Michael Platt People Quotations

Some people are impulsive, some people are not; some people think through their decisions while others don't, and sometimes this can become pathological. Impulsive behavior can be associated with all sorts of mental disorders like addiction or problem gambling. If it could be demonstrated that we could change the way people perceive risk and ambiguity by introducing a medication that could influence brain chemistry, someday we might be able to alleviate some types of pathological decision making.

It seemed very, very similar to the experience of people who are compulsive gamblers, ... While it's always dangerous to anthropomorphize, it seemed as if these monkeys got a high out of getting a big reward that obliterated any memory of all the losses that they would experience following that big reward.