{"id":12466,"date":"2019-05-10T11:55:17","date_gmt":"2019-05-10T15:55:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=12466"},"modified":"2019-05-10T11:55:17","modified_gmt":"2019-05-10T15:55:17","slug":"against-the-odds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2019\/05\/against-the-odds\/","title":{"rendered":"Against the Odds"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Gambling\"<\/a>\n

Picture yourself at a Las Vegas poker table, holding a bad hand\u2014one with a very low chance of winning. Even so, the sight of the large stack of chips that piled up during a recent lucky streak nudges you to place a large bet anyway.<\/p>\n

Why do people make high-risk decisions \u2014not only in casinos but also in other aspects of their lives\u2014even when they know the odds are stacked against them?<\/p>\n

The decision to \u201cup the ante\u201d even in the face of long odds is the result of an internal bias that adds up over time and involves a \u201cpush-pull\u201d dynamic between the brain’s two hemispheres, according to a team led by biomedical engineer Sridevi Sarma<\/a>, an associate professor and a member of the Institute for Computational Medicine<\/a>. Whether you are suffering from a losing streak or riding a wave of wins, your cumulative feelings from each preceding hand all contribute to this nudge factor, the researchers say.<\/p>\n

Insights from the research have the potential to shed light on how soldiers in high-risk combat situations make decisions and to facilitate more effective brain training to change long-term behaviors or habits, the researchers suggest.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we learned is that there is a bias that develops over time that may make people view risk differently,\u201d says Sarma, senior author of a study that was published online in January in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em><\/a>. Pierre Sacr\u00e9, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins, co-led the study.<\/p>\n

For their study, Sarma and team turned to patients with epilepsy who had already undergone stereoelectroencephalography, a procedure in which doctors implanted multiple deep-seated electrodes in patients\u2019 brains to allow the doctors to locate the source of seizures for future surgical treatment.<\/p>\n

Then the Johns Hopkins researchers asked these patients to play a simple card game involving risk taking. The electrodes gave Sarma and her team an intimate look at the patients\u2019 brains in real time as they made decisions while gambling against a computer.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that the players are accumulating all the past card values and all the past outcomes, but with a fading memory,\u201d Sarma says. \u201cIn other words, what happened most recently weighs on a person more than older events do. This means that based on the history of a participant\u2019s bets, we can predict how that person is feeling as they gamble.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why do people make high-risk decisions \u2014not only in casinos but also in other aspects of their lives\u2014even when they know the odds are stacked against them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":12469,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[4306,4301,4175,410,121,110],"class_list":["post-12466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-impact","tag-pierre-sacre","tag-sridevi-sarma","tag-sri-sarma","tag-neuroscience","tag-department-of-biomedical-engineering","tag-institute-for-computational-medicine","issue-spring-2019"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAgainst the Odds - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2019\/05\/against-the-odds\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Against the Odds - 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