JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich. And we are talking on Radiolab about things stochastic.

JAD: Like coin flips and lottery tickets and ...

ROBERT: Well, let's just push this whole argument another step forward, if we may.

JAD: What do you mean?

ROBERT: Let's talk about human beings. Would it surprise you, Jad, if I told you that on the subject of predictability humans and coins are kind of similar?

JAD: It wouldn't surprise me because I wouldn't believe it.

ROBERT: [laughs] You would believe it if I made you an argument so powerful and so astonishing that you would be falling back on your butt in surprise and staring at me with a kind of simple admiration that you rarely have. Because here it is, I'm going to talk to you about basketball.

JAD: Basketball?

ROBERT: That is a sport where people ...

JAD: First of all, A) what do you know about basketball?

ROBERT: I mean ...

JAD: Basketball is a game of skill. Don't even try and pretend that there are, like, random forces like coin flips. No.

ROBERT: Well, let me ...

JAD: No. Nope. Zip. No.

ROBERT: Let me make you an argument. Let me make you an argument.

JAD: Hmm.

ROBERT: Let's just take, to make it really interesting, the most skilled basketball team ever.

JONAH LEHRER: For example, you could take a look at the '82 to '83 76ers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: The Philadelphia 76ers' Maurice Cheeks ...]

ROBERT: That's Jonah Lehrer, regular on our show.

JONAH LEHRER: It's one of the best NBA teams of all time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, sportscaster: Ramon to Cheeks, Cheeks to Dr, J, swooping it underneath, putting it up and in.]

JONAH LEHRER: So during the playoffs, the 76ers were all incredibly hot.

ROBERT: Take my man Andrew Toney. During this run, he was ...

JONAH LEHRER: Sometimes Andrew Toney would make five shots in a row. He would be considered hot.

ROBERT: So that's the deal. Andrew hits his mark once, hits his mark twice, hits his mark three times. Now I'm gonna pass to him because he's obviously hot.

JONAH LEHRER: The basket looks to him that it's the size of a soccer goal.

ROBERT: He's golden. He's got the gods on his side.

JAD: And why are we talking about them?

ROBERT: Well because in this situation, you would have to agree that Andrew Toney was hot, right?

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: That's the word. So let me ask, what exactly do you mean when you say "hot?"

JAD: Why are you asking me? Because he's making a bunch of shots in a row. And if you're on his team and you're coming down the court, you pass the ball to Andrew because he's on a roll.

JONAH LEHRER: What the fan assumes is that after five shots is that he's more likely to make a sixth shot.

JAD: That to me just seems like common sense. If he's making lots of buckets, of course you're gonna pass it to him.

ROBERT: And did the players assume this? Obviously, they're gonna pass, right?

JONAH LEHRER: Oh, the players all believed this.

ROBERT: The coaches believed this too?

JONAH LEHRER: The coaches believe it, so it actually dictates the plays they call. Everyone assumes it to be true that the hot hand is a real thing and dictates the flow of basketball games.

ROBERT: Thank you, Jonah. But ...

JONAH LEHRER: The hot hand doesn't exist.

JAD: What? You just went through this whole rigamarole about the Sixers being hot.

ROBERT: Yeah, well they were a great team, but a lot of scientists have looked at this question of hotness in sports, and in fact, there's a couple of scientists who actually looked at all of the made shots and the missed shots of this 76ers team, and when they looked directly at the numbers, emotions aside, just the data, here's what they found ...

JONAH LEHRER: At the very moment you think you're hottest you're actually freezing cold.

JAD: Wait. That can't be right.

JONAH LEHRER: Some of these percentages are pretty damning.

ROBERT: Take Andrew Toney. During the regular season Toney made 46 percent of his shots.

JONAH LEHRER: 46 percent.

ROBERT: After hitting three shots in a row, which means he's in the zone, he's totally there, his field goal percentage drops to 34 percent. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm telling you, Jad Abumrad.

JAD: [laughs]

JONAH LEHRER: And the reason seems to be is that Andrew knows he's hot, or he thinks he's hot, so he's taking less responsible shots. He's taking the three-point jumper from way beyond the arc, and he assumes his streak will somehow save him.

JAD: No, that cannot be. Because Jonah, you've been to basketball games. You see what happens. Guy makes three shots in a row, the crowd gets up, suddenly there's an electricity in the air. Every time the guy gets the ball, everyone stands up in anticipation. You're telling me that's all a figment of our collective imagination?

JONAH LEHRER: It is a figment of our collective imaginations, and it's especially a figment of the way we kind of calculate streaks. The reason Andrew seems so hot is because he makes three, misses the fourth, makes the fifth, misses the sixth, makes the seventh and eighth. And so we rewrite that essentially random process, this mixture of makes and misses, we rewrite it in terms of, oh, it's a streak. Once we think he's hot, we tend to edit what actually happens to kind of preserve that sense of the streak.

JAD: Ugh!

ROBERT: Okay, don't believe Jonah. What about Jay Koehler, our statistician from Arizona State. Listen to him.

JAY KOEHLER: I have no reason to think, even if whether he missed seven in a row or made seven in a row or made three of his last four, I don't really care, I know that he's a machine. He's like a 52 percent shooting machine, or whatever his number is.

JAD: No, but he's a ...

JAY KOEHLER: And ...

JAD: He's not a machine though, he's a person with confidence that ebbs and flows. There's a difference. There's got to be a difference there.

JAY KOEHLER: I agree with you. You've just described the psychological theory that makes the hot hand belief so compelling, and so hard to get rid of with data. But it just doesn't matter whether the player made three or missed three, their probability of making that fourth shot, that next one, is pretty much the same.

JAD: This is very, very depressing, because essentially what you're saying is that basketball players are like ...

ROBERT: Coins.

JAD: ... coins.

JAY KOEHLER: Yes. Yeah.

ROBERT: The fact is, Jad, you are—and Kobe Bryant, even—is more like a coin than any of us had dared to imagine.

JAD: No!

ROBERT: Kobe has a pattern. In his case, it's what? 60/40?

JAD: Shh, stop it. Stop it!

ROBERT: On any given night with Kobe you think oh, this is—he's spectacular, but all he's doing is he's just having another night of his very 60/40 life. And that's just the way it plays out.

JAD: Even on a shot-by-shot basis you're saying?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JONAH LEHRER: Each shot seems to be kind of a random event.

ROBERT: Exactly. Are you willing to concede that statistically this is a ...

JAD: Not yet.

ROBERT: Come on!

JONAH LEHRER: It's so counterintuitive, I still as a basketball fan I was just watching a game the other night saying, "Pass it to Kobe, [bleep][00:06:00.15]assholes because he's clearly hot." The only exception to this whole, whole literature of streakiness is ...

SOREN WHEELER: Hockey.

JONAH LEHRER: No, is ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: The sport no one cares about.

JONAH LEHRER: Is it Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak where he hits for 42 games in a row? I've got it in the book somewhere.

JAD: Actually, Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak was 56 games. 56.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah, so Joe DiMaggio is just about the only outlier you can find in professional sports.

SOREN: He's the only real hero.

JONAH LEHRER: Yep.

JAD: Well, at least I got Joe.

ROBERT: You know what, Jad? One reason you have trouble, I think ...

JAD: More than trouble. I still don't believe this.

ROBERT: Well, it's because you're not the only person who is a person of pattern and habit. We all are. Pattern rules the brain. Here's another story. This is, again, from Jonah Lehrer, but this one is about a woman. I believe her name is Ann.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I'm Ann Klinestiver. I live in a small country town where most people know other people.

JONAH LEHRER: Ann was a high school English teacher.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I taught for 31 years.

JONAH LEHRER: She now lives in West Virginia.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Can you wait just a minute? There's someone at my door. I'm sorry.

JONAH LEHRER: No, no. Of course. Of course.

JONAH LEHRER: Ann was an upstanding citizen, went to church every Sunday. Was just one of those people who ...

ROBERT: Makes the world go round.

JONAH LEHRER: ... makes the world go round.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I'm sorry.

JONAH LEHRER: Not at all!

ANN KLINESTIVER: Anyway, in 1991, I would go to the grocery store, and on the occasions I wrote a check for my groceries, the woman would say, "Gosh, you're shaky."

JONAH LEHRER: And she says she began to notice that her hands would start to tremble.

ANN KLINESTIVER: " Are you all right?" But I just thought maybe it was because of working hard and trying to get everything done.

JONAH LEHRER: And it got particularly bad when she said she was just walking in the mall doing some shopping.

ANN KLINESTIVER: And I was by myself walking, and it was like I stepped off a step that wasn't there.

JONAH LEHRER: It was the first full body tremor. She fell.

ANN KLINESTIVER: And then my husband was a doctor, and he sent me to a neurologist who diagnosed me with Parkinson's.

JAD: How old is she by the way?

JONAH LEHRER: She was, at that point, in her early 50s.

ROBERT: What is Parkinson's?

JONAH LEHRER: Parkinson's is the death of dopamine neurons in the back of your brain, in the part of your brain that controls bodily movement. And so when these neurons die, the end result is first the shaking hand and the loss of feeling and the loss of movement. And then, of course, the tremors get worse and worse.

ANN KLINESTIVER: But anyway ...

JONAH LEHRER: Well, the doctor diagnosed her with Parkinson's, and he gives her a drug called Requip.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Requip was a new medicine in 1992.

JONAH LEHRER: It's a pseudo-dopamine. It basically mimics dopamine in the synapse of the cells.

ANN KLINESTIVER: And it was like a miracle drug for me.

JONAH LEHRER: Her tremors disappear. Her symptoms disappear.

ROBERT: So she's cured? Or ...

JONAH LEHRER: If you looked at her on Requip years after she had Parkinson's, you wouldn't notice anything. She would seem symptom free. So about seven or eight years go by, all the while they're upping the dosage to compensate for the cell loss that's still taking place. And in the early years of 2000s something sort of unusual happened to Ann.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Some friends of mine had gone to Las Vegas every year for that basketball tournament, the Final Four type thing. And they asked would I like to go with them, and I said, "Yes, I would."

JONAH LEHRER: So she went to watch basketball, but as often happens in Vegas, one afternoon she and her friends found themselves in a casino.

JONAH LEHRER: Had you ever gambled before this trip to Las Vegas?

ANN KLINESTIVER: No, I was raised in a household that was fairly religious, and we considered gambling a sin.

JONAH LEHRER: But as she stood there in the casino in Vegas, she had this inexplicable urge to go to the slot machines.

ANN KLINESTIVER: They had frogs and princes and cars and cherries and lemons. Push a button, the wheels spin and see what the pictures did. I've never taken any drugs so I don't have anything to compare it to, but it was like a high. That was sort of the beginning of it.

JONAH LEHRER: And then when she comes back to West Virginia ...

ANN KLINESTIVER: I couldn't wait to get to a machine. I really wanted to play.

JONAH LEHRER: She discovers the dog-racing tracks about 15 miles away from her house.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I'd go there at 7:30, be there when they opened.

JONAH LEHRER: And that's where she would go. And they had a wide assortment of slot machines.

CASHIER: Hi, how are you?

ANN KLINESTIVER: If I had the money, I'd play all day.

JONAH LEHRER: From 7:00 to 3:30 in the morning.

JAD: Whoa!

JONAH LEHRER: And then she would go home and play slots ...

ANN KLINESTIVER: On the computer.

JONAH LEHRER: ... on her computer. Not even for money, just for the sheer visceral thrill.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I would play that the rest of the night. 7:30 the next morning I'd be back at the joint.

CASHIER: Hi, how are you?

JAD: Without any sleep at all?

JONAH LEHRER: No sleep. And she could keep that up for several days in a row.

ANN KLINESTIVER: At the beginning of my gambling, I'd wake up in the night and just scream out, "Oh, God! What am I doing? Help me, save me!" But eventually I became too hard-hearted, I guess, to even pay attention to that.

JONAH LEHRER: Her credit cards were all maxed out.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I sold my mother's silver. I sold my silverware. Things that should have been my son's heirlooms. Stole from the safety deposit box.

JONAH LEHRER: She steals quarters from her grandkids.

JAD: Steals quarters from her grandkids?

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Anything I looked at around the house I thought I could get money out of.

JONAH LEHRER: Everyone who knows her is watching her life fall apart.

ANN KLINESTIVER: My house was filthy, dirty, a mess. I wouldn't take time to even wash dishes.

JONAH LEHRER: She lives on peanut butter.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Didn't have any crackers or bread or anything. I just had peanut butter.

JONAH LEHRER: Because that's all she can afford and still leave as much money as possible for the slots.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Even when I'd be at church I'd think well, there's so many more minutes, or so many more hours, then I can go gamble.

JONAH LEHRER: Her husband eventually leaves her.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I mean I loved my husband but ...

JONAH LEHRER: They got divorced.

ANN KLINESTIVER: ... there's just no decision. Everything is gambling. One of the neat things about gambling is you can do it by yourself.

JONAH LEHRER: How much money did you lose during those years, if you don't mind me asking?

ANN KLINESTIVER: I lost at least $300,000.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: $300,000.

JAD: Which to her is ...?

JONAH LEHRER: Is all her life's savings.

JAD: That's one quarter at a time.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah, that's the surreal part.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I tried several things. I went to a rehab facility. My father—I told you I was raised in a really religious home, sometimes I would say my dad's watching me from heaven, and he wouldn't approve of this. He would be so disappointed in me, but seemingly I just couldn't stop.

ROBERT: Let me pause here for a second, Jad. I want to just take a moment to try to figure out what exactly is happening to Ann.

JAD: Yeah, why can't she stop?

ROBERT: Yeah. It turns out there may be an explanation if you look into her brain. Remember earlier, we talked about a little chemical called dopamine?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And how she didn't have enough dopamine in her brain, so that was giving her some kind of movement trouble, the Parkinson's.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: It also turns out to be the case that any time you do something that makes you feel good, your brain spurts out dopamine.

JONAH LEHRER: For years that's how scientists saw dopamine, as the neurotransmitter of pleasure, the neurotransmitter of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

JAD: But you said earlier that dopamine has to do with movement.

JONAH LEHRER: Well, what is the ultimate purpose of movement from the perspective of evolution? It's to get you to food. It's to get you to sex. It's to get you to reward.

JAD: Huh!

JONAH LEHRER: So that's why the same circuits, the same chemical that controls motivation, that controls what you want, also controls movement.

ROBERT: But it turned out it was a little more complicated than that. In the mid-1970s ...

JONAH LEHRER: A guy named Wolfram Schultz ...

ROBERT: ... decided to take a much closer look. And his subject was a monkey.

JONAH LEHRER: He would put these very thin needles that can record the activity of individual dopamine neurons in the monkey brain.

ROBERT: And they'd put the monkey in a room, and then every day they would walk down the hall to the room where the monkey was, they'd open the door.

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

ROBERT: They'd flip on the light. They'd give the monkey some juice.

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Here you go, monkey.

ROBERT: And then when the monkey sipped the juice—dopamine!

JAD: Happy monkey.

ROBERT: Right. But then comes a surprise.

JONAH LEHRER: He soon discovered something very odd about these neurons.

ROBERT: As they juiced this monkey, day ...

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

ROBERT: ... after day ...

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

ROBERT: ... after day ...

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

ROBERT: ... after day ...

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

ROBERT: ... the squirt of dopamine, which they were always measuring in the monkey's brain seemed to move forward in time.

JAD: What do you mean?

ROBERT: Well, at first the dopamine hit when the monkey took the sip of juice.

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

ROBERT: But after a while, the monkey got the dopamine hit when they entered the room and switched on the light.

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

ROBERT: And then after a few more times, the dopamine hit when the researchers feet could be heard walking down the hall. You see what's happening here?

VOICEOVER ACTOR: Hello, monkey.

JAD: Not really?

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: You're gonna have to bring it home for me.

ROBERT: Well, then I'll do it again then. What the monkey is trying to do is piece together the sequence of events that inevitably lead to juice.

JONAH LEHRER: Exactly. That's what these cells do: they try to predict rewards.

JAD: Oh, so this isn't just about movement or about feeling good, it's about finding the pattern of the thing that makes you feel good.

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

JAD: It's pattern finding.

JONAH LEHRER: Oh, this is pure pattern recognition. This is essentially how your brain makes sense of reality. In some very primitive sense, it parses reality in terms of rewards. This is how you get more food in the wild is you can see the reward before anyone else can.

JAD: So we're talking about, like, basic survival stuff here.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JONAH LEHRER: There's one other wrinkle, though, about the dopamine system that makes casinos and slot machines so tantalizing, which is that these cells are also programmed to be very sensitive to surprising rewards. So this seems to be—most scientists speculate that this seems to be your brain's way of telling you: pay attention, you just got something for free. This must be good! Sit here in this nice, comfy, velvet chair and try to figure out this reward.

ROBERT: So now imagine Ann, sitting there at the slot machine. She pushes the button on the machine, the slot machine. And oh my God!

JONAH LEHRER: And sirens and bells go off, coins clang.

ROBERT: And inside her head, her dopamine neurons, they're saying, "Whoa, this is wonderful! But now how did this happen?"

JONAH LEHRER: Where did this big reward come from?

ROBERT: What did you do this time?

JONAH LEHRER: Why are you so happy all of the sudden?

ROBERT: And it starts searching for something.

ANN KLINESTIVER: They had frogs and princes and ...

ROBERT: Was it the number of ...

ANN KLINESTIVER: Cherries, and ...

ROBERT: ... cherries that she had just before? Was it that this machine had 13 hits and this was the 14th?

ANN KLINESTIVER: I thought I could tell ...

ROBERT: It has all kinds of pattern-like things. It has bells, it has lights. But the problem is ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... is that there is no pattern to find.

ROBERT: ... there is no pattern.

JONAH LEHRER: It's inherently random. It's inherently unpredictable.

ROBERT: And while the rest of us might just, you know, give up and walk away ...

JONAH LEHRER: God, I just wasted a hundred bucks on this stupid machine. I should go get lunch.

ROBERT: Ann can't go to lunch. Her dopamine system is ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... too powerful, too potent.

JAD: Oh, because of that drug she's taking?

ROBERT: Right. It keeps surging and surging, forcing her neurons to fight, fight hard to find a pattern. That's what's gripping her. Her brain is intoxicated at the possibility that it will learn how to succeed. That it will ...

JONAH LEHRER: ... crack an uncrackable code.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I thought I was good at solving the machines. In fact ...

JONAH LEHRER: She told me a story about she would go to buy milk, and then spend the next twelve hours with the milk rotting next to her as she puts quarter after quarter after quarter into this machine.

JONAH LEHRER: Were you surprised when you learned that the medication might be responsible for your gambling addiction?

ANN KLINESTIVER: I mean, if someone had said to me, "This medicine will cause compulsive gambling," I would have thought they were crazy.

JONAH LEHRER: It's just at that time where the first studies come out showing that this is actually a common side effect of Requip.

JAD: Really? So there were other Anns appearing in other places, same deal?

JONAH LEHRER: Absolutely.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Basically, after my neurologist took me off the Requip ...

JONAH LEHRER: Her compulsion disappeared instantaneously.

ANN KLINESTIVER: Almost immediately.

JAD: That fast?

ANN KLINESTIVER: Well, within a week I'd say.

JAD: Wow!

JONAH LEHRER: It was gone.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I haven't gambled for nearly three years.

ROBERT: Did her Parkinson's return?

JONAH LEHRER: Yeah.

ANN KLINESTIVER: I have tremors a lot worse. I've recently gotten a cane. I have trouble walking. I use a walker.

JONAH LEHRER: So the price of not being a gambling addict is living with debilitating Parkinsonian symptoms.

ANN KLINESTIVER: But my son, let me finish about my son. When I told him after I had quit gambling I said, "Son, I sold things that belonged to you that you should have," and he said, "Mom, those are just things. It's just really great to have you back."

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message two.]

[ANN KLINESTIVER: This is Ann Klinestiver. Support for NPR comes from NPR stations and ...]

[JONAH: LEHRER: The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, helping NPR advance journalistic excellence in the digital age, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ...]

[LAURA BUXTON: ... committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. More information at MacFoud.org. And the Annie E. Casey Foundation, promoting lifelong family connections with children and youth in foster care. On the web at AECF.org.]

[ANN KLINESTIVER: This is NPR, National Public Radio.]

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.