answer that I can come up with (and one that you mention yourself) is that as a society we are more comfortable removing responsibility if there is an external agent that it can be placed upon. So, it is easy in the Parkinson’s case to say that the gambling pathology resulted from the medication, but in the case of the pathological gambler, because there is no external agent influencing their behavior (well, there is-societal pressures, casino billboards, life stresses, etc.-but, nothing as pervasive as medication that a person must take), we are more reluctant to blame the addiction and prefer to put the responsibility for their pathological behavior on themselves-‘they should know better and not gamble,’ for example. I think as cognitive neuroscientists learn more-and ‘modern’ brain imaging is only about 20-25 years old as a field-perhaps some of these misguided societal beliefs (that even we cognitive neuroscientists sometimes hold) will slowly begin to change. For example, from our data, while I can comfortably conclude that there are definite differences in the brains of pathological gamblers versus non-pathological gamblers, at least when they are gambling, and I might even be able to make some claims such as the near-misses appear more win-like to the pathological gambler but more loss-like to the non-pathological gambler, I cannot state with any confidence or certainty that these differences therefore imply that the pathological gambler does not have a choice when they see a billboard advertising a local casino-that they are a slave to their urges. In the absence of hard direct evidence, I guess the best we can do is draw inferences by analogy, but there is much uncertainty associated with such comparisons.”
[283] “whatever the latter may be” William James,
[284] the Metaphysical Club Louis Menand,
[285] “traced by itself before” James is quoting the French psychologist and philosopher Leon Dumont’s essay “De l’habitude.”
