Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by superkuh 928 days ago
I appreciate the correction and the reference. I am suprised that they decided to put gambling disorder with the substance abuse disorders under "Substance-related and addictive disorders". But the bulk of the paper is about how all the other behavior disorders besides gambling do not have sufficient evidence to include them with the addiction disorders. This continues to support my point, re: interaction with websites.

>reflecting ongoing evidence that gambling disorder triggers reward pathways in the brain the same way that drugs do.

Yes, people find things that are intermittently rewarding to have more incentive salience eventually. But gambling with random operant condition is not hijacking those neuronal populations responsible for reward prediction (like the dopaminergic neurons of the ventral tegmental area) and activating them in the absence of reward. It is merely reacting appropriately to actual reward as encoded by activation of the glutamergic populations of the shell of the nucleus accumbens (at least). That's a huge difference... though apparently not big enough to stem the political and social tides.