's also highly addictive.

The dopamine release is what keeps people going back to addictive drugs like cocaine, Dr Livingstone says.
And over the past 100 years or so, the architects of gambling environments have become masters at utilising this chemical cycle in our brain — to the extent that gamblers really don't welcome anything which disrupts it, because it takes them out of their "zone".
"The zone was very much about flow and rhythm and repetition and just continuing," says Natasha Schull, a cultural anthropologist who spent many hours in the casinos of Las Vegas researching the design of gambling environments and the way gamblers behave.
She spoke to addicts who said winning a jackpot just made them feel annoyed."

"Carolyn Hirsh is a former Victorian MP and psychologist, and was also a self-confessed gambling addict.

She remembers the power of that psychological conditioning in action.
"There's the music, there is the sound when you win, and you think 'I've won', although you haven't — you've actually lost.

But music plays," she says.
"People come around and give you free coffee and look after you, there's that nice feeling.

But … I think the real thing is the way the machines are designed alters the brain."
These changes to the gambling brain can do a lot of damage.

Being in "the zone" means being in an alternate universe, where family and responsibility don't seem important.
There's even data to show an association between areas with a large number of poker machines and the rates of particular kinds of crime, Dr Livingstone says."

The gambling zone

""The harms of gambling include separation, fraud, financial disaster, divorce, violence and neglect of children," he says.
"They are associated with mental and physical ill health, and of course ultimately with suicide. Most people who experience gambling harm are too ashamed to admit that they have succumbed to such a silly addiction, as they see it.""

Jesus/Rose/Planet Terror?

Ding, ding?!