Devourer of Memories, Part 1

this hasn't always been taken for granted. And today we're gonna look at a very strange narrative of twenty and some twenty one century research that asks a similar question about memories. What are memories made of? Like, if you have a memory of I don't know, You're going down the street and seeing Hulk Hogan stomping on an ice cream sandwich, is that stored exclusively within the brand sane? If so, how is it stored in the brain? And more importantly, for today's episode, can I eat your body

and gain that memory for myself? Yeah? This is you know, this is actually a really tremendous question though of course it does touch on a number of mythical and fictional notions that we've touched on before over the years, such as can a google eat your brains and become you for a limited amount of time? Or cannon immortal swordsman cut off another immortal's head and gain their vital power. Uh, do you know the living dead really eat brains because

it makes the pain of being dead go away? Is there anything to indo cannibalistic funeral rites you know, practiced by various cultures throughout history since ancient times? Or how about this, If Michael Caine loses a hand and receives a hand transplant from a murderer, does he become more likely to he himself murder? I assume that must be based on a real movie. But what Oliver Oliver Stone directed it? As a matter of fact, what's it called.

I think it's called The Hand. But Michael Caine's ended up. He plays like a comic book artist. I think so that, you know, that's the other side of it is used. Um, you know, it's it's early Stone. It's not political. It's all about you know, people's hands coming off and being replaced by hand that then has the will of a killer within it, which I think has been explored in other horror properties as well. Um, it sounds like solid

Michael Caine. Yeah. And it also gets into an idea that came up in our recent episode on yoga, the idea of of of memories being stored in one's body, which of course is a little more complicated. All this is all is more complicated when you consider the human situation. But a lot of what we're gonna be talking about in this episode is not dealing directly with with with human cognition and human memories, but what we can observe

in simpler but also very important and informative organisms. Yes. Uh, though that doesn't mean that people haven't tried to extrapolate all kinds of things about about human memory from this research, and that will be part of the story too. This is going to be a mostly historical pair of episodes looking at controversial past research and linking it to more recent studies. And it's also going to be in two parts.

As I said, so, I'd say it's it's important not to draw your conclusions until you've heard the whole thing. A significant part of what we're talking about today is going to be research that looked promising at one time but as widely regarded as as being on the wrong track today. Exactly, but still certainly there's a lot to

learn by looking at these past cases. Absolutely. Uh So, the main human figure we're going to be looking at in the story today was an American psychologist named Dr James V. McConnell, who lived nineteen twenty five to nineteen ninety And I wanted to start off by mentioning several sources about McConnell's life and career that will be referring

to in these episodes. One was an article about McConnell by the Michigan State University psychologist Mark Rilling that appeared in American Psychology Ist in nineteen called the Mystery of the Vanished Citations, uh And that title refers to a period where McConnell was doing a lot of very influential research, but today you don't see the citations of this research mentioned very much, and he's sort of exploring why that is.

Another article, it was a great article called Memory in the Flesh in the Verge by R. L. Do Haim Ross, And also a couple of pieces in like two thousand ten and two thousand thirteen for the Journal of the American Psychological Association by a sociology professor named Larry Stern. That Verge article, by the way from and it's quite a good read. Yes it is so. James McConnell was born in Okamalgy, Oklahoma. I hope I'm saying that right, Okmalgy or Okmalgi. Yeah, and that sounds Oklahoma enough, I

think okay uh in nineteen. He spent almost all of his professional career on faculty at the University of Michigan, beginning in nineteen fifty six after he got his PhD from the University of Texas and lasting in Hill his retirement in nineteen eight and from the sixties through the eighties he also served as a research psychologist at the Mental Health Research Institute of the University. So McConnell overall was a very controversial figure in American psychology for multiple

reasons that we will explore throughout these episodes. Widely known as innovative, enthusiastic, humorous, but also perhaps his reckless, sometimes un serious, and undisciplined. One interesting fact about him that will, I think become more relevant as we go on is that early on before his academic career, he did some work in radio and television as a DJ and a scriptwriter before going into psychology, and of course this would prove valuable in a career as a public science communicator

and something of a celebrity scientist. Now, apart from the research that we're going to be looking at today, I think McConnell was probably best known for founding a strange magazine called The Worm Runners Digest. I think one major problem many psychologists had with James McConnell during his life, UH was typified by the spirit of this journal, which

published real reports of real scientific research. In some ways, it was kind of a clearing house for reports of research that wasn't yet in the It wasn't yet ready to be submitted to peer reviewed journals. So kind of scientists would submit uh, you know, worm training reports and things like that to this as as a preliminary measure. But then it would publish that real research UH and and real manuals for replication, right alongside bizarre jokes and

poems and cartoons and hoaxes and satirical articles. So, for a few article titles cited by Larry Stern, one is the effects of physical torture on the learning and retention of nonsense syllables. One is called operant conditioning in the domestic darning needle Spina Farrika. So a lot of like weird psychology in jokes, sort of jokes about the field psychologists trying to write parodies of their own research and the and the problems they encountered within their sub fields. Okay, okay,

there's a very very specific audience in mind them. Yes. Uh. Larry Stern also writes that there were spoofs of Freudian theory, including quote some comments on the addition to the theory of psycho sexual development by Sigmund Fraud, which introduced the nasal stage occurring between the anal and phallic stages, in which the libido quote is localized primarily in the mucus linings of the nose, which I guess is a strange reminder that, you know, in the middle of the twentieth century,

I think a lot of psychology journals would still be dealing with a pretty significant contingent of Freudian trained psychoanalysts. But and I figured this would be of special interest to you. Robert McConnell actually was also a science fiction writer and a charter member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, which again I would say probably didn't help his professional reputation. Yes, perhaps not uh so from what

I could find. His sci fi stories also often seemed to be humorous and aimed at parody of the fields that he worked in. For example, Rilling writes about McConnell's one of McConnell's stories called Learning Theory, published in nineteen sixty five, and in this story quote, McConnell is the protagonist who is abducted during the preparation of a lecture on learning theory, into an interstellar lab ship to become a subject confined to a series of chambers that resembled

the skinner box, tea maze, and lashly jumping stand. And I had to look up that last one. But the lastly jumping stand was an apparatus for the study of operant conditioning, and it gave a rat an option to jump over a gap to two different visual stimuli. One would offer a reward and one would cause the rat

to fall into a net below. Okay, so not just another tool that was used in behavioral studies, right, So he's in this story he's writing about himself being it into the studies that people were doing on rats in

the fifties, and I guess the sixties too. But picking up with Rillings description of the story quote, after first behaving according to the predictions of learning theory, McConnell realizes that he will be returned to ann Arbor if he misbehaves by violating the predictions of his captor's theory of learning. McConnell was an iconic last and his story is a

spoof fun learning theory in nineteen sixty. So I think the idea is, uh, he's poking fun at the sort of the rain of conventional wisdom by saying that if he were a subject in alien psychological research, if he didn't confirm their pre existing theories, they basically throw him out and say he wasn't a valid research subject. Interesting.

According to an obituary I found by some University of Michigan colleagues, McConnell was also a cultivator of orchids, as well as a lover of computers and poker, and known by many students for quote personal zest to joy in teaching, intellectual animation, infectious enthusiasm, and individualized attention that he brought

to his classes. Uh and Rilling points out that while much of his cannibalistic memory transfer work that we're gonna be focusing on was later considered wrong and misguided, McConnell was actually a really important pioneer in research into invertebrate learning and memory, and that scientists today should be able

to learn from both his successes and his failures. Now, I want to make an admission that I'm afraid I'm going to say something wrong in one of these episodes because I keep accidentally calling James McConnell Jerry O'Connell, who was not a psychologist. He was the guy in Scream Too, and he played the football player and Jerry McGuire No, no, I actually haven't seen Jerry McGuire um, But you've got some VHS t do I have some VHS tapes because

I'm I'm saving them. I have to contribute them to the pyramid that is being built in the desert, because we do have to return all the Jerry's home. But yes, I have actually have not watched it. Well know, he was like a hunky dude in the nice but no different guy, not the actor Jerry O'Connell, James McConnell. So if I say, Jerry O'Connell, you've got to reach across the table and slap me, will will you? Will you

keep this pledge? Um? I don't know if I feel like getting up to slap you, but I will try and jump in. Um. So. Dr McConnell explores some pretty radical ideas during his career. You know, one of them will be the primary focus for these episodes. But he also later wrote about the potential of using behavioral modification on criminals to enable their re entry into society. Yeah. Um, And he thought that this might be used to eliminate

crime and mental illness altogether. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the mid century among the behaviorist school of psychology for this kind of like society revolutionizing potential of behavior modification. Right, And we have to go back to some of these character attributes we've touched on already, that he was when he was excited about an idea, he was very excited about it and infectious with his excitement. And he was something of a public figure and would

engage is kind of a celebrity scientist. He could engage with science on a show biz level, not just on a research level, and in fact often maybe did so to the detriment of public expectations. He was accused by some colleagues of over hyping and over interpreting and over

speculating from what research existed. So it's thought that this is the reason that and it's particularly some of these ideas that he was pushing in enthusiasm, he was pushing regarding a behavioralism, that this is what attracted the attention of a man by the name of Ted Kazinski. Yeah, which most people probably recognize that name. If not, you

might know him by his moniker, the UNI Bomber. We were talking about this before we came in that, Like, I bet a lot of younger listeners out there don't even remember the UNI Bomber. I remember from when I was very young. I mean, it's also easy to only remember, you know, a few pictures here and there, remember that police sketch, and remember like a courtroom picture where you know, Kazinski looks, you know, completely unhinged, that sort of thing.

But yeah, McConnell was one of his targets. Kazinski mailed his tenth bomb to Dr McConnell in an assassination attempt, and this was in nineteen five. UM he had at that time he was working with a graduate student assistant uh named I believe what is Nicholas Sueno, and so

they're working together. They opened the package and triggered the explosion. Now, thankfully both individuals survived with only only minor injuries and mild hearing loss, as well as what sounds like some level of PTSD based on the experience, which I think

is quite understandable. But but yeah, just a refresher on the UNI bomber for anyone who doesn't know or as a little foggy uh Ted Kazinski born ninety two was a was a former mathematics professor and mathematician who took two acts of murder and domestic terrorism to advance his manifesto, which was titled Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he heavily criticized his post Industrial Revolution society and he

also criticized what he referred to as leftist psychology. Yeah, he's sometimes he can be kind of hard to pin down in terms of his ideology because he doesn't fit with a lot of the standard ideological kind of groupings you see with mass murderers and terrorists that are motivated by ideology. He was more of a kind of idiosyncratic lone wolf terrorist. But but he's sometimes referred to as

like an anarchist primitivist. He wanted people to return to nature and reject modern technology and science, right, which I mean they're they're versions of that that of course, that are that many people listening to the show might agree with, uh, and they wouldn't resort to murder exactly. And I mean that's that's the big thing, just to drive home here, you know. He Yeah, he argued for this nature centric anarchism, and in his bombings he targeted individuals involved in modern

type mostly individuals involved in modern technological advances. And that's why McConnell's work is sometimes hard to figure out, like why this attracted the attention of Kazinski because it doesn't quite seem to fit the profile at first glance. Yeah. The article I was reading by Mark Rilling identifies McConnell's public communication on TV and another media about behavior modification at use, uh, you know, in use in criminal justice and human behavior reform at the large scale, as the

likely culprit in attracting Kazinski's hire. Yeah, because Kazinski did criticize modification of the human condition, especially behavioral modification, which McConnell had become an outspoken proponent of in the media, and Kazinski saw him as an advocate of society's attempts to change humans to fit the system rather than the reverse. Yeah. Between ninety nine teen, Ted Kaznski killed three people and

injured twenty three. Uh. He was the target of an intense um search for his identity, but finally he was arrested in nineteen and remains in prison serving a life term as of this recording. Yeah. And fortunately both McConnell and and the student Sweeno survived the Attechnic and so McConnell lived several years after that. He passed away in nineteen. So this is just something about just a bizarre um you know, aspect of the overall story and just uh,

certainly a historically noteworthy part of McConnell's biography. Uh, that he just ends up, you know, wandering into the path of of this individual and becomes part of the Kazynski story as well. Yeah, but that's not the main part of his life. We're going to be focusing on in these episodes. We're gonna be looking more at his research on memory, and specifically memory research with a group of flat worms known as plenaria. So should we take a

quick break and then come back to talk about planarians. Yes, let's go ahead and cut the episode right here. All right, we're back. So before we look at the experiments of James McConnell and colleagues, we should meet a major character in this scientific narrative, which is a type of flat worm called planaria. Right now, for starters, Planaria, there is a genus planar area. But but but it's not what

we're talking about here, is not just organisms within that genus. Yeah, it can be a little confusing because there are multiple things called planaria. Planaria is also used to refer to a larger family of related flat worms, and most of the worms that are called planarians are outside the genus of Planaria, in classes in the class to Bellaria or the family Planaria. Day, So we're gonna be talking about

this broader class of planarians. Yeah, the old you'll find them living in both fresh and salt water, in the water, but also on land. A terrestrial Planaria are found the soil or or damp areas or humid places. Some are even parasitic, but most feed on protozoans, tiny snails and worms, and they mostly feed at night. Mostly they're they're soft. They tend to be soft leaf leaf shaped creatures that range from three to fifteen millimeters, but they can reach

longer lengths. They have two eyes, and those two eyes are often quite notable because they look like googly eyes. Yeah, you've probably seen these before in actual photos of these worms zoomed in their cross side. Uh. Some some of them have tentacles, They have of ventral mouth opening and no body cavity. They may swim via undulations or crawl like a slug. They are also simultaneous hymaphrodites, having both

sexes within a single individual. Yet some utilize sexual reproductions and and some utilize a sexual reproduction and of course their legendary for their regenerative powers. Yes, and it's these regenerative powers that are going to play a central role in a lot of this research. Uh. And it may have played a role in your individual research and even

science education growing up. Oh sure, yeah, maybe, I mean so, I mean you could not have a planarian highlander situation, you would have a real problem with trying to keep a planary in decapitated. That's right. Uh. And and to really drive this home, let's talk about just how amazing their regenerative powers are. Basically, they can be cut in half in each half will form into a fully formed individual.

In fact, it's been estimated that a mere one two hundred and seventy nine of the organism can, once removed, regenerate into a fully formed individual. So we're talking total sourcer as apprentice territory here, and that's really not an overstatement. Yeah, it would be like, you know, if you could chop my finger off and it would grow a whole new me. Yeah. Really, And that's I mean, that's amazing because we've we've talked on the show before about the regenerative p hours of

of various vertebrate organisms. For example, you know, and it's impressive that a lizard co jettis in its tail and re mostly regrow that tail. Things of that nature. Many of the healing abilities of even the human body are pretty substantial when you really set back and and consider them. But this is this is something far beyond most of those examples. Yeah, I would say this goes even beyond the impressive examples we see in like amphibians, like salamanders.

You can even cut their head in half, kind of like you started to cut them in half with a sword and then you got bored like around the neck. Uh. You can, you can. You can cut their head in half and then just stop and then they'll they'll develop two heads and live that way. In some cases, Uh, they have. There have been some very interesting experiments in

how they regenerate in micro gravity as well. For instance, normally a two headed planaria is a rare occurrence in nature, but in one experiment, space exposed worms were far more likely developed a second head to the tune of one in fifteen worms. Uh. In amputating this worm within result in more two headed worms. And this is this is just one area where you know their their further study can help us understand their biology and uh it also help us better understand the effects of micro gravity on

an organism. But of course, their regenerative powers in general continue to garner a great deal of research attention. Yeah. I mean the medical applications of regenerative biology itself are very important. Yeah, Worth noting that Darwin actually observed these amazing creatures as well. Uh, and their amazing ability. I will read a quick quote here from Charles Darwin. Alright, this is from a journal of researches into the natural history and geology of the countries visited during the voyage

of HMS Beagle around the world. Quote. Having cut one of them transversely into two nearly equal parts in the course of a fortnight, both had the shape of perfect animals. I had, however, so divided the body that one of the halves contained both the inferior or orifices, and the other in consequence none In the course of twenty five days from the operation, the more perfect half could not

have been distinguished from any other specimen. And there's more that you know here, obviously, But that's just a taste of his fascination with the organism itself, sitting in the Beagle cutting up worms, and and they've continued to fascinate researches as well. Uh. You know, for a number of reasons. Um as pointed out by a doctor only are Pagan author of the first brain. Uh. He pointed this out

in a two thousand fourteen interview with futurism. There are other organisms with this kind of regenerative ability, but very few are quite as excellent at it as the planarian. And they also have a relatively complex nervous system, which contributes to their appeal, especially when you get into areas where you're talking about what can we learn from the from a planarian that we can then apply potentially in the future to human physiology. Now, just a few other

quick fascinating facts about them. At least one variety produces a deadly U produces the deadly tetrodotoxin um. In general, their mouths emerge from a proboscis located halfway down their body. And those googly eyes sometimes described as cross eyes. Apparently

nobody's exactly sure why that is the case. I will say the google eyes often look like an illustration, and they present a problem with the presentation of these planarians and the display the google eyes, because you can show a photo of them and it looks like somebody drew it. It doesn't look like a real world organism. It always, even to this day, it makes me think of Spy Versus Spy and Mad Magazine. They look like the the two Spies, the Black Spy and the White Spy from

that cartoon. Yep, So that's the subject in a nutshell. Uh, But I imagine we should start turning our attention to some of the experiments. Right, So I would say the story begins with the psychological technique of classical conditioning. So the most common example of classical conditioning is Pavlov's dogs. Right.

The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who lived eighteen forty nine and nineteen thirty six, was famously studying the process of digestion in dogs when he noticed that not only did the dogs begin to drool in the presence of food. That that would make sense, right, you put some food in front of a dog. The digestion process begins with the mental stimulation of the side of food. Right, you start producing saliva or drool in order to help you eat.

It actually went beyond that. Pavlov observed that the dogs would start to drool as soon as they saw the lab assistant who usually fed them. So there's a physiological justification for producing extra saliva. When an animal sees food, the animal's body is preparing to eat. But Pavlov, since I was realizing that through repeated training, you could separate the stimulus and the response through one or more layers

of abstraction. So, of course the lab assistant isn't food, but the dog comes to learn through repeated instances that every time it sees the assistant, it's about to get food. And thus the body prepares itself to eat and digest. And this was later done with all kinds of different things. With auditory cues such as a bell or a metronome, the dog, here's the sound. It knows the food is coming,

and the body responds. And I don't know about you, but like, this is something that helps define my relationship with my pet. Like I think about this all the time when observing my cat's relationship with our household environment. Absolutely I think about my dog's relationship with any stimulus such as sound or visual cues that may signal a

walk is about to take place. So like the picking up of the keys, the putting on of the coach, that putting on of the shoes, all these different things are like start to trigger this powerful excitement reaction in the dog, even though none of them are are opening the door, leashing up, going out for a walk, right, none of them are in and of themselves the desired reward, but there are various bits of stimuli associated with that

eventual reward of course. So yeah, we are constantly, even accidentally classically conditioning our pets whenever something that they're interested in, whether positively or negatively, is about to happen. If it happens repeatedly, you're probably training them, whether you want to be or not. Can is open, might be foods as the cat um, the rattle of foil, walking into the kitchen, um, etcetera. Yeah, uh, and this is widely acknowledged as one of the most

useful discoveries in the history of experimental psychology. Of course, it works with both positive and negative stimuli. You can also, for example, administer a mildly painful shock every time somebody hears the Batman theme, and after enough repetition, the person or the animal is probably gonna freeze or WinCE when they hear the music, even if no shock is administered. A call back to our recent episode of Invention, our other podcast about the history the techno history of inventions,

we did want on the turnspit Dog. If you're not aware, there was a time in the history, especially in Britain, where small dogs turned little wheels to keep the spit of meat turning by the fire. And one of the problems with using dogs for this particular bit of work is that they are smart and they pick up on

these clues. So you they might pick up on these little signs that that inform them that some meat is going to be skewer, that they're the roast is gonna be had for dinner, or maybe just a big dinner is going to take place, and then the dog will run off and hide. Exactly what they should have found to turn those spits was like a large invertebrate that was not very good at learning through classical conditioning. Oh and just to keep things clear, because this is some

thing that I used to confuse myself. What's the difference between these two terms, classical conditioning and operant conditioning. You've probably heard both of them. Uh, they're similar. They're both based on learning associations between two things. But the difference is classical conditioning pairs two external stimuli. For example, I show you a picture of Sean Connery and I give

you an electric shock. So every time you know, if you do that enough, when you see the picture of Sean Connery, you'll win s or freeze, or react as if you're going to get a shock, even if you don't. Meanwhile, operant conditioning associates a reward or a punishment with a behavior supplied by the subject. So, for example, if you jump three times, you get a bag of candy corn.

Now we know perfectly well that these types of conditioning, classical conditioning operant conditioning work with a number of more complex life forms like rats, like dogs, like humans. But there was an interesting question that came up in the twentieth century, which was did it work for less complex life forms like say worms. All right, on that note, we're going to take one more break, but we'll be

right back. Thank alright, we're back, alright. So we've been discussing classical conditioning, behavioral conditioning, and the fact that this we we know this works in more complex life forms like mammals, rats, dogs, humans, but does it work in less complex life forms like worms and other invertebrates. In the nineteen fifties, the answer to this question was pretty well understood, and that answer was no. Invertebrates could not learn the way that rats and monkeys and other mammals

could mark. Rilling makes this point at length in his article, writing that the widely held view, especially among zoologists and psychologists who were not experts directly in animal behavior, was that invertebrates had no capacity for internal memory states, and the only thing that they that they could do that would even a approximate learning might come from temporary changes

in body tissue. Really quotes a leading textbook of comparative psychology at the time, I think it's from the nineteen thirties on a question of whether invertebrates can learn associations through conditioning and the passage reads experience may temporarily alter the form of behavior by inducing local tissue change, but such changes are wiped out by subsequent events and have

no permanent altering effect. Uh. It was also the opinion of a contemporary researcher in the nineteen fifties I think named Donald Jensen quote that no invertebrate, no matter how complex, is capable of showing true associative learning. So that's the consensus invertebrates can't learn. As for this distinction they're making about true learning versus tissue change, I think the distinction here is that, like if a worm or an insect could be conditioned to go left rather than right in

a maze. It might only be because, for example, the conditioning process had made the legs or the wings or something on one side of the body stronger. Uh. The bottom line was that animals without backbones cannot truly learn the same way animals like us can. You couldn't have a Pavlov's worm or a Pavlov's crab. Though the authors of the textbook quoted by Rilling make exactly one exception. They admit that this rule might not apply to planaria.

But of course, McConnell, as usual, was sort of disposition alle opposed to the conventional wisdom. He was something of an iconoclast, and he did not accept the idea in the nineteen fifties that invertebrates could not learn. He wanted to find out if worms could be trained. Could he become a worm tamer. So here we move on into the first stage of this research history, the worm conditioning. So in nineteen fifty three McConnell was in graduate studies

at the University of Texas and UH. Then this year and some of the following years he he collaborated with another researcher named Robert Thompson to demonstrate that planarians could be classically conditioned, and the basic set up here involved learning of responses to light light stimuli. Again, most of them are going to be nocturnal. Uh, so light is going to play an important role in their behavior. Yeah, and certainly yeah through their you know, day night cycles

and stuff like that. So they can detect a light. They have the ability to to tell when a light is being flashed. So planaria usually live, uh, at least the planaria they were working with usually live in aquatic environments and they move from one place to another by gliding across the bottom surface of a pool, usually along

slime trails that they deposit as they move. So McConnell and Thompson put together a test with a foot long pool of water in which they would deposit a planarian and then the worm could glide from one end to

the pool to the other. Then, for the conditioning groups, McConnell and Thompson would train the worms by flashing a light above the water, paired with an electric shock applied to the whole pool to the water and the conditioned responses the researchers were looking for in response to the light.

After training were contraction of the worm's body and turning of the of the direction, and when the behavior of these trained planaria was compared with control groups, they found that while the planarian learning effect was not extremely strong,

it was undeniably present. The condition worms showed an increase in contraction in response to the light from from about two percent in the first fifty trials to about ten percent in the last fifty trials, and turns started at a rate of about in response to light, but increased

throughout the test period to thirty five percent after conditioning. So, as you can see, the planarian probably does not learn it nearly the efficiency of a mammal like a rat or a dog or an orangutan, but these nevertheless are significant changes. So, however weak, some learning was clearly taking place. And as a as a modern note, just to be clear, the established wisdom about invertebrates being unable to learn through association was pretty much completely wrong, and planaria were not

the only exception. I was looking at one paper by Hawkins and burn From published in Cold Springs Harbor Perspectives Perspectives in biology called associate of Learning and Invertebrates, and they say that rudimentary forms of associative learning are found basically throughout the animal kingdom. One commonly studied example used in invertebrate learning and memory research is the California sea hair or applies a Californica. Almost had applies a californication californica.

So it's a huge sea slug. I was looking this off. It could barely be up to seventy five centimeters long and way up to about seven kilograms or fifteen pounds. That's a that's a real mother of a sea slug. Can you imagine trying to pick up a fifteen hound sea slug? No? No, I mean one scarcely imagines it coming out of the water, right, But I can't help just because we're talking about something that they see hair, I always think of them behaving and rabbit like behavior,

you know, or even delivering Easter eggs. Well, one also thinks about the sea monster that was popular on medieval and Renaissance maps, the sea hare. I relieve I talked about Chet Manduser with the sea the sea hare, yes, or I talked with chet Mandouser about the sea hare. Yeah. That's one of the fun things about sea monsters is that we have all these things that are sort of name have the same name, like a sea hair, a

sea lion, etcetera. But in the history of sea monsters, pretty much every creature that was known to reside on the surface had a double in the deep. Right, the medieval and Renaissance map sea hair has nothing to do with the sea here. It was not a slug. It had fuzzy bunny ears, and you could have a velveteen

sea hair and it would be very sad. But yeah, so this sea hare is a giant sea slug, and experiments show that it can learn associate sans, for example, a conditioned retraction of the gill and siphon organs that strengthened by noxious stimuli like electric shocks to the tail. So while learning responses are going to vary according to a creature's nero anatomy, there appears to be no general rule against invertebrate learning. Okay, that's good to know heading forward.

So it's not just this idea that like all the eggs are in this one basket for invertebrate learning, only the planarians can learn. No, that is not the case. We We got some smart sea hairs, relatively smart but again to emphasize, this was the opposite of the conventional wisdom leading into the nineteen fifties UH, and to some degree, even after research demonstrating that there was invertebrate learning like, consensus among experts at the time resisted the idea of

true invertebrate learning even after some published studies. One example cited by Rilling concerns a response after McConnell and colleagues seemed to indicate that the condition learning they could elicit in Planaria had to sustained effect that the memory associations lasted not just for hours, not just for days, but literally for for months at a time. I think they

set up to four months. In response to this, UH, a renowned zoologist specializing in invertebrates named Libby Hyman said apparently said multiple times, no, that just can't be, and argued that maybe a planarian could remember something for like five minutes or so, but the memory retention for weeks or months was just unthinkable. But we already see some

things at work here in UH in McConnell's story. So Rilling points out that while these results did bear out, and UH he thinks did generally demonstrate planarian learning and and showed something that is real and true. You could already see some of McConnell's methodological shortcomings at work. For example, he and Thompson did not use any kind of automatic measuring of the flatworm responses, but instead use the more traditional method of quote naturalistic observation, which I think means

that they just watch to see what happened. You can probably guess why psychologists today try to find ways not to rely on experiment or is just eyebawling it when making a judgment about what happened. Uh, You're you're way more subject to experiment or bias this way. You want to, if possible, come up with an automatic method, right, because I mean, ironically, what you're dealing with when you're just

dealing with observations as you are of course dealing with memory. Um, even if certainly if you're making notes about what you're seeing as you're seeing it, you're still having to rely then on your memory of the observation far better and you know, far more reliable to be able to point to say measurements yeah, yeah, done by a machine or something.

Have some kind of method that's not just your subjective judgment, of what you just saw, being able to say this organism moved, you know, however far have left in this experiment, and then in a second experiment the same thing definitely occur. Yes, uh. And I want to be clear that like this doesn't experiment men or bias doesn't have to result from experimenters trying to trick anyone or being trying to commit conscious fraud for their results. They can be doing their honest

best to try to represent things accurately. But still, you know, observation is somewhat subjective. You're going to honestly believe you saw something differently than somebody else did, or you know, our observations and our memories are not perfect, and they're highly influenced by what we want to see or expect

to see. Also, Rilling points out that McConnell and Thompson's graduate advisor here was a comparative psychologist named M. E. Bitterman, who was critical of both students for not being careful enough, for example, not including a control group that were exposed to both shocks and light flashes but unpaired from each other, to more firmly establish a causal link for the for

the conditioning process itself. But what if they had gotten both flashes and shocks and they just weren't linked the same way they were in the in the test group, and they apparently didn't do that. And so Rilling seems to see this as characteristic of McConnell's career as a whole. Uh. To quote from him in a summary passage, quote, McConnell, an innovator, raced from one exciting phenomenon to the next without comprehensive experimental analysis or adequate controls. McConnell's controls were

often developed as a response to his critics. McConnell's students and other scientists were left to the task of cleaning up after McConnell by adding the control groups that he omitted. And I think it's easy to see how this kind of thing can be at at the same time very uh winning and exciting, especially to maybe the general public and you know, publications writing about his exciting and strange and counterintuitive new research, but also really irritating to appears

in the field. If you're vaulting from one flashy, controversial, exciting discovery to another without taking the time to slow down and be sure you're on firm ground after each stop, right, because the ideal process. If the study comes out and there's some sort of problem with it, than than you know, the others in the field chime in. There's a sort of amount of course correction that takes place. You go back to the drawing board, try to figure out how

you went wrong. Yeah, may yeah, maybe take a complete step or two backwards. You don't just keep going along this line because you know that there is gold on the other end. But at the same time, I mean, you can totally understand the temptation to do it that way. It sounds so much more exciting and than trying to buckle down and be super sure and super rigorous about what you think you already proved. Well. In this we get into something we've discussed them the show before about

just the nature of scientific inquiry. Like it's one of these things that in some ways it is very much like how the human mind works and how humans have

always solved problems. You can find, you know, examples of what is essentially scientific inquiry, certainly in in in prehistoric people's But at the same time, there are aspects of scientific inquiry that defy, uh, what it is to be a human problem solver that that that perfect the method in ways that don't make sense just within the confines of you know, you know, minute to minute human experience exactly.

Trial and error comes naturally. But we're way too prone to rely on heuristics, you know, to to use our sort of standard day to day trial and error judgment for real scientific investigation, because usually we only need one or two examples of something going right for us to derive a rule from it. And one or two examples is not you know, that's still an anecdote scientifically. I here's an example from my my life as a parent. Um My son at an early age was enthralled by

claw machines like pizza parlors and um and whatnot. And so the first time I let him try it, I said, Okay, here's a quarter, you can try it. And I was thinking, oh, he'll learn a good lesson. You know, you won't pick anything up with the claws, and I'll see this is a tricky machine made exclusively to take his money by tempting when with the idea that he'll win a cheap prize. And then he wins a cheap prize the first time, right,

So I instantly set the wrong lesson. And then there was another case like shortly thereafter, or maybe a little mong later, but he had some credits at some sort of parlor as part of a children's birthday party. Did it again, won a prize, and so now it's ruined like to the two prizes makes a rule of that claw machines are where you get cheap toys, and the trickery is you know, somewhat lost on him at this at this point anyway, Oh no, I mean that kind

of learning. I've actually wondered before if that could feature into and maybe as far as we know, it already does, but could in the future feature into a a more insidious type of slot machine. It's a more perfect gambling addiction creator and money extractor. And what how it would simply work is it's got a camera on there with facial recognition, and it can recognize if you've played a slot machine in this casino before, and if you haven't it's and it's your first time. It gives you a

small payout on your first go. Yeah, I give you that that that that first time user beginner luck, but also give you false expectations about what's playing a slot machine is all about exactly. But I hope I didn't just give ideas to some really insidious designer there, right, because to be sure to be clear, and we certainly did a couple of episodes and slot machines in the past. A slot machine's purpose is to take your money, and

the slot machine playing experience is the loss of money. Yeah, the slot machine is not designed to help you win big. If you want to play them, you should understand that you are paying for an entertaining experience and that's the best case scenario. All right, we got we got a little off topic there, but it's just as well because we've kind of hit our time for this part of the inquiry. We're gonna be back in the next episode to continue you this discussion of planarians to what extent

can they can they learn? But also we're going to get into this other area about the absorption of another worm's memory. Is it possible, uh, through cannibalism? Through cannibalism, And then how does McConnell get into trouble based on his reported findings, and then where do we go from here in the modern age? In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind. Heading over to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where you'll find

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this is a journey through human techno history. Find it an Invention pod dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. We've mentioned the second oil age that is out as well, if you want to a short form of fiction horror fiction exploration throughout your holidays. Oh and I should also note if you were interested in Stuff to Blow your Mind merchandise, we still have the old T shirt store and I am to understand that there is going to be a sale of some sort coming up. Uh, you

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