Speaker 1: Hey, are you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: it's Saturday. Time for a vault episode. This one originally
Speaker 1: aired November nineteen nineteen, and it was part one of
Speaker 1: our Devourer of Memories series. Uh, this one was a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. We talked about research into flat worms
Speaker 1: that at least for a while, seemed to indicate that
Speaker 1: maybe you could gain some other organisms memories through cannibalism. Uh,
Speaker 1: that might not have held up so well, but but
Speaker 1: it's a really fun story along the way. Yeah. So today,
Speaker 1: if you are in the United States and you feel
Speaker 1: like you have the brain of a turkey after consuming
Speaker 1: the flash of a turkey, then this is the episode
Speaker 1: for you. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios has to work. Hey, you welcome
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we're going to be
Speaker 1: embarking on a two part episode about the nature and
Speaker 1: physical basis of memory. So in the past we've explored
Speaker 1: the question where is my mind? We did an episode
Speaker 1: about this. I think a couple of years ago, Like,
Speaker 1: it seems obvious enough that cognition takes place in the brain,
Speaker 1: but this hasn't always been taken for granted. And today
Speaker 1: we're gonna look at a very strange narrative of twenty
Speaker 1: and some twenty first century research that asks a similar
Speaker 1: question about memories. What are memories made of? Like, if
Speaker 1: you have a memory of I don't know, you know,
Speaker 1: going down the street and seeing Hulk Hogan stomping on
Speaker 1: an ice cream sandwich, is that stored exclusively within the brain.
Speaker 1: If so, how is it stored in the brain? And
Speaker 1: more importantly, for today's episode, can I eat your body
Speaker 1: and gain that memory for myself? Yeah? This is you know,
Speaker 1: this is actually a really tremendous question. Of course, it
Speaker 1: does touch on a number of the mythical and fictional
Speaker 1: notions that we've touched on before over the years, such
Speaker 1: as can of Google eat your brains and become you
Speaker 1: for a limited amount of time? Or cannon immortal swordsman
Speaker 1: cut off another immortal's head and gain their vital power. Uh,
Speaker 1: do you know the living dead really eat brains because
Speaker 1: it makes the pain of being dead go away? Is
Speaker 1: there anything to indo cannibalistic funeral rites, you know, practiced
Speaker 1: by various cultures throughout history since ancient times. Or how
Speaker 1: about this, if Michael Caine loses a hand and receives
Speaker 1: a hand transplant from a murderer, does he become more
Speaker 1: likely to he himself murder? I assume that must be
Speaker 1: based on a real movie. But whatever, Oliver Oliver Stone
Speaker 1: directed it. As a matter of fact, what's it called.
Speaker 1: I think it's called the Hand. But Michael Caine's ended up.
Speaker 1: He probays like a comic book artist. I think so that,
Speaker 1: you know, that's the other side of it is he
Speaker 1: used an arc um. You know, it's it's early stone.
Speaker 1: It's not political. It's all about uh, you know, people's
Speaker 1: hands coming off and being replaced by hand that then
Speaker 1: has the will of a killer within it, which I
Speaker 1: think has been explored in in other horror properties as well. Um,
Speaker 1: it sounds like solid Michael Caine. Yeah. And it also
Speaker 1: gets into an idea that came up in our recent
Speaker 1: episode on yoga, the idea of of of memories being
Speaker 1: stored in one's body, which of course is a little
Speaker 1: more complicated. All this is all is more complicated when
Speaker 1: you consider the human situation. But a lot of what
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about in this episode is not
Speaker 1: dealing directly with with with human cognition and human memories,
Speaker 1: but what we can observe in simpler but also very
Speaker 1: important and informative organisms. Yes. Uh, though that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that people haven't tried to extrapolate all kinds of things
Speaker 1: about about human memory from this research, and that will
Speaker 1: be part of the story too. This is going to
Speaker 1: be a mostly historical pair of episodes looking at controversial
Speaker 1: past research and linking it to more recent studies, and
Speaker 1: it's also going to be in two parts. As I said,
Speaker 1: so I'd say it's it's important not to draw your
Speaker 1: conclusions until you've heard the whole thing. A significant part
Speaker 1: of what we're talking about today is going to be
Speaker 1: research that looked promising at one time but as widely
Speaker 1: regarded as as being on the wrong track today. Exactly,
Speaker 1: but still certainly there's a lot to learn by looking
Speaker 1: at these past cases. Absolutely. Uh So. The main human
Speaker 1: figure we're going to be looking at in the story
Speaker 1: today was an American psychologist named Dr James V. McConnell
Speaker 1: who lived nineteen twenty five to nineteen ninety, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to start off by mentioning several sources about McConnell's
Speaker 1: life and career that will be referring to in these episodes.
Speaker 1: One was an article about McConnell by the Michigan State
Speaker 1: University psychologist Mark Rilling that appeared in American Psychologist in
Speaker 1: nineteen called the Mystery of the Vanished Citations uh, and
Speaker 1: that title refers to a period where McConnell was doing
Speaker 1: a lot of very influential research, but today you don't
Speaker 1: see the citations of this research mentioned very much, and
Speaker 1: he's sort of exploring why. That is. Another article, it
Speaker 1: was a great article called Memory in the Flesh in
Speaker 1: the Verge by R. L. Do Haim Ross, and also
Speaker 1: a couple of pieces in like two thousand ten and
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen for the Journal of the American Psychological
Speaker 1: Association by a sociology professor named Larry Stern. That Verge article,
Speaker 1: by the way, from and it's quite a good read.
Speaker 1: Yes it is so. James McConnell was born in Okamalgy, Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: I hope I'm saying that right, Okamalogy or Okmalgy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that sounds Oklahoma enough, I think okay uh in nineteen.
Speaker 1: He spent almost all of his professional career on faculty
Speaker 1: at the University of Michigan, beginning in nineteen fifty six
Speaker 1: after he got his PhD from the University of Texas
Speaker 1: and lasting until his retirement in nineteen eighty eight, and
Speaker 1: from the sixties through the eighties he also served as
Speaker 1: a research psychologist at the Mental Health Research Institute of
Speaker 1: the university. So McConnell overall was a very controversial figure
Speaker 1: in American psychology for multiple reasons that we will explore
Speaker 1: throughout these episodes. Widely known as innovative, enthusiastic, humorous, but
Speaker 1: also perhaps as reckless, sometimes un serious, and undisciplined. One
Speaker 1: interesting fact about him that will I think become more
Speaker 1: relevant as we go on is that early on before
Speaker 1: his academic career, he did some work in radio and
Speaker 1: television as a DJ and a scriptwriter before going into psychology,
Speaker 1: and of course this would prove valuable in a career
Speaker 1: as a public science communicator and something of a celebrity scientist. Now,
Speaker 1: apart from the research that we're going to be looking
Speaker 1: at today, I think McConnell was probably best known for
Speaker 1: founding a strange magazine called The Worm Runners Digest. I
Speaker 1: think one major problem many psychologists had with James McConnell
Speaker 1: during his life, UH was typified by the spirit of
Speaker 1: this journal, which published real reports of real scientific research.
Speaker 1: In some ways, it was kind of a clearing house
Speaker 1: for parts of research that wasn't yet in the It
Speaker 1: wasn't yet ready to be submitted to peer reviewed journals.
Speaker 1: So kind of scientists would submit, uh, you know, worm
Speaker 1: training reports and things like that to this as a
Speaker 1: preliminary measure. But then it would publish that real research
Speaker 1: uh and and real manuals for replication, right alongside bizarre
Speaker 1: jokes and poems and cartoons and hoaxes and satirical articles.
Speaker 1: So for a few article titles cited by Larry Stern,
Speaker 1: one is the effects of physical torture on the learning
Speaker 1: and retention of nonsense syllables. One is called operant conditioning
Speaker 1: in the domestic darning needle Spina farrika. So a lot
Speaker 1: of like weird psychology in jokes, sort of jokes about
Speaker 1: the field psychologists trying to write parodies of their own
Speaker 1: research and the and the problems they encountered within their
Speaker 1: sub fields. Okay, okay, that's a very very specific audience
Speaker 1: in mind them. Yes, Larry stern all So writes that
Speaker 1: there were spoofs of Freudian theory, including quote some comments
Speaker 1: on the addition to the theory of psycho sexual development
Speaker 1: by Sigmund Fraud, which introduced the nasal stage occurring between
Speaker 1: the anal and phallic stages, in which the libido quote
Speaker 1: is localized primarily in the mucous linings of the nose,
Speaker 1: which I guess is a strange reminder that, you know,
Speaker 1: in the middle of the twentieth century, I think a
Speaker 1: lot of psychology journals would still be dealing with a
Speaker 1: pretty significant contingent of Freudian trained psychoanalysts. But and I
Speaker 1: figured this would be of special interest to you. Robert
Speaker 1: McConnell actually was also a science fiction writer and a
Speaker 1: charter member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, which
Speaker 1: again I would say probably didn't help his professional reputation. Yes,
Speaker 1: perhaps not uh so from what I could find. His
Speaker 1: sci fi stories also often seemed to be humorous and
Speaker 1: aimed at parody of the fields that he worked in.
Speaker 1: For example, Rilling rites about McConnell's one of mc connell's
Speaker 1: stories called Learning Theory published in nineteen sixty five, and
Speaker 1: in this story quote, McConnell is the protagonist who is
Speaker 1: abducted during the preparation of a lecture on learning theory,
Speaker 1: into an interstellar lab ship to become a subject confined
Speaker 1: to a series of chambers that resembled the skinner box,
Speaker 1: tea maze, and lashly jumping stand. And I had to
Speaker 1: look up that last one. But the lastly jumping stand
Speaker 1: was an apparatus for the study of operant conditioning, and
Speaker 1: it gave a rat an option to jump over a
Speaker 1: gap to two different visual stimuli. One would offer a
Speaker 1: reward and one would cause the rat to fall into
Speaker 1: a net below. Okay, so another just another tool that
Speaker 1: was used in behavioral studies, right, So he's in this story,
Speaker 1: he's writing about himself being put into the studies that
Speaker 1: people were doing on rats in the fifties and I
Speaker 1: guess the sixties. Two. But picking up with Rillings description
Speaker 1: of the story quote. After first behaving according to the
Speaker 1: predictions of learning theory, McConnell realizes that he will be
Speaker 1: returned to ann Arbor if he misbehaves by violating the
Speaker 1: predictions of his captor's theory of learning. McConnell was an
Speaker 1: iconic last and his story is a spoof fun learning
Speaker 1: theory in nineteen sixty. So I think the idea is, uh,
Speaker 1: he's poking fun at the sort of the rain of
Speaker 1: conventional wisdom by saying that if he were a subject
Speaker 1: in alien psychological research, if he didn't confirm their pre
Speaker 1: existing theories, they basically throw him out and say he
Speaker 1: wasn't a valid research subject. Interesting. According to an obituary
Speaker 1: I found by some University of Michigan colleagues, McConnell was
Speaker 1: also a cultivator of orchids, as well as a lover
Speaker 1: of computers and poker, and known by many students for
Speaker 1: quote personal zest to joy in teaching, intellectual animation, infectious enthusiasm,
Speaker 1: and individualized attention that he brought to his classes. Uh
Speaker 1: and Rilling points out that while much of his cannibalistic
Speaker 1: memory transfer work that we're going to be focusing on
Speaker 1: was later considered wrong and misguided, McConnell was actually a
Speaker 1: really important pioneer in research into invertebrate learning and memory,
Speaker 1: and that scientists today should be able to learn from
Speaker 1: both his successes and his failures. Now I want to
Speaker 1: make an admission that I'm afraid I'm going to say
Speaker 1: something wrong in one of these episodes because I keep
Speaker 1: accidentally calling James McConnell Jerry O'Connell, who was not a psychologist.
Speaker 1: He was the guy in Scream Too, and he played
Speaker 1: the football player and Jerry McGuire. No, no, I actually
Speaker 1: haven't seen Jerry McGuire. Um, but you've got some vhs?
Speaker 1: Do I have some VHS tapes? Because I'm I'm saving them.
Speaker 1: I have to contribute them to the pyramid that is
Speaker 1: being built in the desert because we do have to
Speaker 1: return all the Jerry's home. But yes, I have to
Speaker 1: actually have not watched it. Well, you know he was
Speaker 1: like a hunky dude in the nice but no different guy,
Speaker 1: not the actor Jerry O'Connell, James McConnell. So if I say,
Speaker 1: Jerry O'Connell, you've got to reach across the table and
Speaker 1: slap me. Will will you? Will you keep this pledge? Um?
Speaker 1: I don't know if I feel like getting up to
Speaker 1: slap you, but I will try and jump in. Um. So.
Speaker 1: Dr McConnell explores some pretty radical ideas during his career
Speaker 1: you know, one of them will be the primary focus
Speaker 1: for these episodes. But he also later wrote about the
Speaker 1: potential of using behavioral modification on criminals to enable their
Speaker 1: re entry into society yea um. And he thought that
Speaker 1: this might be used to eliminate crime and mental illness altogether.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of enthusiasm in the mid century
Speaker 1: among the behaviorist school of psychology for this kind of
Speaker 1: like society revolutionizing potential of behavior modification. Right, And we
Speaker 1: have to go back to some of these character attributes
Speaker 1: we've touched on already, that he was when he was
Speaker 1: excited about an idea, he was very excited about it
Speaker 1: and infectious with his excitement. And he was something of
Speaker 1: a public figure and would engage is kind of a
Speaker 1: celebrity scientist. He could engage with science on a show
Speaker 1: biz level, not just on a research level, and in
Speaker 1: fact often maybe did so to the detriment of public expectations.
Speaker 1: He was accused by some colleagues of over hyping and
Speaker 1: over interpreting and over speculating from what research existed. So
Speaker 1: it's thought that this is the reason that it is
Speaker 1: particularly some of these ideas that he was pushing in
Speaker 1: this enthusiasm he was pushing regarding the behaviorism that this
Speaker 1: is what attracted the attention of a man by the
Speaker 1: name of Ted Kazinski. Yeah, which most people probably recognize
Speaker 1: that name. If not, you might know him by his moniker,
Speaker 1: the UNI Bomber. We were talking about this before we
Speaker 1: came in. That, Like, I bet a lot of younger
Speaker 1: listeners out there don't even remember the UNI Bomber. I
Speaker 1: remember from when I was very young. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: also easy to only remember, you know, a few pictures
Speaker 1: here and there, Remember that police sketch, and remember like
Speaker 1: a courtroom picture where you know, Kazinski looks, you know,
Speaker 1: completely unhinged, that sort of thing. But yeah, McConnell was
Speaker 1: one of his targets. Kauzinski mailed his tenth bomb to
Speaker 1: Dr McConnell in an assassination at and this was in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five. UM he had at that time he
Speaker 1: was working with a graduate student assistant UH named w
Speaker 1: what is Nicholas Sueno, And so they're working together. They
Speaker 1: opened the package and triggered the explosion. Now, thankfully both
Speaker 1: individuals survived with only only minor injuries and mild hearing loss,
Speaker 1: as well as what sounds like some level of PTSD
Speaker 1: based on the experience, which I think is quite understandable.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, just a refresher on the UNI bomber
Speaker 1: for anyone who doesn't know or as a little foggy
Speaker 1: uh Ted Kazinski born in ninety two was a was
Speaker 1: a former mathematics professor and mathematician who took two acts
Speaker 1: of murder and domestic terrorism to advance his manifesto, which
Speaker 1: was titled Industrial Society and its Future, in which he
Speaker 1: heavily criticized his post Industrial Revolution society and he also
Speaker 1: criticized what he referred to as leftist psychology. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: sometimes he can be kind of hard to pin down
Speaker 1: in terms of his ideology because he doesn't fit with
Speaker 1: a lot of the standard ideological kind of groupings you
Speaker 1: see with mass murderers and terrorists that are motivated by ideology.
Speaker 1: He was more of a kind of idiosyncratic lone wolf terrorist.
Speaker 1: But but he's sometimes referred to as like an anarchist primitivist.
Speaker 1: He wanted people to return to nature and reject modern
Speaker 1: technology and science, right, which I mean, they're they're versions
Speaker 1: of that that of course, that are that many people
Speaker 1: listening to the show might agree with uh, and I
Speaker 1: they wouldn't resort to murder exactly. And I mean that's
Speaker 1: that's the big thing to drive home here, you know. He. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he argued for this nature centric anarchism, and in his
Speaker 1: bombings he targeted individuals involved in modern type mostly individuals
Speaker 1: involved in modern technological advances. And that's why McConnell's work
Speaker 1: is sometimes hard to figure out, like why this attracted
Speaker 1: the attention of Kazinski, because it doesn't quite seem to
Speaker 1: fit the profile at first glance. Yeah. The article I
Speaker 1: was reading by Mark Rilling identifies McConnell's public communication on
Speaker 1: TV and another media about behavior modification use uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in use in criminal justice and and human behavior reform
Speaker 1: at the large scale as the likely culprit in attracting
Speaker 1: Kazinski's hire. Yeah, because Kazinski did criticize modification of the
Speaker 1: human condition, especially behavioral modification, which McConnell had become an
Speaker 1: outspoken proponent of in the media, and Kazinski saw him
Speaker 1: as an advocate of society's attempts to change humans to
Speaker 1: fit the system rather than the reverse. Yeah. Between nineteen
Speaker 1: Kazinski killed three people and injured twenty three. Uh, he
Speaker 1: was the to the target of an intense um search
Speaker 1: for his identity, but finally he was arrested in nineteen
Speaker 1: and remains in prison serving a life term as with
Speaker 1: this record. Yeah, and fortunately both McConnell and and the student,
Speaker 1: so we know survived the Attechnic, and so McConnell lived
Speaker 1: several years after that he passed away in So this
Speaker 1: is just something about just a bizarre aspect of the
Speaker 1: overall story and just certainly a historically noteworthy part of
Speaker 1: McConnell's biography. Uh, that he just ends up, you know,
Speaker 1: wandering into the path of of this individual and becomes
Speaker 1: part of the Kazynski story as well. Yeah, but that's
Speaker 1: not the main part of his life we're going to
Speaker 1: be focusing on in these episodes. We're gonna be looking
Speaker 1: more at his research on memory, and specifically memory research
Speaker 1: with a group of flat worms known as planaria. So
Speaker 1: should we take a quick break and then come back
Speaker 1: to talk about planarians. Yes, let's go ahead and cut
Speaker 1: the episode right here. All right, we're back. So before
Speaker 1: we look at the experiments of James McConnell and colleagues,
Speaker 1: we should meet a major character in this science sentific narrative,
Speaker 1: which is a type of flat worm called planaria. Right now,
Speaker 1: for starters planaria, there is a genus planar area. But
Speaker 1: but but it's not who we're talking about here, is
Speaker 1: not just organisms within that genus. Yeah, it can be
Speaker 1: a little confusing because there are multiple things called planaria.
Speaker 1: Planaria is also used to refer to a larger family
Speaker 1: of related flat worms, and most of the worms that
Speaker 1: are called planarians are outside the genus of Planaria, in
Speaker 1: classes in the class Tubularia or the family Planaria. Day,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna be talking about this broader class of planarians. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the oil. You'll find them living in both fresh and
Speaker 1: salt water. In the water, but also on land. A
Speaker 1: terrestrial planaria are found in the soil or or damp
Speaker 1: areas or humid places. Some are even parasitic, but most
Speaker 1: feed on protozoans, tiny snails and worms, and they mostly
Speaker 1: feed at night. Mostly they're they're soft. They tend to
Speaker 1: be soft leaf shaped creatures that range from three to
Speaker 1: fifteen millimeters, but they can reach longer lengths. They have
Speaker 1: two eyes, and those two eyes are often quite notable
Speaker 1: because they look like googly eyes. Yeah, you've probably seen
Speaker 1: these before in actual photos of these worms zoomed in
Speaker 1: their cross side. Uh. Some some of them have tentacles,
Speaker 1: they have of ventral mouth opening and no body cavity.
Speaker 1: They may swim via undulations or crawl like a slug.
Speaker 1: They're also simultaneous hymaphrodites, having both sexes within a single individual.
Speaker 1: Yet some utilize sexual reproductions and and some utilize a
Speaker 1: sexual reproduction. And of course their legendary for their regenerative powers. Yes,
Speaker 1: and it's these regenerative powers that are gonna play a
Speaker 1: central role in a lot of this research. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it may have played a role in your individual research
Speaker 1: and even science education growing up. Oh sure, yeah maybe,
Speaker 1: I mean so, I mean you could not have a
Speaker 1: planarian highlander situation. You would have a real problem with
Speaker 1: trying to keep a planary in decapitated, that's right. Uh.
Speaker 1: And And to really drive this home, let's talk about
Speaker 1: just how amazing their regenerative powers are. Basically, they can
Speaker 1: be cut in half in each half will form into
Speaker 1: a fully formed individual. In fact, it's been estimated that
Speaker 1: a mere one two hundred and seventy nine of the
Speaker 1: organism can once removed regenerate into a fully formed individual.
Speaker 1: So we're talking total sourcer as apprentice territory here, and
Speaker 1: that's really not an overstatement. Yeah, it would be like,
Speaker 1: you know, if you could chop my finger off and
Speaker 1: it would grow a whole new me. Yeah. Really, And
Speaker 1: that's I mean, that's amazing because we've we've talked on
Speaker 1: the show before about the regenerative powers of of various
Speaker 1: vertebrate organisms. For example, you know, and it's impressive that
Speaker 1: a lizard co jettison its tail and re mostly regrow
Speaker 1: that tail. Things of that nature. Many of the healing
Speaker 1: abilities of even the human body are pretty substantial when
Speaker 1: you really set back in and consider them. But this
Speaker 1: is this is something far beyond most of those examples. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say this goes even beyond the impressive examples
Speaker 1: we see in like amphibians, like salamanders. You can even
Speaker 1: cut their head in half kind of like you started
Speaker 1: to cut them in half with a sword and then
Speaker 1: you got bored like around the neck. Uh you can,
Speaker 1: you can, you can cut their head in half and
Speaker 1: then just stop and then they'll they'll develop two heads
Speaker 1: and live that way. In some cases, Uh, they have
Speaker 1: there have been some very interesting experiments in how they
Speaker 1: regenerate in micro gravity as well. For instance, normally a
Speaker 1: two headed planaria is a rare occurrence in nature, but
Speaker 1: in one experiment, space exposed worms were far more likely
Speaker 1: developed a second head, to the tune of one in
Speaker 1: fifteen worms. Uh. In amputating this worm within result in
Speaker 1: more two headed worms. And this is this is just
Speaker 1: one area where you know, there their further study can
Speaker 1: help us understand their biology and you know, to help
Speaker 1: us better understand the effects of micro gravity on an organism.
Speaker 1: But of course their regenerative powers in general continued to
Speaker 1: garner a great deal of research attention. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: the medical applications of regenerative biology itself are very important. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Worth noting that Darwin actually observed these amazing creatures as well, uh,
Speaker 1: and their amazing ability. I will read a quick quote
Speaker 1: here from Charles Darwin. Alright, this is from a journal
Speaker 1: of researches into the natural history and geology of the
Speaker 1: countries visited during the voyage of HMS Beagle around the world. Quote.
Speaker 1: Having cut one of them transversely into two nearly equal
Speaker 1: parts in the course of a fortnight, both had the
Speaker 1: shape of perfect animals. I had, however, so divided the
Speaker 1: body that one of the halves contained both the inferior
Speaker 1: orifices and the other in consequence none In the course
Speaker 1: of twenty five days from the operation, the more perfect
Speaker 1: half could not have been distinguished from any other specimen.
Speaker 1: And there's more that you know here, obviously, but that's
Speaker 1: just a taste of his fascination with the organism itself
Speaker 1: sitting in the be goal cutting up worms. And they
Speaker 1: continued to fascinate researches as well. Uh, you know, for
Speaker 1: a number of reasons, um as pointed out by a
Speaker 1: doctor only our pagan author of the first Brain. Uh.
Speaker 1: He pointed this out in a two thousand fourteen interview
Speaker 1: with futurism. There are other organisms with this kind of
Speaker 1: regenerative ability, but very few are quite as excellent at
Speaker 1: it as the planarian. And they also have a relatively
Speaker 1: complex nervous system, which contributes to their appeal, especially when
Speaker 1: you get into areas where you're talking about what can
Speaker 1: we learn from the from a planarian that we can
Speaker 1: then apply potentially in the future to human physiology. Now,
Speaker 1: just a few other quick fascinating facts about them, at
Speaker 1: least one variety produces a deadly uh, produces the deadly
Speaker 1: tetrodotoxin um. In general, their mouths emerge from a proboscis
Speaker 1: located halfway down their body. That's cool. And those googly
Speaker 1: eyes sometimes they described as cross eyes. Apparently nobody's exactly
Speaker 1: sure why that is the case. I will say the
Speaker 1: google eyes often look like an illustration, and they present
Speaker 1: a problem with the presentation of these planarians and the
Speaker 1: display the google eyes, because you can show a photo
Speaker 1: of them and it looks like somebody drew it. It
Speaker 1: doesn't look like a real world organism. It always, even
Speaker 1: to this day, it makes me think of Spy Versus
Speaker 1: Spy and Mad magazine. They look like the two spies,
Speaker 1: the Black Spy and the White Spy cartoon. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that's the subject in a nutshell. Uh. But I imagine
Speaker 1: we should start turning our attention to some of the experiments. Right,
Speaker 1: So I would say the story begins with the psychological
Speaker 1: technique of classical conditioning. So the most common example of
Speaker 1: classical conditioning is Pavlov's dogs, right. The Russian physiology just
Speaker 1: Yvonne Pavlov, who lived eighteen forty nine and nineteen thirty
Speaker 1: six was famously studying the process of digestion in dogs
Speaker 1: when he noticed that not only did the dogs begin
Speaker 1: to drool in the presence of food. That that would
Speaker 1: make sense, Right, you put some food in front of
Speaker 1: a dog, The digestion process begins with the mental stimulation
Speaker 1: of the side of food. Right, you start producing saliva
Speaker 1: or drool in order to help you eat. It actually
Speaker 1: went beyond that. Pavlov observed that the dogs would start
Speaker 1: to drool as soon as they saw the lab assistant
Speaker 1: who usually fed them. So there's a physiological justification for
Speaker 1: producing extra saliva. When an animal sees food, the animal's
Speaker 1: body is preparing to eat. But Pavlov's insight was realizing
Speaker 1: that through repeated training, you could separate the stimulus and
Speaker 1: the response through one or more layers of abstraction. So,
Speaker 1: of course the lab assistant isn't food. But the dog
Speaker 1: comes to learn through repeated instances is that every time
Speaker 1: it sees the assistant, it's about to get food, and
Speaker 1: thus the body prepares itself to eat and digest. And
Speaker 1: this was later done with all kinds of different things
Speaker 1: with auditory cues such as a bell or a metronome,
Speaker 1: the dog. Here's the sound. It knows the food is coming,
Speaker 1: and the body responds. And I don't know about you,
Speaker 1: but like, this is something that helps define my relationship
Speaker 1: with my pet. Like I think about this all the
Speaker 1: time when observing my cat's relationship with our household environment. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I think about my dog's relationship with any stimulus such
Speaker 1: as sound or visual cues that may signal a walk
Speaker 1: is about to take place. So like the picking up
Speaker 1: of the keys, the putting on of the coach, the
Speaker 1: putting on of the shoes, all these different things are
Speaker 1: like start to trigger this powerful excitement reaction in the dog,
Speaker 1: even though none of them are are opening the door,
Speaker 1: leashing up, going out for a walk, right, none of
Speaker 1: them are in an of themselves the desired reward. But
Speaker 1: there are various bits of stimuli associated with that eventual
Speaker 1: reward of course. So yeah, we are constantly, even accidentally
Speaker 1: classically conditioning our pets whenever something that they're interested in,
Speaker 1: whether positively or negatively, is about to happen. If it
Speaker 1: happens repeatedly, you're probably training them, whether you want to
Speaker 1: be or not. Can is open, might be foods, as
Speaker 1: the cat um the rattle of foil walking into the kitchen, um, etcetera. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: and this is widely acknowledged as one of the most
Speaker 1: useful discoveries in the history of experimental psychology. Of course,
Speaker 1: it works with both positive and negative stimuli. You can also,
Speaker 1: for example, administer a mildly painful shock every time somebody
Speaker 1: hears the Batman theme, and after enough repetition, the person
Speaker 1: or the animal is probably gonna freeze or WinCE when
Speaker 1: they hear the music, even if no shock is administered.
Speaker 1: A call back to our recent episode of Invention, our
Speaker 1: other podcast about the history and the techno history of inventions,
Speaker 1: we did one on the turnspit dog. If you're not aware,
Speaker 1: there was a time in the history, especially in Britain,
Speaker 1: where small dogs turned little wheels to keep the spit
Speaker 1: of meat turning by the fire. And one of the
Speaker 1: problems with using dogs for this particular bit of work
Speaker 1: is that they are smart and they pick up on
Speaker 1: these clues. So you they might pick up on these
Speaker 1: little signs that that inform them that some meat is
Speaker 1: going to be skewer, that they're the roast is going
Speaker 1: to be had for dinner, or maybe just a big
Speaker 1: dinner is going to take place, and then the dog
Speaker 1: will run off and hide. Exactly what they should have
Speaker 1: found to turn those spits was like a large invertebrate
Speaker 1: that was not very good at learning through classical conditioning.
Speaker 1: Uh oh, And just to keep things clear, because this
Speaker 1: is something that I used to confuse myself. What's the
Speaker 1: difference between these two terms, classical conditioning and operant conditioning.
Speaker 1: You've probably heard both of them. Uh, They're similar. They're
Speaker 1: both based on learning associations between two things. But the
Speaker 1: difference is classical conditioning pair there's two external stimuli. For example,
Speaker 1: I show you a picture of Sean Connery and I
Speaker 1: give you an electric shock. So every time you know,
Speaker 1: if you do that enough and when you see the
Speaker 1: picture of Sean Connery, you'll win s or freeze or
Speaker 1: react as if you're going to get a shock, even
Speaker 1: if you don't. Meanwhile, operant conditioning associates a reward or
Speaker 1: a punishment with a behavior supplied by the subject. So
Speaker 1: for example, if you jump three times, you get a
Speaker 1: bag of candy corn. Now we know perfectly well that
Speaker 1: these types of conditioning classical conditioning operant conditioning work with
Speaker 1: a number of more complex life forms, like rats, like dogs,
Speaker 1: like humans. But there was an interesting question that came
Speaker 1: up in the twentieth century, which was did it work
Speaker 1: for less complex life forms like say worms? All right,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to take one more break,
Speaker 1: but we'll be right back. Thank thank alright, we're back,
Speaker 1: all right. So we've been discussing classical condition shinning, behavioral conditioning,
Speaker 1: and the fact that this we we know this works
Speaker 1: in more complex life forms like mammals, rats, dogs, humans,
Speaker 1: but does it work in less complex life forms like
Speaker 1: worms and other invertebrates. In the nineteen fifties, the answer
Speaker 1: to this question was pretty well understood, and that answer
Speaker 1: was no. Invertebrates could not learn the way that rats
Speaker 1: and monkeys and other mammals could. Mark Rilling makes this
Speaker 1: point at length in his article, writing that the widely
Speaker 1: held view, especially among zoologists and psychologists who were not
Speaker 1: experts directly in animal behavior, was that invertebrates had no
Speaker 1: capacity for internal memory states, and the only thing that
Speaker 1: the that they could do that would even approximate learning
Speaker 1: might come from temporary changes in body tissue. Rilling quotes
Speaker 1: a leading textbook of comparative psychology at the time. I
Speaker 1: think it's from the nineteen thirties on a question of
Speaker 1: whether invertebrates can learn associations through conditioning in the passage reads.
Speaker 1: Experience may temporarily alter the form of behavior by inducing
Speaker 1: local tissue change, but such changes are wiped out by
Speaker 1: subsequent events and have no permanent altering effect. Uh. It
Speaker 1: was also the opinion of a contemporary researcher in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties I think named Donald Jensen quote that no invertebrate,
Speaker 1: no matter how complex, is capable of showing true associative learning.
Speaker 1: So that's the consensus invertebrates can't learn. As for this
Speaker 1: distinction they're making about true learning versus tissue change, I
Speaker 1: think the distinction here is that, like if a worm
Speaker 1: or an insect could be conditioned to go left rather
Speaker 1: than right in a maze, it might only be because,
Speaker 1: for example, the conditioning process had made the legs or
Speaker 1: the wings or something on one side of the body stronger. Uh.
Speaker 1: The bottom line was that animals without backbones cannot truly
Speaker 1: learn the same way animals like us can. You couldn't
Speaker 1: have a Pavlov's worm or a Pavlov's crab, though the
Speaker 1: authors of the textbook quoted by Rilling make exactly one exception.
Speaker 1: They admit that this rule might not apply to planaria.
Speaker 1: But of course McConnell, as usual, was sort of disposition
Speaker 1: alle opposed to the conventional wisdom. He was something of
Speaker 1: an iconoclast, and he did not accept the idea in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties that invertebrates could not learn. He wanted
Speaker 1: to find out if worms could be trained, could he
Speaker 1: become a worm tamer. So here we move on into
Speaker 1: the first stage of this research history, the worm conditioning.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen fifty three McConnell was in graduate studies
Speaker 1: at the University of Texas and uh then this year
Speaker 1: and some of the following years he he collaborated with
Speaker 1: another researcher named Robert Thompson to demonstrate that planarians could
Speaker 1: be classically conditioned. And the basic set up here involved
Speaker 1: learning of responses to light light stimuli. Again, most of
Speaker 1: them are going to be nocturnal, uh, so light is
Speaker 1: going to play an important role in their behavior. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and certainly yeah through their you know, day night cycles
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. So they can detect a light.
Speaker 1: They have the ability to to tell when a light
Speaker 1: is being flashed. So planaria usually live at least the
Speaker 1: planaria they were working with usually live in aquatic environments,
Speaker 1: and they move from one place to another by gliding
Speaker 1: across the bottom surface of a pool, usually along slime
Speaker 1: trails that they deposit as they move. So McConnell and
Speaker 1: Thompson put together a test with a foot long pool
Speaker 1: of water in which they would deposit a planarian and
Speaker 1: then the worm could glide from one end to the
Speaker 1: pool to the other. Then, for the conditioning groups, McConnell
Speaker 1: and Thompson would train the worms by flashing a light
Speaker 1: above the water, paired with an electric shock applied to
Speaker 1: the whole pool. To the water and the conditioned responses
Speaker 1: the researchers were looking for in response to the light
Speaker 1: after training were contraction of the worm's body and turning
Speaker 1: of the of the direct and when the behavior of
Speaker 1: these trained planaria was compared with control groups, they found
Speaker 1: that while the planarian learning effect was not extremely strong,
Speaker 1: it was undeniably present. The condition worms showed an increase
Speaker 1: in contraction in response to the light from from about
Speaker 1: two percent in the first fifty trials to about ten
Speaker 1: percent in the last fifty trials, and turns started at
Speaker 1: a rate of about twenty in response to light, but
Speaker 1: increased throughout the test period to thirty five percent after conditioning.
Speaker 1: So as you can see, the planarian probably does not
Speaker 1: learn it nearly the efficiency of a mammal like a
Speaker 1: rat or a dog or an orangutan. But these nevertheless
Speaker 1: are significant changes. So, however weak, some learning was clearly
Speaker 1: taking place, and as a as a modern note, just
Speaker 1: to be clear, the established wisdom about invertebrates being unable
Speaker 1: to learn through association was pretty much completely wrong, and
Speaker 1: planaria were not the only exception. I was looking at
Speaker 1: one paper by Hawkins and burn From published in Cold
Speaker 1: Springs Harbor Perspectives Perspectives in biology called associate of Learning
Speaker 1: and Invertebrates, and they say that rudimentary forms of associative
Speaker 1: learning are found basically throughout the animal kingdom. One commonly
Speaker 1: studied example used in invertebrate learning and memory research is
Speaker 1: the California sea hair or applies ya californica. Almost said,
Speaker 1: applies a californication californica. So it's a huge sea slug.
Speaker 1: I was looking this up. It could barely be up
Speaker 1: to seventy five centimeters long. And way up to about
Speaker 1: seven kilograms or fifteen pounds. That's a that's a real
Speaker 1: mother of a sea slug. Can you imagine trying to
Speaker 1: pick up a fifteen pounds sea slug? No? No, I
Speaker 1: mean one scarcely imagines it coming out of the water, right,
Speaker 1: But uh, I can't help just because we're talking about
Speaker 1: something that they see hair. Uh I always think of
Speaker 1: them behaving and rabbit like, behave here, you know, or
Speaker 1: even delivering Easter eggs. Well, one also thinks about the
Speaker 1: sea monster that was popular on medieval and Renaissance maps,
Speaker 1: the sea hare. Oh well, leave, I talked about chet
Speaker 1: Manduser with the sea hare, yes, or I talked with
Speaker 1: chet Mandouzer about the sea hare. Yeah. That's one of
Speaker 1: the fun things about sea monsters is that we have
Speaker 1: all these things that are sort of named and have
Speaker 1: the same name, like a sea hair, a sea lion, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But in the history of sea monsters, pretty much every
Speaker 1: creature that was known to reside on the surface had
Speaker 1: a double in the deep. Right. The medieval and Renaissance
Speaker 1: map sea hair has nothing to do with the sea here.
Speaker 1: It was not a slug. It had fuzzy bunny ears
Speaker 1: and you could have a velveteen sea hair and it
Speaker 1: would be very sad. But yeah, so this sea hare
Speaker 1: is a giant sea slug, and experiments show that it
Speaker 1: can learn associations, for example, a conditioned retraction of the
Speaker 1: gill and siphon organs that strengthened by noxious stimuli like
Speaker 1: electric shocks to the tail. So while learning responses are
Speaker 1: going to vary according to a creature's nero anatomy, there
Speaker 1: appears to be no general rule against invertebrate learning. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's good to know heading forward. So it's not just
Speaker 1: this idea that, like all the eggs are in this
Speaker 1: one basket for invertebrate learning, only the planarians can learn. No,
Speaker 1: that is not the case. We we got some smart
Speaker 1: sea hairs, relatively smart. But again, to emphasize this was
Speaker 1: the opposite of the conventional wisdom leading into the nineteen fifties, UH,
Speaker 1: and to some degree, even after research demonstrating that there
Speaker 1: was invertebrate learning like, consensus among experts at the time
Speaker 1: resisted the idea of true invertebrate learning even after some
Speaker 1: published studies. One example cited by Rilling concerns a response
Speaker 1: after McConnell and colleagues seemed to indicate that the condition
Speaker 1: learning they could elicit in planaria had a sustained effect
Speaker 1: that the memory associations lasted not just for hours, not
Speaker 1: just for days, but literally for for months at a time.
Speaker 1: I think they set up to four months. In response
Speaker 1: to this, UH, a renowned zoologist specializing in invertebrates named
Speaker 1: Libby Hyman Say apparently said multiple times, No, that just
Speaker 1: can't be and argued that maybe a planarian could remember
Speaker 1: something for like five minutes or so, but the memory
Speaker 1: retention for weeks or months was just unthinkable. But we
Speaker 1: already see some things at work here in UH in
Speaker 1: McConnell's story, So Rilling points out that while these results
Speaker 1: did bear out and UH he thinks did generally demonstrate
Speaker 1: planarian learning and and showed something that is real and true,
Speaker 1: you could already see some of McConnell's methodological shortcomings at work.
Speaker 1: For example, he and Thompson did not use any kind
Speaker 1: of automatic measuring of the flatworm responses, but instead use
Speaker 1: the more traditional method of quote naturalistic observation, which I
Speaker 1: think means that they just watched to see what happened.
Speaker 1: You can probably guess why psychologists today try to find
Speaker 1: ways not to rely on experiment or is just eyebawling
Speaker 1: it when making a judgment about what happened. Uh, You're
Speaker 1: you're way more subject to experiment or bias this way.
Speaker 1: You want to if POSSE will come up with an
Speaker 1: automatic method, right, because I mean, ironically what you're dealing
Speaker 1: with when you're just dealing with observations as you are,
Speaker 1: of course dealing with memory. Um, even if certainly if
Speaker 1: you're making notes about what you're seeing as you're seeing it,
Speaker 1: you're still having to rely then on your memory of
Speaker 1: the observation far better and you know, far more reliable
Speaker 1: to be able to point to say measurements yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: done by a machine or something, have some kind of
Speaker 1: method that's not just your subjective judgment of what you
Speaker 1: just saw, being able to say this organism moved you know,
Speaker 1: however far have left in this experiment, and then in
Speaker 1: a second experiment the same thing definitely occurred. Yes, Uh.
Speaker 1: And I want to be clear that like this doesn't
Speaker 1: experiment or bias doesn't have to result from experimenters trying
Speaker 1: to trick anyone or being trying to commit conscious fraud.
Speaker 1: For their results, so they can be doing their honest
Speaker 1: best to try to represent things accurately. But still, you know,
Speaker 1: observation is somewhat subjective. You're going to honestly believe you
Speaker 1: saw something differently than somebody else did, or you know,
Speaker 1: our observations and our memories are not perfect, and they're
Speaker 1: highly influenced by what we want to see or expect
Speaker 1: to see. Also, Rilling points out that McConnell and Thompson's
Speaker 1: graduate advisor here was a comparative psychologist named M. E. Bitterman,
Speaker 1: who was critical of both students for not being careful enough,
Speaker 1: for example, not including a control group that were exposed
Speaker 1: to both shocks and light flashes but unpaired from each
Speaker 1: other to more firmly establish a causal link for the
Speaker 1: for the conditioning process itself. But what if they had
Speaker 1: gotten both flashes and shocks and they just weren't linked
Speaker 1: the same way they were in the in the test group,
Speaker 1: And they apparently didn't do that, And so Rilling seems
Speaker 1: to see this as characteristic of McConnell's career as a whole.
Speaker 1: Uh to quote from him in a summary passage, quote,
Speaker 1: McConnell an innovator raced from one exciting phenomenon to next
Speaker 1: without comprehensive experimental analysis or adequate controls. McConnell's controls were
Speaker 1: often developed as a response to his critics. McConnell's students
Speaker 1: and other scientists were left to the task of cleaning
Speaker 1: up after McConnell by adding the control groups that he omitted.
Speaker 1: And I think it's easy to see how this kind
Speaker 1: of thing can be at at the same time very
Speaker 1: uh winning and exciting, especially to maybe the general public
Speaker 1: and you know, publications writing about his exciting and strange
Speaker 1: and counterintuitive new research, but also really irritating to appears
Speaker 1: in the field if you're vaulting from one flashy, controversial,
Speaker 1: exciting discovery to another without taking the time to slow
Speaker 1: down and be sure you're on firm ground after each
Speaker 1: stop right, because the ideal process. If the study comes
Speaker 1: out and there's some sort of problem with it, than
Speaker 1: than you know, the others in the field chime in.
Speaker 1: There's a sort of amount of course correction that takes place.
Speaker 1: You go back to the drawing board, try to figure
Speaker 1: out how you went. Yeah, yeah, may yeah, maybe tell
Speaker 1: you complete step or two backwards. You don't just keep
Speaker 1: going along this line because you know that there is
Speaker 1: gold on the other end. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: I mean, you can totally understand the temptation to do
Speaker 1: it that way. It sounds so much more exciting than
Speaker 1: trying to buckle down and be super sure and super
Speaker 1: rigorous about what you think you already proved well. Un
Speaker 1: as we get into something we've discussed some the show
Speaker 1: before about just in the nature of scientific inquiry, Like
Speaker 1: it's one of these things that in some ways it
Speaker 1: is very much like how the human mind works and
Speaker 1: how humans have always solved problems. Uh, you can find,
Speaker 1: you know, examples of what is essentially scientific inquiry, certainly
Speaker 1: in in in prehistoric people's But at the same time,
Speaker 1: there are aspects of scientific inquiry that defy what it
Speaker 1: is to be a human problem solver, that that that
Speaker 1: perfect the method in ways that don't make sense just
Speaker 1: within the confines of you know, you know, minute to
Speaker 1: minute human experience exactly. Trial and error comes naturally, but
Speaker 1: we're way too prone to rely on heuristics, you know,
Speaker 1: to to use our sort of standard day to day
Speaker 1: trial and error judgment for real scientific investigation, because usually
Speaker 1: we only need one or two examples of something going
Speaker 1: right for us to derive a rule from it, and
Speaker 1: one or two examples is not. You know, that's still
Speaker 1: an anecdote scientifically. Here's an example from my my life
Speaker 1: as a parent. Um My son at an early age
Speaker 1: was enthralled by claw machines like pizza parlors and um
Speaker 1: and whatnot. And so the first time I let him
Speaker 1: try it, I said, Okay, here's the quarter, you can
Speaker 1: try it. And I was thinking he'll learn a good lesson.
Speaker 1: You know, you won't pick anything up with the clause,
Speaker 1: And I don't see. This is a tricky machine made
Speaker 1: exclusively to take his money by tempting when with the
Speaker 1: idea that will win a cheap prize. And then he
Speaker 1: wins a cheap prize the first time, right, So I
Speaker 1: instantly said the wrong lesson. And then there was another
Speaker 1: case like shortly thereafter, maybe a little long later, but
Speaker 1: he had some credits at some sort of parlor as
Speaker 1: part of a children's birthday party, did it again, won
Speaker 1: a prize, and so now it's ruined like to the
Speaker 1: two prizes makes a rule of the claw machines are
Speaker 1: where you get cheap toys, and the trickery is you
Speaker 1: know someone lost on him at this at this point anyway,
Speaker 1: Oh no, I mean that kind of learning. I've actually
Speaker 1: wondered before if that could feature into and maybe as
Speaker 1: far as we know, it already does, but could in
Speaker 1: the future feature into a a more insidious type of
Speaker 1: slot machine. It's a more perfect gambling addiction creator and
Speaker 1: money extractor. And what how it would simply work is
Speaker 1: it's got a camera on there with facial recognition, and
Speaker 1: it can recognize if you've played a slot machine in
Speaker 1: this casino before, and if you haven't it's and it's
Speaker 1: your first time. It gives you a small payout on
Speaker 1: your first go. Yeah, I give you that that that
Speaker 1: that first time user beginner luck, but also give you
Speaker 1: false expectations about what's playing a slot machine is all about, exactly.
Speaker 1: But I hope I didn't just give ideas to some
Speaker 1: really insidious designer there, right, because to be sure, to
Speaker 1: be clear, and we certainly did a couple of episodes
Speaker 1: and slot machines in the past. A slot machines purpose
Speaker 1: is to take your money, and the slot machine playing
Speaker 1: experience is the loss of money. Yeah, the slot machine
Speaker 1: is not designed to help you win big. If you
Speaker 1: want to play them, you should understand that you are
Speaker 1: paying for an entertaining experience and that's the best case scenario. Alright,
Speaker 1: We we got a little off topic there, but it's
Speaker 1: just as well because we've kind of hit our time
Speaker 1: for this part of the inquiry. We're gonna be back
Speaker 1: in the next episode to continue this discussion of planarians
Speaker 1: to what extent can they can they learn? But also
Speaker 1: we're going to get into this other area about the
Speaker 1: absorption of another worm's memory. Is it possible uh, through cannibalism?
Speaker 1: Through cannibalism, And then how does McConnell get into trouble
Speaker 1: based on his reported findings, and then where do we
Speaker 1: go from here in the modern age. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, head on over to Stuff to
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Speaker 1: subscribe and that you leave a nice review, leave us
Speaker 1: some stars and or a nice comment, because this helps
Speaker 1: us out in the long run. If you want to
Speaker 1: check out other shows that were involved in. First of all,
Speaker 1: there's Invention. We've mentioned that one before on the show already,
Speaker 1: and uh, this is a journey through human techno history.
Speaker 1: Find it an Invention pod dot com or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. We've mentioned the second oil age that
Speaker 1: is out as well, if you want to a short
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Speaker 1: old T shirt store and I am to understand that
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