But eventually she was playing slots so much, she burned through her retirement funds. Married with two daughters, she worked in a bookstore, and used to look at the casinos as an entertaining break. Hall lives only a short drive from thousands of slot machines in Rhode Island and Connecticut. It was just very exciting,' Sandi Hall told Stahl. I loved the people, I loved the camaraderie, the high fives when you win. 'I found that the machines were wonderful. It's a continuous flow without interruption,' Schull said. You're not interrupted by anything you're not waiting for the horses to run, you're not waiting for the guy next to you to choose his card to put down there's no roulette wheel spinning. 'Another core aspect of the addictiveness is their continuous nature.

Because the bets are small, you can place hundreds of them at a time. 'A higher dose,' says Schull, because all that speed means more bets and that means more excitement.Īnd no machine is better for that than the 'penny slot,' the most popular game on the casino floor.

And these machines, if they're packing 1,200 hands per hour into play, you could see that as being exposed to a higher dose,' Schull said. 'What addiction really has to do is with the speed of rewards. 'Do you think that most people would even think that a machine could addict you? That a machine could do the same thing that a drug could?' Stahl asked. She has interviewed gamblers, casino owners and slot machine designers. Schull has studied gambling addiction for over 15 years. 'Whether or not it's their intention, the gambling industry is designing machines that can addict people,' MIT anthropology Professor Natasha Schull told '60 Minutes' correspondent Lesley Stahl. It looks like great fun, but it can be dangerously addictive. You can play hundreds of lines at once and instead of pulling a handle, you bet by pushing buttons, which means each bet can be completed in as little as three and a half seconds. Old fashioned slot machines let gamblers pull the handle and hope for three of a kind, but the modern slots are like high tech video games that play music and scenes from TV shows. And ways to avoid becoming a 'problem gambler.' If you're casino bound, remember, the house always has the upper hand, but there are ways to increase your odds of winning.

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