Future Shock

Chapter 15 FUTURE SHOCK: THE PHYSICAL DIMENSION

Eons ago the shrinking seas cast millions of unwilling aquatic creatures onto the newly created beaches. Deprived of their familiar environment, they died, gasping and clawing for each additional instant of eternity. Only a fortunate few, better suited to amphibian existence, survived the shock of change. Today, says sociologist Lawrence Suhm of the University of Wisconsin, "We are going through a period as traumatic as the evolution of man's predecessors from sea creatures to land creatures ... Those who can adapt will; those who can't will either go on surviving somehow at a lower level of development or will perish – washed up on the shores."

To assert that man must adapt seems superfluous. He has already shown himself to be among the most adaptable of life forms. He has survived Equatorial summers and Antarctic winters. He has survived Dachau and Vorkuta. He has walked the lunar surface. Such accomplishments give rise to the glib notion that his adaptive capabilities are "infinite." Yet nothing could be further from the truth. For despite all his heroism and stamina, man remains a biological organism, a "biosystem," and all such systems operate within inexorable limits.

Temperature, pressure, caloric intake, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, all set absolute boundaries beyond which man, as presently constituted, cannot venture. Thus when we hurl a man into outer space, we surround him with an exquisitely designed microenvironment that maintains all these factors within livable limits. How strange, therefore, that when we hurl a man into the future, we take few pains to protect him from the shock of change. It is as though NASA had shot Armstrong and Aldrin naked into the cosmos.

It is the thesis of this book that there are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and that by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of men to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We run the high risk of throwing them into that peculiar state that I have called future shock.

We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes. Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.

Different people react to future shock in different ways. Its symptoms also vary according to the stage and intensity of the disease. These symptoms range all the way from anxiety, hostility to helpful authority, and seemingly senseless violence, to physical illness, depression and apathy. Its victims often manifest erratic swings in interest and life style, followed by an effort to "crawl into their shells" through social, intellectual and emotional withdrawal. They feel continually "bugged" or harassed, and want desperately to reduce the number of decisions they must make.

To understand this syndrome, we must pull together from such scattered fields as psychology, neurology, communications theory and endocrinology, what science can tell us about human adaptation. There is, as yet, no science of adaptation per se. Nor is there any systematic listing of the diseases of adaptation. Yet evidence now sluicing in from a variety of disciplines makes it possible to sketch the rough outlines of a theory of adaptation. For while researchers in these disciplines often work in ignorance of each other's efforts, their work is elegantly compatible. Forming a distinct and exciting pattern, it provides solid underpinning for the concept of future shock.

What actually happens to people when they are asked to change again and again? To understand the answer, we must begin with the body, the physical organism, itself. Fortunately, a series of startling, but as yet unpublicized, experiments have recently cast revealing light on the relationship of change to physical health.

These experiments grow out of the work of the late Dr. Harold G. Wolff at the Cornell Medical Center in New York. Wolff repeatedly emphasized that the health of the individual is intimately bound up with the adaptive demands placed on him by the environment. One of Wolff's followers, Dr. Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr., has termed this the "human ecology" approach to medicine, and has argued passionately that disease need not be the result of any single, specific agent, such as a germ or virus, but a consequence of many factors, including the general nature of the environment surrounding the body. Hinkle has worked for years to sensitize the medical profession to the importance of environmental factors in medicine.

Today, with spreading alarm over air pollution, water pollution, urban crowding and other such factors, more and more health authorities are coming around to the ecological notion that the individual needs to be seen as part of a total system, and that his health is dependent upon many subtle external factors.

It was another of Wolff's colleagues, however, Dr. Thomas H. Holmes, who came up with the idea that change, itself – not this or that specific change but the general rate of change in a person's life – could be one of the most important environmental factors of all. Originally from Cornell, Holmes is now at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and it was there, with the help of a young psychiatrist named Richard Rahe, that he created an ingenious research tool named the Life-Change Units Scale. This was a device for measuring how much change an individual has experienced in a given span of time. Its development was an important methodological breakthrough, making it possible, for the first time, to qualify, at least crudely, the rate of change in individual life.

Reasoning that different kinds of life-changes strike us with different force, Holmes and Rahe began by listing as many such changes as they could. A divorce, a marriage, a move to a new home – such events affect each of us differently. Moreover, some carry greater impact than others. A vacation trip, for example, may represent a pleasant break in the routine. Yet it can hardly compare in impact with, say, the death of a parent.

Holmes and Rahe next took their list of life-changes to thousands of men and women in many walks of life in the United States and Japan. Each person was asked to rank order the specific items on the list according to how much impact each had. Which changes required a great deal of coping or adjustment? Which ones were relatively minor?

To Holmes' and Rahe's surprise, it turned out that there is widespread agreement among people as to which changes in their lives require major adaptations and which ones are comparatively unimportant. This agreement about the "impact-fullness" of various life events extends even across national and language barriers. (The work in the United States and Japan is now being supplemented by studies in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.) People tend to know and to agree on which changes hit the hardest.

Given this information, Holmes and Rahe were able to assign a numerical weight to each type of life change. Thus each item on their list was ranked by its magnitude and given a score accordingly. For example, if the death of one's spouse is rated as one hundred points, then moving to a new home is rated by most people as worth only twenty points, a vacation thirteen. (The death of a spouse, incidentally, is almost universally regarded as the single most impactful change that can befall a person in the normal course of his life.)

Now Holmes and Rahe were ready for the next step. Armed with their Life-Change Units Scale, they began to question people about the actual pattern of change in their lives. The scale made it possible to compare the "changefulness" of one person's life with that of another. By studying the amount of change in a person's life, could we learn anything about the influence of change itself on health?

To find out, Holmes, Rahe and other researchers compiled the "life change scores" of literally thousands of individuals and began the laborious task of comparing these with the medical histories of these same individuals. Never before had there been a way to correlate change and health. Never before had there been such detailed data on patterns of change in individual lives. And seldom were the results of an experiment less ambiguous. In the United States and Japan, among servicemen and civilians, among pregnant women and the families of leukemia victims, among college athletes and retirees, the same striking pattern was present: those with high life change scores were more likely than their fellows to be ill in the following year. For the first time, it was possible to show in dramatic form that the rate of change in a person's life – his pace of life – is closely tied to the state of his health.

"The results were so spectacular," says Dr. Holmes, "that at first we hesitated to publish them. We didn't release our initial findings until 1967."

Since then, the Life-Change Units Scale and the Life Changes Questionnaire have been applied to a wide variety of groups from unemployed blacks in Watts to naval officers at sea. In every case, the correlation between change and illness has held. It has been established that "alterations in life style" that require a great deal of adjustment and coping, correlate with illness – whether or not these changes are under the individual's own direct control, whether or not he sees them as undesirable. Furthermore, the higher the degree of life change, the higher the risk that subsequent illness will be severe. So strong is this evidence, that it is becoming possible, by studying life change scores, actually to predict levels of illness in various populations.

Thus in August, 1967, Commander Ransom J. Arthur, head of the United States Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit at San Diego, and Richard Rahe, now a Captain in Commander Arthur's group, set out to forecast sickness patterns in a group of 3000 Navy men. Drs. Arthur and Rahe began by distributing a Life Changes Questionnaire to the sailors on three cruisers in San Diego harbor. The ships were about to depart and would be at sea for approximately six months each. During this time it would be possible to maintain exact medical records on each crew member. Could information about a man's life change pattern tell us in advance the likelihood of his falling ill during the voyage?

Each crew member was asked to tell what changes had occurred in his life during the year preceding the voyage. The questionnaire covered an extremely broad spectrum of topics. Thus it asked whether the man had experienced either more or less trouble with superiors during the twelve-month period. It asked about alterations in his eating and sleeping habits. It inquired about change in his circle of friends, his dress, his forms of recreation. It asked whether he had experienced any change in his social activities, in family get-togethers, in his financial condition. Had he been having more or less trouble with his in-laws? More or fewer arguments with his wife? Had he gained a child through birth or adoption? Had he suffered the death of his wife, a friend or relative?

The questionnaire went on to probe such issues as the number of times he had moved to a new home. Had he been in trouble with the law over traffic violations or other minor infractions? Had he spent a lot of time away from his wife as a result of job-related travel or marital difficulties? Had he changed jobs? Won awards or promotions? Had his living conditions changed as a consequence of home remodeling or the deterioration of his neighborhood? Had his wife started or stopped working? Had he taken out a loan or mortgage? How many times had he taken a vacation? Was there any major change in his relations with his parents as a result of death, divorce, remarriage, etc.?

In short, the questionnaire tried to get at the kind of life changes that are part of normal existence. It did not ask whether a change was regarded as "good" or "bad," simply whether or not it had occurred.

For six months, the three cruisers remained at sea. Just before they were scheduled to return, Arthur and Rahe flew new research teams out to join the ships. These teams proceeded to make a fine-tooth survey of the ships' medical records. Which men had been ill? What diseases had they reported? How many days had they been confined to sick bay?

When the last computer runs were completed, the linkage between changefulness and illness was nailed down more firmly than ever. Men in the upper ten percent of life change units – those who had had to adapt to the most change in the preceding year – turned out to suffer from one-and-a-half to two times as much illness as those in the bottom ten percent. Moreover, once again, the higher the life change score, the more severe the illness was likely to be. The study of life change patterns – of change as an environmental factor – contributed significantly to success in predicting the amount and severity of illness in widely varied populations.

"For the first time," says Dr. Arthur, appraising life change research, "we have an index of change. If you've had many changes in your life within a short time, this places a great challenge on your body ... An enormous number of changes within a short period might overwhelm its coping mechanisms.

"It is clear," he continues, "that there is a connection between the body's defenses and the demands for change that society imposes. We are in a continuous dynamic equilibrium ... Various 'noxious' elements, both internal and external, are always present, always seeking to explode into disease. For example, certain viruses live in the body and cause disease only when the defenses of the body wear down. There may well be generalized body defense systems that prove inadequate to cope with the flood of demands for change that come pulsing through the nervous and endocrine systems."

The stakes in life-change research are high, indeed, for not only illness, but death itself, may be linked to the severity of adaptational demands placed on the body. Thus a report by Arthur, Rahe, and a colleague, Dr. Joseph D. McKean, Jr., begins with a quotation from Somerset Maugham's literary autobiography, The Summing Up:

"The death of Somerset Maugham's father," they write, "seems at first glance to have been an abrupt unheralded event. However, a critical evaluation of the events of a year or two prior to the father's demise reveals changes in his occupation, residence, personal habits, finances and family constellation." These changes, they suggest, may have been precipitating events.

This line of reasoning is consistent with reports that death rates among widows and widowers, during the first year after loss of a spouse, are higher than normal. A series of British studies have strongly suggested that the shock of widowhood weakens resistance to illness and tends to accelerate aging. The same is true for men. Scientists at the Institute of Community Studies in London, after reviewing the evidence and studying 4,486 widowers, declare that "the excess mortality in the first six months is almost certainly real ... [Widowerhood] appears to bring in its wake a sudden increment in mortality-rates of something like 40 percent in the first six months."

Why should this be true? It is speculated that grief, itself, leads to pathology. Yet the answer may lie not in the state of grief at all, but in the very high impact that loss of a spouse carries, forcing the survivor to make a multitude of major life changes within a short period after the death takes place.

The work of Hinkle, Holmes, Rahe, Arthur, McKean and others now probing the relationship of change to illness is still in its early stages. Yet one lesson already seems vividly clear: change carries a physiological price tag with it. And the more radical the change, the steeper the price.

"Life," says Dr. Hinkle, "... implies a constant interaction between organism and environment." When we speak of the change brought about by divorce or a death in the family or a job transfer or even a vacation, we are talking about a major life event. Yet, as everyone knows, life consists of tiny events as well, a constant stream of them flowing into and out of our experience. Any major life change is major only because it forces us to make many little changes as well, and these, in turn, consist of still smaller and smaller changes. To grapple with the meaning of life in the accelerative society, we need to see what happens at the level of these minute, "micro-changes" as well.

What happens when something in our environment is altered? All of us are constantly bathed in a shower of signals from our environment – visual, auditory, tactile, etc. Most of these come in routine, repetitive patterns. When something changes within the range of our senses, the pattern of signals pouring through our sensory channels into our nervous system is modified. The routine, repetitive patterns are interrupted – and to this interruption we respond in a particularly acute fashion.

Significantly, when some new set of stimuli hits us, both body and brain know almost instantly that they are new. The change may be no more than a flash of color seen out of the corner of an eye. It may be that a loved one brushing us tenderly with the fingertips momentarily hesitates. Whatever the change, an enormous amount of physical machinery comes into play.

When a dog hears a strange noise, his ears prick, his head turns. And we do much the same. The change in stimuli triggers what experimental psychologists call an "orientation response." The orientation response or OR is a complex, even massive bodily operation. The pupils of the eyes dilate. Photochemical changes occur in the retina. Our hearing becomes momentarily more acute. We involuntarily use our muscles to direct our sense organs toward the incoming stimuli – we lean toward the sound, for example, or squint our eyes to see better. Our general muscle tone rises. There are changes in our pattern of brain waves. Our fingers and toes grow cold as the veins and arteries in them constrict. Our palms sweat. Blood rushes to the head. Our breathing and heart rate alter.

Under certain circumstances, we may do all of this – and more – in a very obvious fashion, exhibiting what has been called the "startle reaction." But even when we are unaware of what is going on, these changes take place every time we perceive novelty in our environment.

The reason for this is that we have, apparently built into our brains, a special noveltydetection apparatus that has only recently come to the attention of neurologists. The Soviet scientist E. N. Sokolov, who has put forward the most comprehensive explanation of how the orientation response works, suggests that neural cells in the brain store information about the intensity, duration, quality, and sequence of incoming stimuli. When new stimuli arrive, these are matched against the "neural models" in the cortex. If the stimuli are novel, they do not match any existing neural model, and the OR takes place. If, however, the matching process reveals their similarity to previously stored models, the cortex shoots signals to the reticular activating system, instructing it, in effect, to hold its fire.

In this way, the level of novelty in our environment has direct physical consequences. Moreover, it is vital to recognize that the OR is not an unusual affair. It takes place in most of us literally thousands of times in the course of a single day as various changes occur in the environment around us. Again and again the OR fires off, even during sleep.

"The OR is big!" says research psychologist Ardie Lubin, an expert on sleep mechanisms. "The whole body is involved. And when you increase novelty in the environment – which is what a lot of change means – you get continual ORs with it. This is probably very stressful for the body. It's a helluva load to put on the body.

"If you overload an environment with novelty, you get the equivalent of anxiety neurotics – people who have their systems continually flooded with adrenalin, continual heart pumping, cold hands, increased muscle tone and tremors – all the usual OR characteristics."

The orientation response is no accident. It is nature's gift to man, one of his key adaptive mechanisms. The OR has the effect of sensitizing him to take in more information – to see or hear better, for instance. It readies his muscles for sudden exertion, if necessary. In short, it prepares him for fight or flight. Yet each OR, as Lubin underscores, takes its toll in wear and tear on the body, for it requires energy to sustain it.

Thus one result of the OR is to send a surge of anticipatory energy through the body. Stored energy exists in such sites as the muscles and the sweat glands. As the neural system pulses in response to novelty, its synaptic vesicles discharge small amounts of adrenalin and nor-adrenalin. These, in turn, trigger a partial release of the stored energy. In short, each OR draws not only upon the body's limited supply of quick energy, but on its even more limited supply of energy-releasers.

It needs to be emphasized, moreover, that the OR occurs not merely in response to simple sensory inputs. It happens when we come across novel ideas or information as well as novel sights or sounds. A fresh bit of office gossip, a unifying concept, even a new joke or an original turn of phrase can trigger it.

The OR is particularly stressing when a novel event or fact challenges one's whole preconceived world view. Given an elaborate ideology, Catholicism, Marxism or whatever, we quickly recognize (or think we recognize) familiar elements in otherwise novel stimuli, and this puts us at ease. Indeed, ideologies may be regarded as large mental filing cabinets with vacant drawers or slots waiting to accept new data. For this reason, ideologies serve to reduce the intensity and frequency of the OR.

It is only when a new fact fails to fit, when it resists filing, that the OR occurs. A classical example is that of the religious person who is brought up to believe in the goodness of God and who is suddenly faced by what strikes him as a case of overwhelming, senseless evil. Until the new fact can be reconciled or his world view altered, he suffers acute agitation and anxiety.

The OR is so inherently stressing that we enjoy a vast sense of relief when it is over. At the level of ideas or cognition, this is the "a-hah!" reaction we experience at a moment of revelation, when we finally understand something that has been puzzling us. We may be aware of the "a-hah" reaction on rare occasions only, but OR's and "a-hah's" are continually occurring just below the level of consciousness.

Novelty, therefore – any perceptible novelty – touches off explosive activity within the body, and especially the nervous system. OR's fire off like flashbulbs within us, at a rate determined by what is happening outside us. Man and environment are in constant, quivering interplay.

While novelty in the environment raises or lowers the rate at which OR's occur, some novel conditions call forth even more powerful responses. We are driving along a monotonous turnpike, listening to the radio and beginning to daydream. Suddenly, a car speeds by, forcing us to swerve out of our lane. We react automatically, almost instantaneously, and the OR is very pronounced. We can feel our heart pumping and our hands shaking. It takes a while before the tension subsides.

But what if it does not subside? What happens when we are placed in a situation that demands a complex set of physical and psychological reactions and in which the pressure is sustained? What happens if, for example, the boss breathes hotly down our collar day after day? What happens when one of our children is seriously ill? Or when, on the other hand, we look forward eagerly to a "big date" or to closing an important business deal?

Such situations cannot be handled by the quick spurt of energy provided by the OR, and for these we have what might be termed the "adaptive reaction." This is closely related to the OR. Indeed, the two processes are so intertwined that the OR can be regarded as part of, or the initial phase of, the larger, more encompassing adaptive reaction. But while the OR is primarily based on the nervous system, the adaptive reaction is heavily dependent upon the endocrine glands and the hormones they shoot into the bloodstream. The first line of defense is neural; the second is hormonal.

When individuals are forced to make repeated adaptations to novelty, and especially when they are compelled to adapt to certain situations involving conflict and uncertainty, a pea-sized gland called the pituitary pumps out a number of substances. One of these, ACTH, goes to the adrenals. This causes them, in turn, to manufacture certain chemicals termed corticosteroids. When these are released, they speed up body metabolism. They raise blood pressure. They send anti-inflammatory substances through the blood to fight infection at wound sites, if any. And they begin turning fat and protein into dispersible energy, thus tapping into the body's reserve tank of energy. The adaptive reaction provides a much more potent and sustained flush of energy than the OR.

Like the orientation response, the adaptive reaction is no rarity. It takes longer to arouse and it lasts longer, but it happens countless times even within the course of a single day, responding to changes in our physical and social environment. The adaptive reaction, sometimes known by the more dramatic term "stress," can be touched off by shifts and changes in the psychological climate around us. Worry, upset, conflict, uncertainty, even happy anticipation, hilarity and joy, all set the ACTH factory working. The very anticipation of change can trigger the adaptive reaction. The need to alter one's way of life, to trade an old job for a new one, social pressures, status shifts, life style modifications, in fact, anything that forces us to confront the unknown, can switch on the adaptive reaction.

Dr. Lennart Levi, director of the Clinical Stress Laboratory at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, has shown, for example, that even quite small changes in the emotional climate or in interpersonal relationships can produce marked changes in body chemistry. Stress is frequently measured by the amount of corticosteroids and catecholamines (adrenalin and nor adrenalin, for example) found in the blood and urine. In one series of experiments Levi used films to generate emotions and plotted the resultant chemical changes.

A group of Swedish male medical students were shown film clips depicting murders, fights, torture, execution and cruelty to animals. The adrenalin component of their urine rose an average 70 percent as measured before and after. Nor-adrenalin rose an average 35 percent. Next a group of young female office workers were shown four different films on successive nights. The first was a bland travelog. They reported feelings of calmness and equanimity, and their output of catecholamines fell. The second night they watched Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and reported feeling intense excitement and anger. Adrenalin output shot upward. The third night they viewed Charley's Aunt, and roared with laughter at the comedy. Despite the pleasant feelings and the absence of any scenes of aggression or violence, their catecholamines rose significantly again. The fourth night they saw The Devil's Mask, a thriller during which they actually screamed with fright. Not unexpectedly, catecholamine output soared. In short, emotional response, almost without regard for its character, is accompanied by (or, indeed, reflects) adrenal activity.

Similar findings have been demonstrated again and again in the case of men and women – not to speak of rats, dogs, deer and other experimental animals – involved in "real" as distinct from "vicarious" experiences. Sailors in underwater demolition training, men stationed in lonely outposts in Antarctica, astronauts, factory workers, executives have all shown similar chemical responsiveness to change in the external environment.

The implications of this have hardly begun to register, yet there is increasing evidence that repeated stimulation of the adaptive reaction can be seriously damaging, that excessive activation of the endocrine system leads to irreversible "wear and tear." Thus, we are warned by Dr. René Dubos, author of Man Adapting, that such changeful circumstances as "competitive situations, operation within a crowded environment, change in a very profound manner the secretion of hormones. One can type-read that in the blood or the urine. Just a mere contact with the complex human situation almost automatically brings this about, this stimulation of the whole endocrine system."

What of it?

"There is," Dubos declares, "absolutely no question that one can overshoot the stimulation of the endocrine system and that this has physiological consequences that last throughout the whole lifetime of the organs."

Years ago, Dr. Hans Selye, a pioneer investigator of the body's adaptive responses, reported that "animals in which intense and prolonged stress is produced by any means suffer from sexual derangements ... Clinical studies have confirmed the fact that people exposed to stress react very much like experimental animals in all these respects. In women the monthly cycles become irregular or stop altogether, and during lactation milk secretion may become insufficient for the baby. In men both the sexual urge and sperm-cell formation are diminished."

Since then population experts and ecologists have compiled impressive evidence that heavily stressed populations of rats, deer – and people – show lower fertility levels than less stressed control groups. Crowding, for example, a condition that involves a constant high level of interpersonal interaction and compels the individual to make extremely frequent adaptive reactions has been shown, at least in animals, to enlarge the adrenals and cause a noticeable drop in fertility.

The repeated firing of the OR and the adaptive reaction, by overloading the neural and endocrine systems, is linked to other diseases and physical problems as well. Rapid change in the environment makes repeated calls on the energy supply of the body. This leads to a speedup of fat metabolism. In turn, this creates grave difficulties for certain diabetics. Even the common cold has been shown to be affected by the rate of change in the environment. In studies reported by Dr. Hinkle it was found that the frequency of colds in a sample of New York working women correlated with "changes in the mood and pattern of activity of the woman, in response to changing relationships to the people around her and the events that she encountered."

In short, if we understand the chain of biological events touched off by our efforts to adapt to change and novelty, we can begin to understand why health and change seem to be inextricably linked to one another. The findings of Holmes, Rahe, Arthur and others now engaged in life change research are entirely compatible with on-going research in endocrinology and experimental psychology. It is quite clearly impossible to accelerate the rate of change in society, or to raise the novelty ratio in society, without triggering significant changes in the body chemistry of the population. By stepping up the pace of scientific, technological and social change, we are tampering with the chemistry and biological stability of the human race.

This, one must immediately add, is not necessarily bad. "There are worse things than illness," Dr. Holmes wryly reminds us. "No one can live without experiencing some degree of stress all the time," Dr. Selye has written. To eliminate ORs and adaptive reactions would be to eliminate all change, including growth, self-development, maturation. It presupposes complete stasis. Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.

There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.

Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

Chapter 16 FUTURE SHOCK: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSION

If future shock were a matter of physical illness alone, it might be easier to prevent and to treat. But future shock attacks the psyche as well. Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the "mind" and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. By indiscriminately racing the engines of change, we may be undermining not merely the health of those least able to adapt, but their very ability to act rationally on their own behalf.

The striking signs of confusional breakdown we see around us – the spreading use of drugs, the rise of mysticism, the recurrent outbreaks of vandalism and undirected violence, the politics of nihilism and nostalgia, the sick apathy of millions – can all be understood better by recognizing their relationship to future shock. These forms of social irrationality may well reflect the deterioration of individual decision-making under conditions of environmental overstimulation.

Psychophysiologists studying the impact of change on various organisms have shown that successful adaptation can occur only when the level of stimulation – the amount of change and novelty in the environment – is neither too low nor too high. "The central nervous system of a higher animal," says Professor D. E. Berlyne of the University of Toronto, "is designed to cope with environments that produce a certain rate of ... stimulation ... It will naturally not perform at its best in an environment that overstresses or overloads it." He makes the same point about environments that understimulate it. Indeed, experiments with deer, dogs, mice and men all point unequivocally to the existence of what might be called an "adaptive range" below which and above which the individual's ability to cope simply falls apart.

Future shock is the response to overstimulation. It occurs when the individual is forced to operate above his adaptive range. Considerable research has been devoted to studying the impact of inadequate change and novelty on human performance. Studies of men in isolated Antarctic outposts, experiments in sensory deprivation, investigations into on-the-job performance in factories, all show a falling off of mental and physical abilities in response to understimulation. We have less direct data on the impact of overstimulation, but such evidence as does exist is dramatic and unsettling.

Soldiers in battle often find themselves trapped in environments that are rapidly changing, unfamiliar, and unpredictable. The soldier is torn this way and that. Shells burst on every side. Bullets whiz past erratically. Flares light the sky. Shouts, groans and explosions fill his ears. Circumstances change from instant to instant. To survive in such overstimulatiog environments, the soldier is driven to operate in the upper reaches of his adaptive range. Sometimes, he is pushed beyond his limits.

During World War II a bearded Chindit soldier, fighting with General Wingate's forces behind the Japanese lines in Burma, actually fell asleep while a storm of machine gun bullets splattered around him. Subsequent investigation revealed that this soldier was not merely reacting to physical fatigue or lack of sleep, but surrendering to a sense of overpowering apathy.

Death-inviting lassitude was so common, in fact, among guerrilla troops who had penetrated behind enemy lines that British military physicians gave it a name. They termed it Long Range Penetration Strain. A soldier who suffered from it became, in their words, "incapable of doing the simplest thing for himself and seemed to have the mind of a child." This deadly lethargy, moreover, was not confined to guerrilla troops. One year after the Chindit incident, similar symptoms cropped up en masse among the allied troops who invaded Normandy, and British researchers, after studying 5000 American and English combat casualties, concluded that this strange apathy was merely the final stage in a complex process of psychological collapse.

Mental deterioration often began with fatigue. This was followed by confusion and nervous irritability. The man became hypersensitive to the slightest stimuli around him. He would "hit the dirt" at the least provocation. He showed signs of bewilderment. He seemed unable to distinguish the sound of enemy fire from other, less threatening sounds. He became tense, anxious, and heatedly irascible. His comrades never knew when he would flail out in anger, even violence, in response to minor inconvenience.

Then the final stage of emotional exhaustion set in. The soldier seemed to lose the very will to live. He gave up the struggle to save himself, to guide himself rationally through the battle. He became, in the words of R. L. Swank, who headed the British investigation, "dull and listless ... mentally and physically retarded, preoccupied." Even his face became dull and apathetic. The fight to adapt had ended in defeat. The stage of total withdrawal was reached.

That men behave irrationally, acting against their own clear interest, when thrown into conditions of high change and novelty is also borne out by studies of human behavior in times of fire, flood, earthquake and other crises. Even the most stable and "normal" people, unhurt physically, can be hurled into anti-adaptive states. Often reduced to total confusion and mindlessness, they seem incapable of the most elementary rational decision-making.

Thus in a study of the responses to tornadoes in Texas, H. E. Moore writes that "the first reaction ... may be one of dazed bewilderment, sometimes one of disbelief, or at least of refusal to accept the fact. This, it seems to us, is the essential explanation of the behavior of persons and groups in Waco when it was devastated in 1953 ... On the personal level, it explains why a girl climbed into a music store through a broken display window, calmly purchased a record, and walked out again, even though the plate glass front of the building had blown out and articles were flying through the air inside the building."

A study of a tornado in Udall, Kansas, quotes a housewife as saying: "After it was over, my husband and I just got up and jumped out the window and ran. I don't know where we were running to but ... I didn't care. I just wanted to run." The classic disaster photograph shows a mother holding a dead or wounded baby in her arms, her face blank and numb as though she could no longer comprehend the reality around her. Sometimes she sits rocking gently on her porch with a doll, instead of a baby, in her arms.

In disaster, therefore, exactly as in certain combat situations, individuals can be psychologically overwhelmed. Once again the source may be traced to a high level of environmental stimulation. The disaster victim finds himself suddenly caught in a situation in which familiar objects and relationships are transformed. Where once his house stood, there may be nothing more than smoking rubble. He may encounter a cabin floating on the flood tide or a rowboat sailing through the air. The environment is filled with change and novelty. And once again the response is marked by confusion, anxiety, irritability and withdrawal into apathy.

Culture shock, the profound disorientation suffered by the traveler who has plunged without adequate preparation into an alien culture, provides a third example of adaptive breakdown. Here we find none of the obvious elements of war or disaster. The scene may be totally peaceful and riskless. Yet the situation demands repeated adaptation to novel conditions. Culture shock, according to psychologist Sven Lundstedt, is a "form of personality maladjustment which is a reaction to a temporarily unsuccessful attempt to adjust to new surroundings and people."

The culture shocked person, like the soldier and disaster victim, is forced to grapple with unfamiliar and unpredictable events, relationships and objects. His habitual ways of accomplishing things – even simple tasks like placing a telephone call – are no longer appropriate. The strange society may itself be changing only very slowly, yet for him it is all new. Signs, sounds and other psychological cues rush past him before he can grasp their meaning. The entire experience takes on a surrealistic air. Every word, every action is shot through with uncertainty.

In this setting, fatigue arrives more quickly than usual. Along with it, the cross-cultural traveler often experiences what Lundstedt describes as "a subjective feeling of loss, and a sense of isolation and loneliness."

The unpredictability arising from novelty undermines his sense of reality. Thus he longs, as Professor Lundstedt puts it, "for an environment in which the gratification of important psychological and physical needs is predictable and less uncertain." He becomes "anxious, confused and often appears apathetic." In fact, Lundstedt concludes, "culture shock can be viewed as a response to stress by emotional and intellectual withdrawal."

It is hard to read these (and many other) accounts of behavior breakdown under a variety of stresses without becoming acutely aware of their similarities. While there are differences, to be sure, between a soldier in combat, a disaster victim, and a culturally dislocated traveler, all three face rapid change, high novelty, or both. All three are required to adapt rapidly and repeatedly to unpredictable stimuli. And there are striking parallels in the way all three respond to this overstimulation.

First, we find the same evidences of confusion, disorientation, or distortion of reality. Second, there are the same signs of fatigue, anxiety, tenseness, or extreme irritability. Third, in all cases there appears to be a point of no return – a point at which apathy and emotional withdrawal set in.

In short, the available evidence strongly suggests that overstimulation may lead to bizarre and anti-adaptive behavior.

We still know too little about this phenomenon to explain authoritatively why overstimulation seems to produce maladaptive behavior. Yet we pick up important clues if we recognize that overstimulation can occur on at least three different levels: the sensory, the cognitive and the decisional. (The line between each of these is not completely clear, even to psychologists, but if we simply, in commonsense fashion, equate the sensory level with perceiving, the cognitive with thinking, and the decisional with deciding, we will not go too far astray.)

The easiest to understand is the sensory level. Experiments in sensory deprivation, during which volunteers are cut off from normal stimulation of their senses, have shown that the absence of novel sensory stimuli can lead to bewilderment and impaired mental functioning. By the same token, the input of too much disorganized, patternless or chaotic sensory stimuli can have similar effects. It is for this reason that practitioners of political or religious brainwashing make use not only of sensory deprivation (solitary confinement, for example) but of sensory bombardment involving flashing lights, rapidly shifting patterns of color, chaotic sound effects – the whole arsenal of psychedelic kaleidoscopy.

The religious fervor and bizarre behavior of certain hippie cultists may arise not merely from drug abuse, but from group experimentation with both sensory deprivation and bombardment. The chanting of monotonous mantras, the attempt to focus the individual's attention on interior, bodily sensation to the exclusion of outside stimuli, are efforts to induce the weird and sometimes hallucinatory effects of understimulation. At the other end of the scale, we note the glazed stares and numb, expressionless faces of youthful dancers at the great rock music auditoriums where light shows, split-screen movies, high decibel screams, shouts and moans, grotesque costumes and writhing, painted bodies create a sensory environment characterized by high input and extreme unpredictability and novelty.

An organism's ability to cope with sensory input is dependent upon its physiological structure. The nature of its sense organs and the speed with which impulses flow through its neural system set biological bounds on the quantity of sensory data it can accept. If we examine the speed of signal transmission within various organisms, we find that the lower the evolutionary level, the slower the movement. Thus, for example, in a sea urchin egg, lacking a nervous system as such, a signal moves along a membrane at a rate of about a centimeter an hour. Clearly, at such a rate, the organism can respond to only a very limited part of its environment. By the time we move up the ladder to a jellyfish, which already has a primitive nervous system, the signal travels 36,000 times faster: ten centimeters per second. In a worm, the rate leaps to 100 cps. Among insects and crustaceans, neural pulses race along at 1000 cps. Among anthropoids the rate reaches 10,000 cps. Crude as these figures no doubt are, they help explain why man is unquestionably among the most adaptable of creatures.

Yet even in man, with a neural transmission rate of about 30,000 cps, the boundaries of the system are imposing. (Electrical signals in a computer, by contrast, travel billions of times faster.) The limitations of the sense organs and nervous system mean that many environmental events occur at rates too fast for us to follow, and we are reduced to sampling experience at best. When the signals reaching us are regular and repetitive, this sampling process can yield a fairly good mental representation of reality. But when it is highly disorganized, when it is novel and unpredictable, the accuracy of our imagery is necessarily reduced. Our image of reality is distorted. This may explain why, when we experience sensory overstimulation, we suffer confusion, a blurring of the line between illusion and reality.

If overstimulation at the sensory level increases the distortion with which we perceive reality, cognitive overstimulation interferes with our ability to "think." While some human responses to novelty are involuntary, others are preceded by conscious thought, and this depends upon our ability to absorb, manipulate, evaluate and retain information.

Rational behavior, in particular, depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least fair success, the outcome of his own actions. To do this, he must be able to predict how the environment will respond to his acts. Sanity, itself, thus hinges on man's ability to predict his immediate, personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.

When the individual is plunged into a fast and irregularly changing situation, or a novelty-loaded context, however, his predictive accuracy plummets. He can no longer make the reasonably correct assessments on which rational behavior is dependent.

To compensate for this, to bring his accuracy up to the normal level again, he must scoop up and process far more information than before. And he must do this at extremely high rates of speed. In short, the more rapidly changing and novel the environment, the more information the individual needs to process in order to make effective, rational decisions.

Yet just as there are limits on how much sensory input we can accept, there are in-built constraints on our ability to process information. In the words of psychologist George A. Miller of Rockefeller University, there are "severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process, and remember." By classifying information, by abstracting and "coding" it in various ways, we manage to stretch these limits, yet ample evidence demonstrates that our capabilities are finite.

To discover these outer limits, psychologists and communications theorists have set about testing what they call the "channel capacity" of the human organism. For the purpose of these experiments, they regard man as a "channel." Information enters from the outside. It is processed. It exits in the form of actions based on decisions. The speed and accuracy of human information processing can be measured by comparing the speed of information input with the speed and accuracy of output.

Information has been defined technically and measured in terms of units called "bits." (A bit is the amount of information needed to make a decision between two equally likely alternatives. The number of bits needed increases by one as the number of such alternatives doubles.) By now, experiments have established rates for the processing involved in a wide variety of tasks from reading, typing, and playing the piano to manipulating dials or doing mental arithmetic. And while researchers differ as to the exact figures, they strongly agree on two basic principles: first, that man has limited capacity; and second, that overloading the system leads to serious breakdown of performance.

Imagine, for example, an assembly line worker in a factory making childrens' blocks. His job is to press a button each time a red block passes in front of him on the conveyor belt. So long as the belt moves at a reasonable speed, he will have little difficulty. His performance will approach 100 percent accuracy. We know that if the pace is too slow, his mind will wander, and his performance will deteriorate. We also know that if the belt moves too fast, he will falter, miss, grow confused and uncoordinated. He is likely to become tense and irritable. He may even take a swat at the machine out of pure frustration. Ultimately, he will give up trying to keep pace.

Here the information demands are simple, but picture a more complex task. Now the blocks streaming down the line are of many different colors. His instructions are to press the button only when a certain color pattern appears – a yellow block, say, followed by two reds and a green. In this task, he must take in and process far more information before he can decide whether or not to hit the button. All other things being equal, he will have even greater difficulty keeping up as the pace of the line accelerates.

In a still more demanding task, we not only force the worker to process a lot of data before deciding whether to hit the button, but we then force him to decide which of several buttons to press. We can also vary the number of times each button must be pressed. Now his instructions might read: For color pattern yellow-red-red-green, hit button number two once; for pattern green-blue-yellow-green, hit button number six three times; and so forth. Such tasks require the worker to process a large amount of data in order to carry out his task. Speeding up the conveyor now will destroy his accuracy even more rapidly.

Experiments like these have been built up to dismaying degrees of complexity. Tests have involved flashing lights, musical tones, letters, symbols, spoken words, and a wide array of other stimuli. And subjects, asked to drum fingertips, speak phrases, solve puzzles, and perform an assortment of other tasks, have been reduced to blithering ineptitude. The results unequivocally show that no matter what the task, there is a speed above which it cannot be performed – and not simply because of inadequate muscular dexterity. The top speed is often imposed by mental rather than muscular limitations. These experiments also reveal that the greater the number of alternative courses of action open to the subject, the longer it takes him to reach a decision and carry it out.

Clearly, these findings can help us understand certain forms of psychological upset. Managers plagued by demands for rapid, incessant and complex decisions; pupils deluged with facts and hit with repeated tests; housewives confronted with squalling children, jangling telephones, broken washing machines, the wail of rock and roll from the teenager's living room and the whine of the television set in the parlor – may well find their ability to think and act clearly impaired by the waves of information crashing into their senses. It is more than possible that some of the symptoms noted among battle-stressed soldiers, disaster victims, and culture shocked travelers are related to this kind of information overload.

One of the men who has pioneered in information studies, Dr. James G. Miller, director of the Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, states flatly that "Glutting a person with more information than he can process may ... lead to disturbance." He suggests, in fact, that information overload may be related to various forms of mental illness.

One of the striking features of schizophrenia, for example, is "incorrect associative response." Ideas and words that ought to be linked in the subject's mind are not, and vice versa. The schizophrenic tends to think in arbitrary or highly personalized categories. Confronted with a set of blocks of various kinds – triangles, cubes, cones, etc. – the normal person is likely to categorize them in terms of geometric shape. The schizophrenic asked to classify them is just as likely to say "They are all soldiers" or "They all make me feel sad."

In the volume Disorders of Communication, Miller describes experiments using word association tests to compare normals and schizophrenics. Normal subjects were divided into two groups, and asked to associate various words with other words or concepts. One group worked at its own pace. The other worked under time pressure – i.e., under conditions of rapid information input. The time-pressed subjects came up with responses more like those of schizophrenics than of self-paced normals.

Similar experiments conducted by psychologists G. Usdansky and L. J. Chapman made possible a more refined analysis of the types of errors made by subjects working under forced-pace, high information-input rates. They, too, concluded that increasing the speed of response brought out a pattern of errors among normals that is peculiarly characteristic of schizophrenics.

"One might speculate," Miller suggests, "... that schizophrenia (by some as-yetunknown process, perhaps a metabolic fault which increases neural 'noise') lowers the capacities of channels involved in cognitive information processing. Schizophrenics consequently ... have difficulties in coping with information inputs at standard rates like the difficulties experienced by normals at rapid rates. As a result, schizophrenics make errors at standard rates like those made by normals under fast, forced-input rates."

In short, Miller argues, the breakdown of human performance under heavy information loads may be related to psychopathology in ways we have not yet begun to explore. Yet, even without understanding its potential impact, we are accelerating the generalized rate of change in society. We are forcing people to adapt to a new life pace, to confront novel situations and master them in ever shorter intervals. We are forcing them to choose among fast-multiplying options. We are, in other words, forcing them to process information at a far more rapid pace than was necessary in slowly-evolving societies. There can be little doubt that we are subjecting at least some of them to cognitive overstimulation. What consequences this may have for mental health in the techno-societies has yet to be determined.

Whether we are submitting masses of men to information overload or not, we are affecting their behavior negatively by imposing on them still a third form of overstimulation – decision stress. Many individuals tapped in dull or slowly changing environments yearn to break out into new jobs or roles that require them to make faster and more complex decisions. But among the people of the future, the problem is reversed. "Decisions, decisions ..." they mutter as they race anxiously from task to task. The reason they feel harried and upset is that transience, novelty and diversity pose contradictory demands and thus place them in an excruciating double bind.

The accelerative thrust and its psychological counterpart, transience, force us to quicken the tempo of private and public decision-making. New needs, novel emergencies and crises demand rapid response.

Yet the very newness of the circumstances brings about a revolutionary change in the nature of the decisions they are called upon to make. The rapid injection of novelty into the environment upsets the delicate balance of "programmed" and "non-programmed" decisions in our organizations and our private lives.

A programmed decision is one that is routine, repetitive and easy to make. The commuter stands at the edge of the platform as the 8:05 rattles to a stop. He climbs aboard, as he has done every day for months or years. Having long ago decided that the 8:05 is the most convenient run on the schedule, the actual decision to board the train is programmed. It seems more like a reflex than a decision at all. The immediate criteria on which the decision is based are relatively simple and clear-cut, and because all the circumstances are familiar, he scarcely has to think about it. He is not required to process very much information. In this sense, programmed decisions are low in psychic cost.

Contrast this with the kind of decisions that same commuter thinks about on his way to the city. Should he take the new job Corporation X has just offered him? Should he buy a new house? Should he have an affair with his secretary? How can he get the Management Committee to accept his proposals about the new ad campaign? Such questions demand nonroutine answers. They force him to make one-time or first-time decisions that will establish new habits and behavioral procedures. Many factors must be studied and weighed. A vast amount of information must be processed. These decisions are non-programmed. They are high in psychic cost.

For each of us, life is a blend of the two. If this blend is too high in programmed decisions, we are not challenged; we find life boring and stultifying. We search for ways, even unconsciously, to introduce novelty into our lives, thereby altering the decision "mix." But if this mix is too high in non-programmed decisions, if we are hit by so many novel situations that programming becomes impossible, life becomes painfully disorganized, exhausting and anxiety-filled. Pushed to its extreme, the end-point is psychosis.

"Rational behavior ...," writes organization theorist Bertram M. Gross, "always includes an intricate combination of routinization and creativity. Routine is essential ... [because it] frees creative energies for dealing with the more baffling array of new problems for which routinization is an irrational approach." When we are unable to program much of our lives, we suffer. "There is no more miserable person," wrote William James, "than one ... for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup ... the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of deliberation." For unless we can extensively program our behavior, we waste tremendous amounts of information-processing capacity on trivia.

This is why we form habits. Watch a committee break for lunch and then return to the same room: almost invariably its members seek out the same seats they occupied earlier. Some anthropologists drag in the theory of "territoriality" to explain this behavior – the notion that man is forever trying to carve out for himself a sacrosanct "turf." A simpler explanation lies in the fact that programming conserves information-processing capacity. Choosing the same seat spares us the need to survey and evaluate other possibilities.

In a familiar context, we are able to handle many of our life problems with low-cost programmed decisions. Change and novelty boost the psychic price of decision-making. When we move to a new neighborhood, for example, we are forced to alter old relationships and establish new routines or habits. This cannot be done without first discarding thousands of formerly programmed decisions and making a whole series of costly new first-time, nonprogrammed decisions. In effect, we are asked to re-program ourselves.

Precisely the same is true of the unprepared visitor to an alien culture, and it is equally true of the man who, still in his own society, is rocketed into the future without advance warning. The arrival of the future in the form of novelty and change makes all his painfully pieced-together behavioral routines obsolete. He suddenly discovers to his horror that these old routines, rather than solving his problems, merely intensify them. New and as yet unprogrammable decisions are demanded. In short, novelty disturbs the decision mix, tipping the balance toward the most difficult, most costly form of decision-making.

It is true that some people can tolerate more novelty than others. The optimum mix is different for each of us. Yet the number and type of decisions demanded of us are not under our autonomous control. It is the society that basically determines the mix of decisions we must make and the pace at which we must make them. Today there is a hidden conflict in our lives between the pressures of acceleration and those of novelty. One forces us to make faster decisions while the other compels us to make the hardest, most time-consuming type of decisions.

The anxiety generated by this head-on collision is sharply intensified by expanding diversity. Incontrovertible evidence shows that increasing the number of choices open to an individual also increases the amount of information he needs to process if he is to deal with them. Laboratory tests on men and animals alike prove that the more the choices, the slower the reaction time.

It is the frontal collision of these three incompatible demands that is now producing a decision-making crisis in the techno-societies. Taken together these pressures justify the term "decisional overstimulation," and they help explain why masses of men in these societies already feel themselves harried, futile, incapable of working out their private futures. The conviction that the rat-race is too tough, that things are out of control, is the inevitable consequence of these clashing forces. For the uncontrolled acceleration of scientific, technological and social change subverts the power of the individual to make sensible, competent decisions about his own destiny.

When we combine the effects of decisional stress with sensory and cognitive overload, we produce several common forms of individual maladaptation. For example, one widespread response to high-speed change is outright denial. The Denier's strategy is to "block out" unwelcome reality. When the demand for decisions reaches crescendo, he flatly refuses to take in new information. Like the disaster victim whose face registers total disbelief, The Denier, too, cannot accept the evidence of his senses. Thus he concludes that things really are the same, and that all evidences of change are merely superficial. He finds comfort in such clichés as "young people were always rebellious" or "there's nothing new on the face of the earth," or "the more things change, the more they stay the same."

An unknowing victim of future shock, The Denier sets himself up for personal catastrophe. His strategy for coping increases the likelihood that when he finally is forced to adapt, his encounter with change will come in the form of a single massive life crisis, rather than a sequence of manageable problems.

A second strategy of the future shock victim is specialism. The Specialist doesn't block out all novel ideas or information. Instead, he energetically attempts to keep pace with change – but only in a specific narrow sector of life. Thus we witness the spectacle of the physician or financier who makes use of all the latest innovations in his profession, but remains rigidly closed to any suggestion for social, political, or economic innovation. The more universities undergo paroxysms of protest, the more ghettos go up in flames, the less he wants to know about them, and the more closely he narrows the slit through which he sees the world.

Superficially, he copes well. But he, too, is running the odds against himself. He may awake one morning to find his specialty obsolete or else transformed beyond recognition by events exploding outside his field of vision.

A third common response to future shock is obsessive reversion to previously successful adaptive routines that are now irrelevant and inappropriate. The Reversionist sticks to his previously programmed decisions and habits with dogmatic desperation. The more change threatens from without, the more meticulously he repeats past modes of action. His social outlook is regressive. Shocked by the arrival of the future, he offers hysterical support for the not-so-status quo, or he demands, in one masked form or another, a return to the glories of yesteryear.

The Barry Goldwaters and George Wallaces of the world appeal to his quivering gut through the politics of nostalgia. Police maintained order in the past; hence, to maintain order, we need only supply more police. Authoritarian treatment of children worked in the past; hence, the troubles of the present spring from permissiveness. The middle-aged, rightwing reversionist yearns for the simple, ordered society of the small town – the slow-paced social environment in which his old routines were appropriate. Instead of adapting to the new, he continues automatically to apply the old solutions, growing more and more divorced from reality as he does so.

If the older reversionist dreams of reinstating a small-town past, the youthful, left-wing reversionist dreams of reviving an even older social system. This accounts for some of the fascination with rural communes, the bucolic romanticism that fills the posters and poetry of the hippie and post-hippie subcultures, the deification of Ché Guevara (identified with mountains and jungles, not with urban or post-urban environments), the exaggerated veneration of pre-technological societies and the exaggerated contempt for science and technology. For all their fiery demands for change, at least some sectors of the left share with the Wallacites and Goldwaterites a secret passion for the past.

Just as their Indian headbands, their Edwardian capes, their Deerslayer boots and goldrimmed glasses mimic various eras of the past, so, too, their ideas. Turn-of-the-century terrorism and quaint Black Flag anarchy are suddenly back in vogue. The Rousseauian cult of the noble savage flourishes anew. Antique Marxist ideas, applicable at best to yesterday's industrialism, are hauled out as knee-jerk answers for the problems of tomorrow's superindustrialism. Reversionism masquerades as revolution.

Finally, we have the Super-Simplifier. With old heroes and institutions toppling, with strikes, riots, and demonstrations stabbing at his consciousness, he seeks a single neat equation that will explain all the complex novelties threatening to engulf him. Grasping erratically at this idea or that, he becomes a temporary true believer.

This helps account for the rampant intellectual faddism that already threatens to outpace the rate of turnover in fashion. McLuhan? Prophet of the electric age? Levi-Strauss? Wow! Marcuse? Now I see it all! The Maharishi of Whatchmacallit? Fantastic! Astrology? Insight of the ages!

The Super-Simplifier, groping desperately, invests every idea he comes across with universal relevance – often to the embarrassment of its author. Alas, no idea, not even mine or thine, is omni-insightful. But for the Super-Simplifier nothing less than total relevance suffices. Maximization of profits explains America. The Communist conspiracy explains race riots. Participatory democracy is the answer. Permissiveness (or Dr. Spock) are the root of all evil.

This search for a unitary solution at the intellectual level has its parallels in action. Thus the bewildered, anxious student, pressured by parents, uncertain of his draft status, nagged at by an educational system whose obsolescence is more strikingly revealed every day, forced to decide on a career, a set of values, and a worthwhile life style, searches wildly for a way to simplify his existence. By turning on to LSD, Methedrine or heroin, he performs an illegal act that has, at least, the virtue of consolidating his miseries. He trades a host of painful and seemingly insoluble troubles for one big problem, thus radically, if temporarily, simplifying existence.

The teen-age girl who cannot cope with the daily mounting tangle of stresses may choose another dramatic act of super-simplification: pregnancy. Like drug abuse, pregnancy may vastly complicate her life later, but it immediately plunges all her other problems into relative insignificance.

Violence, too, offers a "simple" way out of burgeoning complexity of choice and general overstimulation. For the older generation and the political establishment, police truncheons and military bayonets loom as attractive remedies, a way to end dissent once and for all. Black extremists and white vigilantes both employ violence to narrow their choices and clarify their lives. For those who lack an intelligent, comprehensive program, who cannot cope with the novelties and complexities of blinding change, terrorism substitutes for thought. Terrorism may not topple regimes, but it removes doubts.

Most of us can quickly spot these patterns of behavior in others – even in ourselves – without, at the same time, understanding their causes. Yet information scientists will instantly recognize denial, specialization, reversion and super-simplification as classical techniques for coping with overload.

All of them dangerously evade the rich complexity of reality. They generate distorted images of reality. The more the individual denies, the more he specializes at the expense of wider interests, the more mechanically he reverts to past habits and policies, the more desperately he super-simplifies, the more inept his responses to the novelty and choices flooding into his life. The more he relies on these strategies, the more his behavior exhibits wild and erratic swings and general instability.

Every information scientist recognizes that some of these strategies may, indeed, be necessary in overload situations. Yet, unless the individual begins with a clear grasp of relevant reality, and unless he begins with cleanly defined values and priorities, his reliance on such techniques will only deepen his adaptive difficulties.

These preconditions, however, are increasingly difficult to meet. Thus the future shock victim who does employ these strategies experiences a deepening sense of confusion and uncertainty. Caught in the turbulent flow of change, called upon to make significant, rapidfire life decisions, he feels not simply intellectual bewilderment, but disorientation at the level of personal values. As the pace of change quickens, this confusion is tinged with selfdoubt, anxiety and fear. He grows tense, tires easily. He may fall ill. As the pressures relentlessly mount, tension shades into irritability, anger, and sometimes, senseless violence. Little events trigger enormous responses; large events bring inadequate responses.

Pavlov many years ago referred to this phenomenon as the "paradoxical phase" in the breakdown of the dogs on whom he conducted his conditioning experiments. Subsequent research has shown that humans, too, pass through this stage under the impact of overstimulation, and it may explain why riots sometimes occur even in the absence of serious provocation, why, as though for no reason, thousands of teenagers at a resort will suddenly go on the rampage, smashing windows, heaving rocks and bottles, wrecking cars. It may explain why pointless vandalism is a problem in all of the techno-societies, to the degree that an editorialist in the Japan Times reports in cracked, but passionate English: "We have never before seen anything like the extensive scope that these psychopathic acts are indulged in today."

And finally, the confusion and uncertainty wrought by transience, novelty and diversity may explain the profound apathy that de-socializes millions, old and young alike. This is not the studied, temporary withdrawal of the sensible person who needs to unwind or slow down before coping anew with his problems. It is total surrender before the strain of decisionmaking in conditions of uncertainty and overchoice.

Affluence makes it possible, for the first time in history, for large numbers of people to make their withdrawal a full-time proposition. The family man who retreats into his evening with the help of a few martinis and allows televised fantasy to narcotize him, at least works during the day, performing a social function upon which others are dependent. His is a parttime withdrawal. But for some (not all) hippie dropouts, for many of the surfers and lotuseaters, withdrawal is full-time and total. A check from an indulgent parent may be the only remaining link with the larger society.

On the beach at Matala, a tiny sun-drenched village in Crete, are forty or fifty caves occupied by runaway American troglodytes, young men and women who, for the most part, have given up any further effort to cope with the exploding high-speed complexities of life. Here decisions are few and time plentiful. Here the choices are narrowed. No problem of overstimulation. No need to comprehend or even to feel. A reporter visiting them in 1968 brought them news of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Their response: silence. "No shock, no rage, no tears. Is this the new phenomenon? Running away from America and running away from emotion? I understand uninvolvement, disenchantment, even noncommitment. But where has all the feeling gone?"

The reporter might understand where all the feeling has gone if he understood the impact of overstimulation, the apathy of the Chindit guerrilla, the blank face of the disaster victim, the intellectual and emotional withdrawal of the culture shock victim. For these young people, and millions of others – the confused, the violent, and the apathetic – already evince the symptoms of future shock. They are its earliest victims.

It is impossible to produce future shock in large numbers of individuals without affecting the rationality of the society as a whole. Today, according to Daniel P. Moynihan, the chief White House advisor on urban affairs, the United States "exhibits the qualities of an individual going through a nervous breakdown." For the cumulative impact of sensory, cognitive or decisional overstimulation, not to mention the physical effects of neural or endocrine overload, creates sickness in our midst.

This sickness is increasingly mirrored in our culture, our philosophy, our attitude toward reality. It is no accident that so many ordinary people refer to the world as a "madhouse" or that the theme of insanity has recently become a staple in literature, art, drama and film. Peter Weiss in his play Marat/Sade portrays a turbulent world as seen through the eyes of the inmates of the Charenton asylum. In movies like Morgan, life within a mental institution is depicted as superior to that in the outside world. In Blow-Up, the climax comes when the hero joins in a tennis game in which players hit a non-existent ball back and forth over the net. It is his symbolic acceptance of the unreal and irrational – recognition that he can no longer distinguish between illusion and reality. Millions of viewers identified with the hero in that moment.

The assertion that the world has "gone crazy," the graffiti slogan that "reality is a crutch," the interest in hallucinogenic drugs, the enthusiasm for astrology and the occult, the search for truth in sensation, ecstasy and "peak experience," the swing toward extreme subjectivism, the attacks on science, the snowballing belief that reason has failed man, reflect the everyday experience of masses of ordinary people who find they can no longer cope rationally with change.

Millions sense the pathology that pervades the air, but fail to understand its roots. These roots lie not in this or that political doctrine, still less in some mystical core of despair or isolation presumed to inhere in the "human condition." Nor do they lie in science, technology, or legitimate demands for social change. They are traceable, instead, to the uncontrolled, non-selective nature of our lunge into the future. They lie in our failure to direct, consciously and imaginatively, the advance toward super-industrialism.

Thus, despite its extraordinary achievements in art, science, intellectual, moral and political life, the United States is a nation in which tens of thousands of young people flee reality by opting for drug-induced lassitude; a nation in which millions of their parents retreat into video-induced stupor or alcoholic haze; a nation in which legions of elderly folk vegetate and die in loneliness; in which the flight from family and occupational responsibility has become an exodus; in which masses tame their raging anxieties with Miltown, or Librium, or Equanil, or a score of other tranquilizers and psychic pacifiers. Such a nation, whether it knows it or not, is suffering from future shock.

"I'm not going back to America," says Ronald Bierl, a young expatriate in Turkey. "If you can establish your own sanity, you don't have to worry about other people's sanity. And so many Americans are going stone insane." Multitudes share this unflattering view of American reality. Lest Europeans or Japanese or Russians rest smugly on their presumed sanity, however, it is well to ask whether similar symptoms are not already present in their midst as well. Are Americans unique in this respect, or are they simply suffering the initial brunt of an assault on the psyche that soon will stagger other nations as well?

Social rationality presupposes individual rationality, and this, in turn, depends not only on certain biological equipment, but on continuity, order and regularity in the environment. It is premised on some correlation between the pace and complexity of change and man's decisional capacities. By blindly stepping up the rate of change, the level of novelty, and the extent of choice, we are thoughtlessly tampering with these environmental preconditions of rationality. We are condemning countless millions to future shock.