Mass Hysteria

Its symptoms are often similar to those of serious illness - but hysteria spreads faster than any known disease. How can this be possible? Is there perhaps a link with some form of ESP?

Reports of outbreaks of mass hysteria in places throughout the world, together with the limited amount of research that has been done on the subject, strongly suggest that certain long accepted assumptions about the phenomenon should be revised. Three aspects, in particular, need reconsidering.

Firstly, it is unwise to think of hysteria simply in terms of self-indulgent shamming. A better description would be a 'breakdown' which, whether nervous or physical, may provide a form of protection from an intolerable situation by removing the victim from it. Thus, it can at times be seen to perform the same valuable function as does a fuse wire in an electrical circuit.

Secondly, the symptoms of hysteria are not necessarily always those we tend to associate with the term. In general, they will tend to manifest themselves in whatever form is associated with breakdown of normal behaviour by the society in which they occur.

Thirdly, the diagnosis of 'hysteria' should not be regarded as a sign that there was nothing really wrong with the victim. On the contrary, the prevalence of such outbreaks suggests that they should definitely be carefully investigated in order to find out precisely how displays of mob hysteria occur and for what reasons.

So what is the force that takes over a group of people and, in effect, breaks them down, inducing a range of symptoms that may vary enormously in different circumstances, but that are generally quite consistent within a single outbreak? What, in other words, is the nature of 'psychic' contagion, a phenomenon that results in scores or even hundreds of people breaking down at, or around, the same time, in much the same way - even when they are not all within sight of one another, so that simple imitation can be ruled out?

When dealing with such problems, it is always worth looking back over Man's evolutionary past, to see if there are any parallels. In this case, there are. Indeed, many species appear to use methods of communication that biologists have yet to explain.

At its most basic level, this communication seems to take place between cells. In his book Supernature, Lyall Watson describes the remarkable capacity of the common or bathroom sponge - a colony of cells in its natural ocean habitat - to reconstitute itself in similar form if destroyed. 'Some sponges grow to several feet in diameter,' Watson observes, 'and yet, if you cut them up and squeeze the pieces through silk cloth to separate every cell from its neighbour, the gruel soon gets together and organises itself and the complete sponge reappears.'

In his book The Soul of the White Ant, the South African scientist Eugene Marais describes his experiments with colonies of ants. These revealed that, although groups of ants and even individual ants were engaged in separate pursuits at any given time - feeding the queen, collecting the food for her, storing it, building larders for it, or fighting off intruders - the activities of all of them were dictated by what, for want of a better word, he felt bound to call a 'soul'.

Birds of a feather

The behaviour of starlings is a good example of such collective behaviour on a larger scale. Thousands of starlings roost in London, but they spend their days in the countryside, where food is more plentiful. At a certain time in the evening, starlings all round London - as far away as Essex and the Home Counties - will begin to make the same inward journey, so that day after day the flocks can be tracked on radar, spreading outwards in the morning, moving inwards in the evening.

Even more remarkable is the group behaviour of these starlings as they fly out and back. They do not follow a leader; rather, it is as if, in their whirling's, they are directed by what Marais termed a 'soul'.

The most plausible explanation for this kind of behaviour is that it depends on a form of communication that developed early in the evolutionary process. In the case of ants, it was a form of diversification, enabling the community as a whole to survive while various groups within it performed their various tasks. In birds, it developed into a mechanism for the protection of the group, providing large flocks of birds with collective guidance for their movements.

Could it be, therefore, that mass hysteria is a relic of a similar collective human instinct - an evolutionary device that by this point in time has largely outlived its usefulness?

This seems a likely hypothesis: but we are still no nearer an explanation of the way in which the symptoms are transmitted in an outbreak of mass hysteria. The most promising line of research in this connection has been into pheromones, free-floating scent molecules, the discovery of which has helped scientists to account for the way in which, for example, males of a species will come clustering round a female who is on heat.

In her novel The Group, Mary McCarthy claimed that women living in close contact with each other tend to menstruate at the same time; and research at Harvard and elsewhere has since shown that this is correct. Room-mates' periods do tend to move into synchronisation; and so do those of close friends who spend a great deal of time together. Pheromones are currently front-runners in the search for an explanation. But if pheromones are the channel of communication in this case, may they not serve the same purpose in other epidemics that hitherto have been thought to be spread solely by infection?

The pheromone connection

In a fascinating research project, two eminent astronomers, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, demonstrated that, contrary to common assumption, influenza does not necessarily spread by person-to-person contact - a fact that had already been established globally, as large-scale epidemics do not follow the course that would be expected if person-to-person infection were the sole agent of the spread of the disease. The same phenomenon has been confirmed at the Common Cold Research Unit at Salisbury in England. Coughs and sneezes seem to be the obvious suspects, but they are not always guilty.

So in what other way might epidemics spread? An alternative theory is that viruses are constantly all around us, but that we can resist them unless, and until, an epidemic is signalled - by pheromones.

Pheromones, however, take us only part of the way on this voyage of discovery. Eugene Marais, who knew nothing of pheromones but had convinced himself that the secret of ant communication must lie in scent, was imaginative enough to recognise that the kind of scent involved was not quite the kind we generally think of. It was misleading, he argued, to assume the existence of a gas, or microscopic particles. 'Perfume is not entirely a physical substance. You may scent a large room for ten years with a small piece musk, and yet there will not be any loss of weight.' Scent, he felt, should be thought in terms of 'waves in the ether.'

Much of Marais' work has been superseded by subsequent research, but it remains stimulating. In Tuning in to Nature, Philip S Callahan, of the University of Florida, followed up Marais' idea, and came to the same conclusion: the sensory mechanism involved in ant communication is not straight smell. Insects, he claims, 'smell' odours electronically, by tuning into the narrow band infra-red radiation. If this turns out to be correct, and Callahan certainly presents impressive evidence for his theory, then the traditional assumptions about the way epidemics of all kinds are spread will need to be re-examined.

The origin of a number of serious conditions is still uncertain: these include epilepsy, Legionnaire's disease, Parkinsonism and multiple sclerosis. To date, the whole weight of research into their causes and spread has been on the quest for some common biological factor - germs, a virus, biochemical mix-up, or toxic substances. But up to the present moment, this research has achieved little.

Looters on the rampage

Sometimes, researchers find what they believe at the time to be the cause - and it is triumphantly paraded. But soon, other contributory factors are identified - or the suspected virus is also found in the bodies of perfectly healthy people. The whole idea that illnesses are always caused by viruses is, in fact, beginning to fall into discredit in many respects. Instead, it is now thought likely that their role is more like that of 'looters', who come out on the rampage only when law and order - in this case, the orderly and healthy functioning of the human body - have broken down.

But what causes this sort of breakdown, and resulting epidemics? The answer, of course, is that we do not know as yet. However, a detailed study of mass hysteria might perhaps bring us closer to an explanation.

Many fascinating questions remain to be answered. Do pheromones elicit the responses that result in an epidemic, for instance? Or could it be that pathogens from outer space, falling to Earth, are responsible for disease, as Hoyle and Wickramasinghe have also suggested? Or is there perhaps some as yet undiscovered psychokinetic force - as reported so often in accounts of hauntings or poltergeist activity - that can affect groups?

Late in November 1978, a horrified world learned of the appalling mass suicide at Jonestown in the jungles of Guyana, on the northern coast of South America. There were 900 victims, all members of a religious sect known as the People's Temple, led by the psychopathic Reverend Jim Jones. It was a clear case of mass hysteria that made them succumb to the orders of a madman that they should kill themselves by drinking potassium cyanide mixed with a sweet fizzy drink.

More serious and systematic investigation of mass hysteria could provide the answers not merely to these questions, but to much that is imperfectly understood, or misunderstood, about disease in general. It might also help solve many of the problems that have baffled biologists in their study of animal, bird and insect behaviour, and psychologists in their study of the ways in which men and women communicate when no contact through the ordinary senses seems possible.