A medical theory of conversion advanced by journalists Flo Conway and Jim Siegalman in their 1978 anticult book. Snapping: America’s Epidemic of Sudden Personality Change. In their volume, they claimed that certain religious groups, popularly called cults, had discovered a new technique of mind control. The cults, Conway and Siegalman suggested, used this technique on their members to produce a new form of illness that they termed “information disease.” This disease, they said, was characterized by severe disturbances in perception, memory, and informational processing capacities and was caused by an alteration of the neurological pathways in the brain. The genesis of the disease came from the practice of various mind-altering techniques by group members, followed by hours of group indoctrination.
Conway and Siegalman presented no medical data to support their claims of physiological changes in the members studied. But they did present statistical findings that, they claimed, indicated a relationship between participation in a group and long-term negative mental and emotional effects (including nightmares, amnesia, hallucinations, etc.). However, careful examination of their data failed to support the snapping hypothesis.