Video poker image courtesy of Softlandmark.
I just finished reading an interesting commentary that may save you money at the poker table!
A new study in the May 1st issue of the Journal Sleep found “that sleep deprivation jeopardizes decision-making at a gambling table by elevating the expectation of gains and making light of one’s losses following risky decisions.”
Researchers at Duke University studied healthy volunteers as they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and found that the area of the brain involved with the anticipation of reward becomes selectively more active when high risk-high payoff choices were made under conditions of sleep deprivation.
Interestingly, “the number of high risk decisions did not increase with sleep deprivation, but the expectation of being rewarded for making the high risk gamble was elevated.”
This could be why when people stay up all night playing cards and gambling they take crazy risks that they shouldn’t. This could also hold true for people staying up all night on online gaming sites.
Don’t get me wrong -- I love to play cards, but what this study is telling us is think long and hard before you go “All in” at 3am.
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