It’s fairly obvious that if you don’t sleep well at night, you tend to lack of concentration skills the next day, leading you to make lousy decisions. But now a group of scientists have come out to prove this fact by linking gambling and sleep deprivation.
The researchers took 29 healthy adults and deprived them of sleep in a laboratory environment. They then used MRI scans to measure brain activity when they gambled in a bid to see the outcome of their decisions. It was found that sleeplessness affects the brain’s assessment of monetary gains and losses, therefore affecting their ability to make wise judgments about their gambling habits.
The study showed that when the participants were asked to make decisions about money in their gambling activities after a sleepless night, they tried to maximize their winnings and focused less on protecting their potential losses.
“While well rested participants sought to minimize the effect of the worst loss, sleep deprivation caused the same individuals to be less concerned abut losses and to shift to a a strategy that improved the magnitude of the best gain,” said the authors of the study.
Naturally, casinos have known this all along without the need to prove the facts scientifically. It is for that reason that many casinos don’t have windows and instead flood their floors with bright lights to trick your brains into thinking it’s day.
One of the authors of the study, Vinod Venkatraman said: “Late-night gamblers are fighting more than just the unfavorable odds of gambling machines; they are fighting a sleep-deprived brain’s tendency to implicitly seek gains while discounting the impact of potential losses.”
Comments are closed.