Poker Psychology: Mental Blockage
- Filed under: Poker
- Date: Nov 28,2009
It is surprising to discover how thoroughly our basic functions sometimes control our conscious minds. Scientific studies have shown that mice and pigeons, and recently other animals such as cuttlefish, can be taught to react to a specific arbitrary sign with a specific set of behaviors: animals learn to expect food at a sight or sound, and learn to receive food by manipulating a lever, ringing a bell, or pecking a certain spot. Through habituation, they are conditioned to consistently believe that specific phenomena or actions regularly lead to the same specific results.
Even more important, the study shows that once an individual is thoroughly conditioned to trust the sign, they will not search for other variations of possible occurrences similar, but a shade different, to the one in which they are so habituated to believe. So a mouse who has thoroughly got the message that a falling rock means food, and if that incident doesn’t occur, there is no food, he will take it that all other signs except for the falling rock indicate no food. To him there are no other possibilities and he will not look for them.
Having learnt one condition, the mouse mind is blocked to any other possibility, even if subsequent stimuli are as strong or even stronger. Obviously? Before you condescendingly dismiss inferior mice, rooks, and cuttlefish (all significantly more intelligent then Man previously supposed), ask yourselves if have never been jolted into a sudden realization of a simple possibility that had never hitherto occurred to you: like that the bunch of guys at the top running the country might be as ignorant or even more ignorant than you?
This phenomenon is reminiscent of the Rashomon effect. I call it that because in the classic movie, there were several witnesses to an event. Each witness saw the event from solely his own perspective and reality and each witness related differently what he had seen, yet they all saw exactly the same event. We will now return to our poker analogy. A group of players are taking a break and discussing another player (who is not present) who to their minds is a real loser and wonders why he is still in the game. They agree on this and swear each other to secrecy so they can go back to the table and fleece the guy. By revealing to each other the particulars as to how the outsider was playing, they discovered they each saw a completely different bit of behavior. One noticed that every time outsider had a good hand, he makes the bet and balls his hands into fists, never doing so with a bad hand. The other notices when outsider has a bad hand, he plays with his chips in a most annoying way, without doing this in any other situation.
So our loser outsider has two ways of conveying his hands, but each of our smug insiders have only discovered one. They stopped at only one notion.
This phenomenon is important for the successful poker player to take note of. The best players can be distinguished by their curious and active minds throughout the play. They keenly observe and classify according to importance the traits of their opponents and use them to their advantage.
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categories: poker psychology,tilt,poker,gambling,games,recreation,psychology
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