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How Slot Machines Mess With Your Brain to Get You Hooked on Losing
There are few worse bets than a slot machine in the world of gambling. The games are programmed to ensure the house wins and they trigger a chemical surge in the brain that can fuel addiction, scientists say. The father of behavior analysis, U.S. psychologist B.F. Skinner, likened slot-machine players to the pigeons he’d trained to peck for scraps of food. Now lawmakers in Australia, where per-capita gambling losses are the biggest in the world, are renewing calls for tighter controls on the machines, which raked in A$11.6 billion ($8.9 billion) in the year through June 2015. Under Australian law, the so-called ... (full story)