Coined by Stanislav Grof to mean ‘turning towards the Whole’, in a similar manner to heliotropic ‘turning towards the Sun’. However, the related Greek verb trepo ‘to turn’ has two meanings, as in English: ‘to change direction’ (as in ‘turn into a side-road’), and ‘to change form’ (as in ‘turn into a frog’). So holotropic can be said to have two meanings, the second being ‘transforming the Whole’, using -tropic in the same sense as entropic.

When Claude Shannon, confusingly known as ‘the father of information theory’, wrote a paper in 1946 titled ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, he wondered what he should call the formula he had devised for the ‘degree of uncertainty’ of messages. Shannon first thought of calling it information, but he felt that this word was overly used. John von Neumann, the polymath who designed the stored-program computer, had a better idea. Von Neumann suggested,