Sheldon Adelson thinks Asian people have a “greater propensity” to play in a casino than Caucasian people. But the rest of the world could soon be following Asia’s lead, says one of the United Kingdom’s most high profile scientists.
Baroness Susan Greenfield cites a generation brought up on daily use of computers and the Internet as displaying impulsive behaviour of a type identified in some scientific studies of gamblers. This is in contrast to the popular idea that in Asia it’s cultural notions about fortune and good luck that account for a love of a wager.
Baroness Greenfield is director of the Royal Institution in London, a scientific and research body founded in 1799. She is also Oxford Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology (i.e., the substances or stimuli that affect the electrical circuitry of our brains).
She claims children who repeatedly spend many hours at a computer may be changing the way their brains respond to stimuli.
“The prefrontal cortex of the brain is more evolved in humans than in any other creature. It also forms late in our development, not becoming fully active until our teenage years,” says Baroness Greenfield in a recent essay.
“If you damage the prefrontal cortex, your senses and movements are not impaired but you change; you become more reckless, lose a sense of sequence and consequence, of narrative and of your place in these sequences.
“We know this from studies of gamblers,” she states.
“We know it from obese people: the fatter you are, the lower the activity of your prefrontal cortex. We know it from small children in whom the area is not developed and from schizophrenics, whose prefrontal cortex is damaged.
“What do all these people have in common? Well, a gambler is aware of the consequences of gambling but does it, regardless, for the thrill. People know that if you eat too much you get fat but an obese person will keep eating. Small children have no understanding of consequences. The schizophrenic inhabits a world of dazzling colours but it is all about them: they live entirely in the moment.
“These conditions are about the sensory, self-centred ‘here and now’ instead of sequence and consequence,” she adds.
“What I am advocating is a hypothesis. That if we were to scan the brains of young people who spend a lot of time playing computer games and in chatrooms, we would find that the prefrontal cortex is damaged, underdeveloped or underactive—just as it is in gamblers, schizophrenics or the obese.”
Charming.
She adds: “We would find that they become confused between reality and screen life in their virtual world. And that in this confusion, they risk losing, neurologically, the ability to think.”
Baroness G’s hypothesis must itself have a health warning attached. In the UK, Dukes and manual workers alike love to gamble—sometimes even side by side at horse race meetings or in casinos—but among an ascetic urban elite (including the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown) there’s a long-standing mixture of fear and disdain that gambling is synonymous with losing control. In addition, Baroness Greenfield’s personal public profile in the UK depends to some extent on being a controversialist.
As far as Asian Gaming Intelligence can tell, the only thing distinguishing the computer-playing and Internet-browsing habits of young Asian people and young Caucasian people is service availability. If Baroness G’s hypothesis has legs, then Asian gaming stocks look like a sure fire long term bet, whatever the markets are doing at the moment.
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