Skip to main content

Thought 2 - Rat Gambling

Warning: Do NOT read this if you are offended by animal experiments.

What started out as an conversation about probability and statistics, lead to gambling, then to whether you can study gambling addiction in a controlled lab. This conversation then got a bit out of hand. What follows is how this might be accomplished, and a history of the conversation.

First you train a rat to press a lever that dispenses food or a treat or some other reward. Once this is established, you then introduce a penalty for "losing" on a gamble. This could take the form of a mild shock. Randomly either give the animal a reward or punishment with about a 50/50 ratio. Then slowly change the percentage over to increasingly more punishments than rewards until the rat no longer presses the button, it has learned that gambling is not a good idea.

Well that seemed like a decent start, but then we discovered that we were missing the element of a jackpot. This lead to either wiring up the rat's pleasure center of the brain, or dispensing a dopamine releasing drug, like say cocaine. Then add the "jackpot", into the reward with a very small probability, but make it show up early so that the rat is always sort of "chasing the dragon". Then find out how the "jackpot" alters the rat's cutoff point.

Anyway, it's just a thought.

Comments

Inky Neverwhere said…
This makes me think that part of the problem with human gambling addicts is that they don't associate the overall loss with an immediate negative consequence. Now, if the casino machines delivered an electric shock along with the loss of a quarter, nickel, token...
July 28, 2008 at 2:05 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thought 16 - Kid Power

In response "Thought 14 - Perpetual Cat" sugarbumkin said, "The same theory could be applied to balloons tied to kindergarteners at recess. I like it." Well this got me thinking... Clothes with that are laced with MEMS generators. A MEMS generator is a solid state electronic circuit that generates low level of current though passive motion of the environment. Things like temperature change, acceleration, and even Brownian motion are converted to power using a MEMS generator. So, now we have attached them to small free moving bipeds of pure energy. How do we get the energy back. I figure that we isolate the playground into a large battery configuration where the children are running around on a conductive plate that makes contact with the heels of their shoes. They will run around with a super capacitor in addition to the MEMS, when their feet touch the ground the super-cap is discharged into the conductive plate underneath them. I do not think that the childr
2 comments
Read more

Thought 44: Phone Home

This is actually two thoughts in one, but they are both phone related. Thought 44.1: The backside keyboard. We created the typewriters since 1829 and they've use all of our fingers in an effort to create efficiency. We have even created varieties of key layouts such as qwerty and Dvorak to improve the typing speed. Then we took a huge step backwards and created the cell phone with only the 12 buttons for typing, reducing not only the number of keys by the number of fingers usable on those keys. Then we made the thought that if we just replicate the full qwerty things would be better. And to some extend they are, but we still are reduced to just 2 fingers, or rather thumbs to type with. Then it struck me, the full key set could go on the back of the phone. Well at first it seems rather stupid how do you see the keys to type on them, but does/should a touch typist ever look at the typewriter or keyboard? No. The buttons on the back could be a full qwerty keyboard split and r
1 comment
Read more

Thought 1 - Future Bike Helmet

Now that I have a motorcycle, I realize the potential future possibilities of the helmet. Wherein the helmet can become more than just mere protection, but a useful interface and aid to the rider. The concept stems from three currently available, but edgy technologies: transparent displays, blue tooth, and EEG recording. Technology 1: Transparent Displays Transparent displays are just now being put into high end cars and modern aircraft to create a dashboard on the windshield allows the driver or pilot to view the instruments, like speedometer, radar, engine problems, etc. This is typically done with a projected display onto a special film on the window. It can also be performed by simply building the LCD into the screen. The built in is not done because it is more costly in terms of construction of the display and a crack or chip in the display becomes an LCD ink blot. The projector could potentially be built into the visor of a motor cycle helmet, especial now that mini projec
1 comment
Read more