The mundane simplicity of the lottery only reinforces the attraction. Casino card tables can be intimidating, an opaque world of rules and hard-to-master strategies; ditto for the track.

Image Credit... The New York Times

Because it is pure luck, the lottery is easy to grasp and allows for plenty of perfectly loopy — and very enjoyable — number superstitions. Your birthday digits never won you a dime? Try your marriage date; your favorite psalm verse; the day your bullying father-in-law died. Or, perhaps, reverse the order. In studies, psychologists have found that ticket holders are very reluctant to trade their tickets for others, precisely because they have an illusion of control from having picked magical numbers.

This sense of power infuses the waiting period with purpose. And the hope of a huge payoff, however remote, is itself a source of pleasure. In brain-imaging studies of drug users, as well as healthy adults placing bets, neuroscientists have found that the prospect of a reward activates the same circuits in the brain that the payoffs themselves do.

“It’s not just winning the money but anticipating winning the money that is exciting, and the two experiences are similar neurobiologically,” said Christine Reilly, executive director of the Institute for Research on Pathological Gambling and Related Disorders, in Medford, Mass.

People who gorge on lotto tickets, buying 100 at a time even after years of luckless playing, are no less rational than anyone else making big bets. And lottery odds are neutral and fair, after all, not biased toward any social elite. Seeing a Georgia truck driver win proves that in players’ minds.

Large rewards make most people reckless, whether they’re on the winning or losing end. A 2003 University of Vermont study found that lottery players who said they preferred to receive potential winnings in annuity payments — generally thought to be safer than receiving the money all at once, in a lump sum — often changed their minds when they actually won. And the higher the jackpot, the more likely people were to prefer a lump-sum payout, the researchers found. (Mr. Nabors chose a lump sum.)