Brain damage can sometimes give gamblers a winning edge, an American study suggests. The researchers take a flier at explaining how and why certain brain lesions might, in some circumstances, help a person to triumph over others or over adversity.

The study – Investment Behavior and the Negative Side of Emotion – published in the journal Psychological Science, renders its tantalising, juicy question into lofty academese. The five co-authors, led by Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University, ask: "Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions?"

The team experimented with people who had abnormalities in particular brain regions – the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the right insular or somatosensory cortex. Medically, those can be a sign that something's amiss in how the person handles emotions.

Each brain-damaged person got a wad of play money, and instructions to gamble on 20 rounds of coin tossing (heads-you-win/tails-you-lose, with some added twists). Other people who had no such brain lesions got the same money and the same gambling instructions.

The brain-damaged gamblers pretty consistently ended up with more money than their healthier-brained competitors. The researchers speculate that when "normal" gamblers encounter a run of unhappy coin-toss results, they get discouraged and become cautious – perhaps too cautious. Not so the people with brain-lesion-induced emotional disfunction. Encountering a run of bad luck, they plough on, undaunted. And then enjoy a relatively handsome payoff. At least sometimes.

The study notes that this brain damage side-benefit might occasionally even save someone's life.

They cite the case of a man with ventromedial prefrontal damage who was driving under hazardous road conditions: "When other drivers reached an icy patch, they hit their brakes in panic, causing their vehicles to skid out of control, but the patient crossed the icy patch unperturbed, gently pulling away from a tailspin and driving ahead safely. The patient remembered the fact that not hitting the brakes was the appropriate behaviour, and his lack of fear allowed him to perform optimally."

Shiv has an eye for non-standard ways of exploring human behaviour. He sometimes teaches a course called The Frinky Science of the Mind.

In 2008, he and three colleagues were awarded an Ig Nobel prize for demonstrating that expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine.

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize.

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