Games in the Brain: Neural Substrates of Gambling Addiction (2015)

Neuroscientist. 2015 Jun 26. pii: 1073858415591474.

Murch WS1, Clark L2.

Abstract

As a popular form of recreational risk taking, gambling games offer a paradigm for decision neuroscience research. As an individual behavior, gambling becomes dysfunctional in a subset of the population, with debilitating consequences. Gambling disorder has been recently reconceptualized as a “behavioral addiction” in the DSM-5, based on emerging parallels with substance use disorders. Why do some individuals undergo this transition from recreational to disordered gambling? The biomedical model of problem gambling is a “brain