Neuroliberation campaign on 'Take a pew' web series

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Louis Theroux – Gambling in Las Vegas

One of our aims here at the Neuroliberation campaign is to try to get people to think a little deeper about the mental health effects of gambling on people. We’ve been saying for years how gambling addictions can severely affect the mood of someone and Louis Theroux in his usual documentary style did just that in one of his documentaries titled ‘Gambling in Las Vegas’.
His documentary does an excellent job of highlighting how so-called ‘business friendships’ are never really what they are cracked up to be. Would a good friend let you sit playing a machine for hours on end each day whilst losing thousands of pounds?

Louis starts the documentary off by interviewing a high-roller who has a hired someone on a casino payroll to ‘show him around’. Because he spends so much money at the casino they’ve given him the best suite in the hotel free of charge with complimentary service, the largest hotel suite in North America. The job of the guy he’s hired is to keep him spending and playing at the tables as much as possible.
At one point in the film the guy admits that it’s bad that he’s losing, you’ll notice his ‘friend’ quickly move in and say “aah it’s just a warm up”. 

7:40 into the documentary Louis is interviewing a cashier and a casino player that is $4,000 up. Louis says to the cashier “He’s winning and winning” and the cashier replies in these ever-so significant words 

“You want people to win, that way they’ll come back. If they never win they’ll never come back”
Louis then asks what then happens in which the cashier replies “We want them to win a little bit, and then we take all their money”.

Louis is then introduced to a lady called Martha who is playing on the high-limits slot machine in the casino. 
It’s obvious that she has a severe gambling addiction, she wastes thousands on the slot machines each day, but one question it may make us ask is - who could actually stand and watch that happen to somebody? And as human beings do we really care for each other anymore?

Soon after he asks one of the casino staff about how they are able to take part in that scenario. Unfortunately employees at any gambling premises are rarely taught to really help a problem gambler, and this includes betting shops and bingo halls here in the UK. 
Many even swear by the training manuals they are given, and one of our concerns should be for our own way of thinking. Look at what we’re doing to each other!

The man he’s interviewing says that if he saw a regular person spending a lot more than they usual would that he’d say “are you sure you want to be doing this?”.
Unfortunately it’s no secret that it rarely works with people whilst gambling. They are in the thick of an addiction whilst staring at a hypnotic machine that manipulates their neurons to go crazy, like they are another planet.

You see in this documentary clearly that gambling addicts become like children in the sense that they know it’s doing them no good but will make up every excuse under the sun to condone it.
I doubt Martha the high-roller slot machine player was ever really and truly helped when she had spent too much.


Louis also interviews another two guys who have come to Las Vegas on a holiday trip.
Whilst watching it’s soon clear how much gambling has affected their mood and mental status, they are hyped up on the most sold drug going on the planet ‘The desire to have more money’.

24 minutes into the film one of the guys playing blackjack with Louis asks his friend to move because since he sat there he lost $3,000 on one hand. This is a pure example of the delusional mind that gets created in gamblers.
It’s certainly not uncommon for people who have been gambling to create false senses of mysticism. Talk to any ex problem-gamblers and many of them will explain how the logic mind tries to link numbers and patterns. People often believe that god is guiding them to their big win.

There’s heaps more we could tell you about the documentary but we don’t want to spoil it for, all in all it’s a highly recommended watch. 
It raises many big questions about our morals in society, and how we seem to socially accept being part of a dark-circus where what we are sold is mind control and illusion, often for a costly price.

Why the campaign is called 'Neuroliberation'.

A lot of people say that I should change the name of the campaign to something more direct and specific about betting shops. But my impulsive passion got the best of me early on and I'd already spent a lot of time promoting the name 'Neuroliberation' on the internet, making videos and printing flyers. It would have been wasting resources for me to do it all again.

But maybe things have worked out just fine. Perhaps the name 'Neuroliberation' it gives it a more intriguing edge.

When I first started the campaign , it wasn't simply because I knew lots of people were getting hooked on gambling, it was a lot deeper than that.

I'd never thought about campaigning about gambling whatsoever until one particular night when I was having a small party with a couple of friends. It was at the time in my life when I was in and out of betting shops all of the time, and it was on that night of the party that I first started seeing the mental health effects of my gambling addiction and the chaos that was going on in my mind from playing roulette machines.


I just wanted to have a good time at the party, but I found myself getting anxious, self-concious and paranoid and I didn't know why. Its hard to describe how my feelings were at the time, but I could feel that something big was eating me up inside me. I could feel the rotten damage caused by the fixed odds betting terminals games taking over my mind.
That night I was aware of my own demons. The constant frustrations of losing my own self-control and the guilt of losing my income was causing deep wounds and it was the first time I realised how much of an after-effect gambling can have on your emotions.


I told my friends that I had to chill out because I was getting a bit anxious .After a few moments of just kicking back I decided to google 'inner conflict' because I was aware of how much from time to time I had felt these 'battles' going on inside my mind.

Google led me to start reading all kinds of psychology papers and to watch a few YouTube videos. Quite quickly I began to realise how much all this gambling stuff has its roots set in mind control, tricky and manipulation. OK so for thousands of years we'v had gambling-addicts in our community. The world see's him as a fool, but we allow it so often because we only look at it on the surface. If people watched enough gambling psychology videos and spent more time self-educating then I'm sure many more of us would have a completely different view on the so called 'lack of discipline'  in a problem gambler.

The deeper you look into who lobbies for the gambling industry , and who regulates it  the more you realise that the industry knows full well what it's doing. It knows that the fixed odds betting terminals games cause mental health issues and cognitive disruption  It desperately tries to bury those facts but they just have to know about it because there's so much psychological research out there and within a few hours I was able to find enough to know that gambling creates completely new neurological pathways in the brain and can even cause brain damage.

People have to find this information for themselves though. Guess I need some more links up on the page. But your not going to hear the full truth about it from the TV because the whole media is rife with triggers, advertisements and things that influence your brain on those deep and well researched levels. 
To anyone that's studied psychology it's pretty much standard knowledge but I know that I and many others never went to university or studied psychology so it's important to remember that the knowledge needs to be shared. There's a lot that can come from that. Be sure to check out Robert Sapolsky on Youtube , he explains a lot of things quite well.

Maybe it's difficult to grasp the concept that thoughts and emotions are actually real manifestations and electromagnetic energy. Before I did any of the research I took it as a pinch of salt. My thoughts were my thoughts, just something that never really existed physically . 

I'm all for taking responsibility and shifting your thought patterns to conquer a gambling addiction but I personally think that sometimes taking responsibility is taking a step back, swallowing your pride and admitting that maybe you weren't fully in control. Unfortunately a lot of people see that as being lame because it can easily seem like your just avoiding responsibility for your own actions.

I was annoyed, big-time. How dare anyone intrude on MY brain like that. I was getting taken advantage of by a corporate industry and now I knew how much of a trap it all was, and I knew that they knew it too.
I just felt slimy the more I thought about it. Betting shop staff have to watch people everyday falling under the spell and becoming victims of the black magic that's going down. But they are buttered up through their training to believe that the people feeding hundreds of pounds into the roulette machines are just happy-go-lucky people that like to gamble hundreds or thousands of pounds in just a few minutes.

The very same knowledge and information about neurology can be used to heal and empower us. But unfortunately it's also always been used to trap people and put them under a spell too. I already knew to what extent it was happening to because during my gambling addiction I saw so many other people queuing up to play the roulette and ending their last few spins going mental after losing their control and everything they had after feeding the machines with hundreds of pounds.

So I immediately went a bit radical and started petitioning on the street and giving people the information. I'd set up a pasting table at the bottom of St James street in Brighton and would do a few days here and there during the summer. I'd got a great response from the public and the more I talked about the issues the more people were telling me how they knew someone else that had a roulette addiction. I'm still hearing these stories a few times a week and every time I mention my campaign in a conversation. So it's not just me, I'm not going mad....I think.

I rushed the naming if the project as I just wanting to get started and waste no time planning. 
I called it 'Dopamine mind control' and did a radio show on Brighton's Radio Reverb. I kept it under that name for a few months but I soon thought that the name sounded too barmy, tin-foil hat brigade and conspiracy theorist'.

The more I looked into the neurological workings of the brain, the more I decided to focus my attention on that because I knew that it was difficult to find other gambling campaigners that were focusing on the actually neurology. I also wanted people to know that the same information can be applied to many things around us and once you know about the deeper workings of the brain, the more you realise that most of us are being mentally abused everyday by giant corporations and we by educating ourselves we can generally have some form of better defense against it.

That's when I decided to call it 'Neuroliberation' - to free the mind. That's what I wanted, a  stop to the abuse. For us to educate ourselves and not be fooled by lobbyist who try to sell you worthless junk or try to get the nation hooked on gambling. Unfortunately a lot swallow it up and digest the meal. Just because the bloke said it on the telly. The automatic rejection that someone would put their business interests before public safety concerns.

So OK, it would be difficult to get rid of all this Neuro-marketing , betting shops and all of the other mental bombardments completely out of society, but at least if we spend a little time looking into how our brains work when people are gambling then we can at least protect ourselves from a lot of crap that's going on out there.


Here's parts 2 and 3 of the film. Lots of psychology information going on from the last bit of part two and the first bit of part 3.