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milligrams of amphetamine were administered to volunteer subjects every hour until
every subject crossed their particular threshold for personality change. The
graduate students underwent a global mind-brain-person transition at differing total
doses of amphetamine. The subject’s world was suddenly transformed into one of
enemies and friends. The syndrome dissipated over several hours when the drug
was stopped and the plasma levels of amphetamine and its metabolites declined.
As amphetamine makes memory formation and recall stronger, the subjects were
embarrassed when remembering what strange and forbidding yet uneatable things
they so strongly believed. These included such things as: they as good people were
caught in a network of bad person Russian spies; some threatening others arranged
for poison gas to be seeping out of the water faucet; the white coated scientists
were CIA undercover intelligence officers hoping to get information about their small
pornography collection. The subject’s world had become divided in, for each
person, a stereotyped way.

After a couple of weeks of return to normal living, the experiment was
repeated. Each subject again developed his or her individually unique set of good-
guy, bad-guy delusional beliefs and at the same dose of amphetamine as before.
Like those of strong faith, their ideas once again resisted the logical arguments
made by the professional staff: that the new realities were neuropsychological and
had an obvious pharmacological origin. While on the drug, all stuck to their story,
even while being shown the movie record of their first drug-induced episode. There
is reliable scientific literature describing kamikaze pilots on high doses of
amphetamine in an ecstatic state of Shinto nationalism. With their planes loaded
with explosives, they deliberately crashed their planes onto American aircraft
carriers in the Pacific Theater of World War II. One wonders if these drug-induced
states occur in the drug-free condition in today’s abstemious Muslim suicide
bombers.

A more abstract and general way of thinking about the sudden emergence of
fixation, repetitiousness and splitting in feelings and thoughts involves the
emergence of regular limit cycle oscillations in a complex system that was behaving
previously in a stable but flexible way. Locking up into a fixed, closed loop, is a

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