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METHODOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS. "These remarkable discoveries have not had sufficient impact on the field and were largely abandoned because of practical difficulties inherent in manual experiments. While the basic findings were validated in some cases, they failed to be reproduced in others, and the whole line of research became abandoned." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

RAT NEWS. "No one could argue that rats cannot learn. Within a few months, more than 50 labs, including teams at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT and Yale, conducted transfer experiments. McConnell, after failed attempts using salamanders and mynah birds, also turned to rats. And then things got really interesting." https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

VINDICATION. "Everything changed when, in late 1965, four independent labs reported successful memory-transfer experiments using rats (and in one case, cross-species transfer between rats and mice). Two of these reports appeared in the high-impact journals Science and Nature." https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

AFFIRMATION. "Our results, obtained using a highly sensitive, objective, quantitative analysis system, support previous findings of Best and Rubenstein that planarians are capable of acquiring a relatively complex, explicit-like memories of environmental familiarity." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENCES OF OPINION. "Still, McConnell believed that eventually the data would win out, and many eminent psychologists, Donald Hebb, Harry Harlow, Karl Pribram, and Gordon Bower among them, fully supported his efforts, even though they did not share his interpretation of his results. In fact, up until 1965, McConnell was, as he put it, “riding high.” https://lnkd.in/esKEPF7 View in LinkedIn

REVIVAL OF OLD FINDINGS. "Our data reveal the presence of memory savings in regenerated tail fragments from trained worms. We suggest that some trace of memory is stored in locations distributed beyond the brain (because the place conditioning association survives decapitation)." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend with the ongoing historical snippet about transferable memory in animals. A firestorm was created by the first publication of such a finding in platyhelminthes, which initiated a flood of publications that tried to reproduce the phenomena, but with very mixed success. Recently, new methods have been applied, with surprising results. View in LinkedIn

MEMORY TRACES. "Worms that had regenerated from headless fragments from original familiarized worms displayed significant shorter feeding latency compared with unfamiliarized worms, suggesting that memory of the original environment was not located exclusively in the brain, and had become imprinted onto the newly built brain during regeneration. In the past, such results have been received with skepticism." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn

OTHER POSSIBILITIES. "This really puts into question whether or not the way biology does things now is the only possible way that life could be organized on a molecular level." https://lnkd.in/dF6far5 View in LinkedIn

CONFIRMATION OF RESULTS. "Our results support the findings of Best and Rubinstein, and show a statistically significant shorter feeding delay for the familiarized worms compared with unfamiliarized worms. Most importantly, the memory survives long enough to allow for regeneration after amputation, and indeed we show that memory traces survive entire brain regeneration in a ‘savings’ paradigm." http://jeb.biologists.org/content/216/20/3799 View in LinkedIn