Mental Attitude: The Gambler’s Fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy is described as a situation when one outcome may seem more likely based on previous results in a game of chance, such as thinking a coin-flip has a greater than 50/50 chance of landing “heads” if the previous four flips landed tail side up. An experiment involving patients with damage to the part of the brain called the insula found that they do not succumb to the gambler’s fallacy. This finding suggests that people who are addicted to gambling may have hyperactive activity in this area of the brain and if future studies confirm this, it may lead to a possible treatment for gambling addiction.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2014