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The similarity to Nintendo or PlayStation has a chilling implication: Researchers have found that when players do well at a video game, the amount of dopamine released in their brains roughly doubles, and that this surge can linger for at least a half-hour afterward. So the more “price points” you can see, the more your brain will fool itself into thinking it has detected a predictable pattern in the numbers—and the more powerfully your dopamine system will kick in. As we’ve seen, it can take as few as three price changes to make you think you’ve spotted a trend; in years past, when investors got their stock prices out of the newspaper, it could take three days to gather that much data, while today a market website will get you there in less than sixty seconds. No wonder, by the late 1990s, the typical “investor” in popular tech stocks like Qualcomm, VeriSign, and Puma Technology owned them for an average of less than eight days at a time.
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