Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, some say. But to the gambling brain, almost hitting the slot machine jackpot may be just as good as actually winning, a study appearing in the Feb. 12 Neuron suggests. The results may help explain gambling’s allure.
“This is a very elegant study,” comments Marc Potenza, an addiction psychiatrist at Yale University. “From a public health and clinical perspective, this is very important.”
When all three cherries hit the payline and money pours out of a slot machine, select regions of the brain activate. Called the reward pathway, brain cells in these regions signal pleasure by releasing and detecting the feel-good chemical messenger dopamine. “Those same areas are recruited by natural rewards, like chocolate, and by drugs of abuse, like cocaine,” explains coauthor of the study Luke Clark, of the University of Cambridge in England.