Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Monkey Man
Haven't heard from Darren. Must still be recovering from the Superbowl.
Before we made this film I never considered myself a gambling man. No one in my family really gambles. We don't go to the track and we never play the lottery. I like the idea of poker - the camaraderie and all that. But it just doesn't do it for me. Darren likes poker but he's not obsessed.
When we went to the Greyhound Track in Florida to shoot Louis Eisenberg I was amazed to see all the losing tickets just tossed to the floor. The losers would go right back and bet again - all day. It just seemed ridiculous.
It's easy to look at everyone else and pass a judgment like that; "What are those people doing? They're completely mad." But we all have our own things we do - our own addictions to a certain kind of risk. Mine I think is being a filmmaker. That means I'm a huge gambler and I never fully recognized it until this week.
In a Duke University experiment neurobiologists studied risk taking in monkeys. The monkeys were given two buttons. If a monkey pushed the first button he would get a small amount of juice every time he pushed it. If he pushed the second button the monkey would get a lot of juice but this did not happen every time. More often than not he would end up with nothing. Despite this - he would nearly always opt for the second button, which offered the very rare but big reward:
¶ 12:28 PM 
Haven't heard from Darren. Must still be recovering from the Superbowl.
Before we made this film I never considered myself a gambling man. No one in my family really gambles. We don't go to the track and we never play the lottery. I like the idea of poker - the camaraderie and all that. But it just doesn't do it for me. Darren likes poker but he's not obsessed.
When we went to the Greyhound Track in Florida to shoot Louis Eisenberg I was amazed to see all the losing tickets just tossed to the floor. The losers would go right back and bet again - all day. It just seemed ridiculous.
It's easy to look at everyone else and pass a judgment like that; "What are those people doing? They're completely mad." But we all have our own things we do - our own addictions to a certain kind of risk. Mine I think is being a filmmaker. That means I'm a huge gambler and I never fully recognized it until this week.
In a Duke University experiment neurobiologists studied risk taking in monkeys. The monkeys were given two buttons. If a monkey pushed the first button he would get a small amount of juice every time he pushed it. If he pushed the second button the monkey would get a lot of juice but this did not happen every time. More often than not he would end up with nothing. Despite this - he would nearly always opt for the second button, which offered the very rare but big reward:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050823080657.htm">Gambling Monkeys Give Insight Into Neural Machinery Of Risk
ScienceDaily (2005-08-23) -- Duke University Medical Center neurobiologists have pinpointed circuitry in the brains of monkeys that assesses the level of risk in a given action. ... > http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/050823080657.htm">read full article
