Year: 2022

THE BOMBSHELL. "Nearly 55 years ago it was demonstrated that planarians could be trained to learn a task, and following amputation of the head, the animals regenerating from the original tail sections remembered the original training." (JV McConnell). http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

THE PUBLICATION. "Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians." JV McConnell, 1962. The publication that provoked avalanche of interest in the subject. Eating the professor enhanced learning. https://lnkd.in/d2sqt4F View in LinkedIn

"THIS STUNNING FINDING, suggesting that some memory may be stored outside of the head and imprinted on the new brain during regeneration, led to a myriad of subsequent associative learning studies." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

LIGHT, SHOCK AND MEMORY. "In 1955, Robert Thompson and James V. McConnell conditioned planarian flatworms by pairing a bright light with an electric shock. After repeating this several times they took away the electric shock, and only exposed them to the bright light. The flatworms would react to the bright light as if they had been shocked." https://lnkd.in/diZf4tN View in LinkedIn

THE CORE. "Thompson and McConnell found that if they cut the worm in two, and allowed both worms to regenerate each half would develop the light-shock reaction. In 1962, McConnell repeated the experiment, but instead of cutting the trained flatworms in two he ground them into small pieces and fed them to other flatworms. He reported that the flatworms learned to associate the bright light with a shock much faster than flatworms who had not been fed trained worms." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian View in LinkedIn

EQUIVOCAL SPECIES. "This experiment intended to show that memory could be transferred chemically. The experiment was repeated with mice, fish, and rats, but it always failed to produce the same results. The perceived explanation was that rather than memory being transferred to the other animals, it was the hormones in the ingested ground animals that changed the behavior. McConnell believed that this was evidence of a chemical basis for memory, which he identified as memory RNA." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian View in LinkedIn

"ACQUIRED MEMORIES that could survive the process of head regeneration were demonstrated by measuring a direct display of a conditioned response or a faster learning rate (‘savings’) among worm fragments generated from head and tail pieces of previously trained planarians." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

DISCREDITED. "The alleged fact that no one was ever able to truly replicate the findings. Those who did report positive results, the story goes, were poor scientists who either conducted sloppy experiments that lacked proper controls or simply deceived themselves." https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

TREMENDOUS RESEARCH EFFORT. "In fact, by the time the dust had settled roughly 200 independent research teams — many in the upper tiers of science — conducted memory transfer experiments, using dozens of learning paradigms and 23 types of subjects including, in addition to the flatworm and standard lab rat, octopuses, praying mantes, baby chicks, kittens and honey bees." https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

SMOKE AND FIRES. "Government agencies granted more than $1 million (in 1960s dollars) to conduct such experiments, and 247 research reports appeared in print. Clearly, something was going on here; there were enough encouraging results to beckon others to try their hand." https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn