Snapping

by Flo Conway; Jim Siegelman

  Not long after we became acquainted with catastrophe theory, we spoke with a young woman we will call Pam Mitchell who, in the early seventies, spent over a year in the Hare Krishna cult. As she described it to us, her dramatic experience in the cult and her precarious re-emergence during deprogramming seemed to map onto Thom's elementary model with full precision, describing two completely distinct yet fully interacting systems of personality.

  Like most cult members, Pam Mitchell slipped gradually into her Krishna state of mind, just as most anorexics slip gradually. into their state of uncontrollable fasting. Her boyfriend introduced her to the group, and she grew increasingly familiar with the doctrines and rituals of Krishna life. In the beginning, Pam artended several Sunday feasts at the Krishna temple and experienced repeated snapping moments during 'artika' ceremonies. Before long, she moved into the temple and became deeply involved in the daily life and practices of the cult, sliding into the state of reduced awareness common throughout America's cults -- a state she referred to as being "dumfounded." She performed numerous temple chores and duties for several months while in that state of mind and assumed the traditional Krishna woman's role of subservience. Pam tried to hold onto some thread of her old identity as she balanced the opposing forces of fear, guilt, confusion, and exhaustion building up within her. Her modern feminine consciousness opposed the Krishnas' lowly attitude toward women, her body reacted to the restricted diet and interminable fatigue of cult life, and her nervous system actively resisted the boredom and inactivity of hour after hour of chanting. Finally, her strained emotions crested and gave way in a classic catastrophic moment.

  "It slowly worked to the point where I was existing on such a low level," she recalled for us, "that finally I cracked. I walked into the room and started laughing hysterically. Then I had a real breakdown. I just collapsed for about a day and a half.

  "I guess you could say I snapped in a way," she told us, without prompting. "I snapped to the point where I wasn't fighting anymore."

  For the next three months, as she described it, Pam's anxiety and frustration "went inside." The tensions she had been feeling disappeared, yet before long they began manifesting themselves in physical ways. Her hands and face broke out in eczema, and she gained weight dramatically. Concerned over her appearance, the temple president refused to let her go home to visit her family.

  Then one day she experienced another catastrophic change in awareness.

  "It was a snap thing," she said again. "I was just talking to another girl who was working in the kitchen with me, and I went, 'I've been brainwashed! What has happened to me?"

  In keeping with Thom's model, Pam's sudden moment of reawakening -- not a snapping into but, in this case, a snapping out of her cult state -- was not the direct result of any intense or abrupt experience. Instead, it was a realization, sparked by a passing impression, that had been building up for some time. Although it happened in an instant, she remembered the dynamic nature of the experience.

  "I felt alive again. I felt like I was thinking again," she recalled. "It was kind of gradual at first, like when you're slowly waking up and gradually becoming conscious. I started to talk and become more and more excited, feeling, sensing more as I talked about what was happening to me. Then I got real excited and all of a sudden I looked at what I was doing and it hit me. It was like a connection."

  Pam's description of the experience could easily be traced on the catastrophe curve.

  "I felt like I had jumped off a cliff six months ago and I was just back up on the plateau I was on before," she said. "It was like I had gone backward in my own development, but I knew myself again. It was me, not that other person. How can you explain how it feels to be alive?"

  Soon after her awakening, Pam left the Krishna temple and made her way back to her hometown. But in a manner reminiscent of Kay Rambur's experience in the Children of God, Pam's self-styled deprogramming was incomplete. For the next few weeks, she struggled in that peculiar state of limbo known to deprogrammers as floating.

  "I was unable to relate to anybody," Pam recalled. "Within a week I was going back to the temple because I couldn't assimilate back here. Everyone else seemed crazy, and since nobody was aware of what had happened to me, I just couldn't make it by myself."

  When Pam began returning to the Krishna temple, however, her mother knew that her daughter was still in trouble. She made arrangements to have Pam deprogrammed properly.

  "They told me I was going for a job interview," said Pam, recalling the irony of her floating state. "But as I was walking up to this house, I saw the deprogrammer standing in the doorway. Then I realized what was going on and I started to fight. Even though I had left the cult a week before of my own free will, I fought him. There was a big violent scene at the door, yelling and screaming. I started chanting Hare Krishna as loud as I could."

  Paradoxical as it may seem, Pam Mitchell's peculiar reversion fits neatly into the catastrophe model, in the area of the fold in the middle of Thom's elementary catastrophe curve. In this limbo region, which may be depicted as more or less stable depending on the particular catastrophe model, a cult member's awareness may lurch about at random. As Ted Patrick describes it, in the floating state the cult member may go either way: toward full recovery or toward what he calls "backsliding," another term that aptly describes a path on the catastrophe curve.

  "I was crazy, going nuts," Pam Mitchell told us. "I was at that insanity point people talk about when they know they're crazy but can't do anything about it. It was an uncontrollable thing. I couldn't make the transition back, even though I wanted to really bad."

  But the deprogrammer succeeded in bringing her through the crisis. He talked to her and played tapes of other ex-cult members describing similar experiences, until Pam finally experienced the sudden moment of reawakening.

  "It was like a realization," she recalled, "and my old self fell right back into my body. I was totally exhausted, but the skeleton of my personality had come back."

  Pam Mitchell's deprogramming was a complete success. Her final reawakening was another catastrophic jump. In direct contrast to the snapping moment of dissolution, however, this abrupt transformation returned her to a healthy state of full awareness and self-control. Afterward, she spent the next few months learning to think for herself and feel again, rebuilding her values and relationships, easing herself back into the world.

  ---

  Is this catastrophe model of snapping valid? René Thom's theory has come under heavy fire within the mathematics community. Many prominent American scientists have charged that proponents of catastrophe theory have rashly applied it to natural and social phenomena that cannot be verified by traditional scientific methods. Furthermore, critics claim, other mathematical formulas already exist that deal with sudden change, albeit with far less glamorous names such as "bifurcation theory," "shock wave theory," and "thresholds."

  In an effort to better determine whether our application to snapping of Thom's controversial theory was, as we believed, valuable and responsible, we made a special trip to Berkeley to confer with Dr. Hans Bremermann, professor of mathematics and medical physics at the University of California there. Bremermann is highly regarded in the world of science for his development of one of the most fascinating concepts in the physics of computation, referred to by many scientists (among them, W. Ross Ashby), as "Bremermann's Limit" on the amount of data -- in strictly physical terms -- any information-processing device is capable of handling. His work, in effect, delineates what mathematical problems and computations fall within the bounds of physical "reality." A brilliant and far-reaching scholar, Bremermann was one of the first American scientists to hail the arrival of catastrophe theory, in his review of Thom's book written for the American journal Science in 1973.

  We met in Bremermann's office, crowded among overflowing cartons of manuscripts and academic papers, and began by asking Bremermann if his enthusiasm for Thom had dampened in view of the recent barrag
e of criticism. Speaking in a soft voice with a slight German accent, he was quick to point out that despite the controversy surrounding catastrophe theory, no one has been able to find fault with Thom's mathematics. It is in the application of the theory, Bremermann cautioned, that all the trouble arises.

  "I think the consensus in the mathematical community is that Zeeman, as an expositor and publicizer of catastrophe theory, has been a bit too successful," Bremermann told us. "I think that some people are worried because the name, which really is a technical name, has such powerful associations. They fear it may be misunderstood in popular articles."

  Since it first appeared, Bremermann revealed, he has felt, along with Thom himself, that catastrophe theory is not so much a scientific theory as it is a new mathematical language , a scientific metaphor. As such, he said, it offers a way to talk about complex natural phenomena that would not be possible using ordinary scientific language and concepts.

  "A biological organism is a phenomenally complicated mathematical entity," he said, elaborating on the dilemma from his own scientific point of view. "Look at a single bacterium. If you put it under a microscope, you can hardly see it. It's so small, only a few light waves in size. It's very close to the visible limits of light, and you can't see any of its rich structure. But there are thousands of genes in it. There are several thousand different kinds of molecules in it, plus intricate spatial structuring. This complexity is way beyond what any mathematician, even reinforced with a computer, can resolve, predict, or compute."

  At the human level, Bremermann went on, the enormous complexity of nature becomes even more awesome -- and incalculable.

  "When you take human beings interacting and bringing about cultures, societies, and civilizations," he said, "it's even more complex. You cannot look at the individual parts and try to figure out what the whole organism is going to do. You run into impenetrable physical barriers of computation. There are lots of things we simply cannot explore."

  According to Bremermann, catastrophe theory provides a possible way out of this labyrinth of complexity.

  "Okay, in come Thom and Zeeman," declared Bremermann, "and they say that if we can't fully explore complex things, we can still look at them on another level. If you have a dynamic system, maybe you don't even need to know all the details. You can look at the states it settles down to and say something about the occasional and sudden transitions that it makes. That's what catastrophe theory is."

  Like Pribram's holographic framework, catastrophe theory ofters a new way of picturing the world. To Bremermann, its promise lies in its potential to provide a special way of using mathematics descriptively (rather than deductively, as has been the custom in his field).

  "The conceptual machinery that has served us more or less well for so long is breaking down," said Bremermann, speaking with the same urgency that characterized our conversations with John Lyman and Karl Pribram. "It is not quite adequate to deal with the enormous phenomena that we face in the world. Our poor brains can't follow the dynamics of modern society. The monster has developed, it's there, but we really don't understand it. The politicians don't know how to control it. Nobody has an intellectual penetration of the dynamics that are at work."

  We asked Bremermann how well this approach to complex phenomena could be applied to our study of sudden personality change in cults and groups.

  "Now we are talking about a very specific phenomenon," he said, "and I think we are on much firmer ground to try to fit it into the catastrophe framework than we are in simply discussing catastrophe theory in general."

  As we laid out some of our findings, Bremermann was impressed by the similarities between snapping and other catastrophes, but he acknowledged the difficulty involved in applying the theory to human personality.

  "In this situation there are lots of things which impinge upon the mind," he said. "To fit it into this folded surface and to single out specific control parameters would have to be carefully done. Instead of focusing on the mathematical theory, why not look at it simply as a model that allows us to see these different phenomena in the same frame of reference and draw comparisons? Here is a concrete problem. We have this phenomenon: on the one hand, the Moonies, say, or the Krishna; on the other, say, what happened to Patty Hearst, for example. If enough people get hit by things like this in their homes, I think they will begin to understand that there are strange phenomena that require new concepts for understanding."

  As we presented some of the testimony we had gathered, Bremermann nodded.

  "These deprogrammers have found something," he said. "These states of rapture and depression. It really fits the catastrophe model much better than I would have imagined, and one could draw comparisons with some other kinds of breakdowns, such as anorexia."

  Toward the end of our discussion, we asked Bremermann about the numerous instances we had come across of snapping in slow motion. We told him that many cult members, in fact, talk of a gradual descent into their cult states of mind. During deprogramming as well, some cult members re-emerge in a smooth progression rather than a sudden snap. We asked Bremermann if this more continuous experience invalidated our catastrophe model. On the contrary, he said, he found it perfectly in keeping with the finer points of Thom's work.

  "Catastrophe is just a term that applies if you want to understand a dynamic phenomenon where something changes suddenly," he explained. "But mathematically, all the ingredients are continuous. They're smooth, and then all of a sudden something jumps, but you can move from one point to the other in slow motion, by a different path if you like.

  "In other words, instead of falling down a cliff," he said, "you can walk down slowly, in a roundabout way, and reach the exact same point."

  We came away from our talk with Hans Bremermann fully apprised of the pitfalls of proposing any application of catastrophe theory, but more convinced than ever that our use of the model was appropriate. As only one tool among many new and controversial scientific theories we were drawing upon, catastrophe theory gave us a final handle on snapping in its varied forms, filling out and completing our initial picture of the phenomenon. In our informal application, it brought us to the point where we could trace any path of snapping and deprogramming on the simplified catastrophe curve shown in Figure 2. (In fact, a more detailed and accurate model of snapping could be drawn on one of Thom's more complex catastrophe curves, a slightly modified version of the wave shown here.)

  We drove northward out of California, heading up to Oregon for a few months of solace in which to transcribe more interviews and analyze them in the light of our latest findings. A growing understanding was rapidly drawing us toward a somber conclusion, that in some cases, although certainly not all, the phenomenon of snapping as depicted on the catastrophe curve may lead to a new and frightening form of mental disorder. Left unremedied, or reinforced over time, the sudden alteration of the mind characterized by our term snapping may deteriorate into a lasting affliction of consciousness, a physical impairment of human awareness. With our new understanding of how experience in the form of information is metabolized -- broken up, distributed, and reorganized -- throughout the brain and nervous system, we were now able to grasp how this natural, organic process may become subject to disease, not in the medical sense, but an affliction, nonetheless, of the physical organization of our human information-processing capacities.

  In the pages that follow, we will present in detail the afflictions of the mind we have found to plague victims of some religious cults and mass therapies. We now understand these afflictions to be physical impairments of thought and feeling, protracted alterations of awareness and personality that can be diagnosed, in the strictest sense, as varieties of 'information disease.'

  13 Varieties of Information Disease

  Where is the Life we have lost in living?

  Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

  -- T. S. Eliot The Roc
k

  Now the focus of our investigation shifts to the terrain beneath the precipice as we draw a distinction, for the first time, between snapping -- a term that up to this point we have used in a very broad sense to indicate any sudden, drastic alteration of personality -- and information disease, which we now define as any of several distinct although often interrelated states the mind may settle down to in the aftermath of the moment. We identify information disease as an alteration through experience of a person's fundamental information-processing capacities. When these vital capacities become altered or damaged, the resulting change is not simply one of behavior. When snapping turns to information disease, it represents a lasting alteration of human awareness at the most basic level of an individual's personality. The disease is not physiological in nature; it does not damage or destroy the sturdy biological machinery of the brain. Nevertheless, as we have come to understand it, information disease represents a physical alteration of the complex organization of the brain.