Las Vegas~!

Cirque de Soleil at The Mirage

Today is the first day of our vacation. We will drive to San Antonio to catch a plane to go to Las Vegas. Las Vegas is not a prime locale for us as we don't gamble and don't drink very often, but we are Beatles fans and want to see the Cirque de Soleil show at The Mirage. We'll go to that tomorrow night.

Only 1 1/2 days in Las Vegas, but two nights there. It will be interesting to be there, especially after reading the last chapter in The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg where he chronicles the gambling addiction of one woman until she lost everything.

This chapter talks about "near misses": "To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose, " as written by cognitive neuroscientist Reza Habib. (264)

My dad played slot machines at the officers' club when we lived in Japan in the 1960's, but the slots have obviously changed since then:

"In the late 1990's, one of the largest slot machine manufacturers hired a former video game executive to help them design new slots. That executive's insight was to program machines to deliver more near wins. Now, almost every slot contains numerous twists--such as free spons and sounds that erupt when icons almost align--as well as small payouts that make players feel like they are winning when, in truth, they are putting in more money than they are getting back. 'No other form of gambling manipulates the human mind as beautifully as these machines,' an addictive-disorder researcher at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine told a New York Times reporter in 2004." (265)

With two days wandering around Las Vegas, I'll observe all the bells and whistles with the slot machines and anything else that seems out of the ordinary. (Everything?)