Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
Speaker 1: of the show. Today we are airing part two of
Speaker 1: the one that came out last weekend. So this is
Speaker 1: Devour of Memories, Part two, originally published November twenty one, nineteen.
Speaker 1: It continues the story from last weekend, So we hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy. Let's dig right in. Welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How
Speaker 1: Stuff Work. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: we're back with part two of our exploration of planarians,
Speaker 1: memory learning and conditioning. And of course today we're going
Speaker 1: to get to the cannibalism. That's right. If you did
Speaker 1: not listen to part one, do go back and listen
Speaker 1: to it, because we lay the groundwork. We discussed these
Speaker 1: or isms, why they're interesting. We discussed their regenerative powers.
Speaker 1: We talk about McConnell himself. We talk about his personal
Speaker 1: and professional history as well as his run in with
Speaker 1: the unit Bomber. Right, uh, So that figure, of course
Speaker 1: is James V. McConnell, the American psychologist. But if you
Speaker 1: listen to the last episode, as you should before this one,
Speaker 1: you already know that. So we're picking up after McConnell's
Speaker 1: initial research demonstrating in the nineteen fifties that despite conventional
Speaker 1: wisdom that invertebrates could not learn, could not be trained
Speaker 1: through classical conditioning or any other kind of associate of learning. Uh,
Speaker 1: McConnell and colleagues did in fact demonstrate that that's not true,
Speaker 1: at least for planarians, these flatworms, that that could be
Speaker 1: trained to react to something like a light stimulus. And
Speaker 1: we also discussed how it's just generally known to be
Speaker 1: true today that invertebrates can learn. The conventional wisdom at
Speaker 1: the time was wrong. But so to pick up with
Speaker 1: McConnell's career. After completing his graduate degree at the University
Speaker 1: of Texas, I almost said Jerry O'Connell, not Jerry O'Connell.
Speaker 1: James McConnell moved on to the University of Michigan, where
Speaker 1: he continued his research into flatworms with the team that
Speaker 1: came to be known as the Polenarian Research Group or
Speaker 1: PR g So another piece of context for this research
Speaker 1: is a sort of quest for the holy Grail within
Speaker 1: twentieth century psychology and neuroscience, and this was the hunt
Speaker 1: for the elusive ingram. It was believed by many in
Speaker 1: the mid century that a researcher, that the first researcher
Speaker 1: to actually pinpoint something known as the ingram, would receive
Speaker 1: the Nobel Prize for their work. But what was the ingram?
Speaker 1: The short version is that the ingram was believed to
Speaker 1: be the fundamental physical unit of memory represented in the body.
Speaker 1: In order for an animal to learn an association between
Speaker 1: two things, that memory has to be accompanied by some
Speaker 1: kind of physical change inside the body. But what is
Speaker 1: the fun no mimental unit of that change. Is it
Speaker 1: a structural change in the brain that can be located
Speaker 1: or is it something else? So the idea is that
Speaker 1: you would see the physical evidence of learning and then
Speaker 1: potentially like that is physical evidence that could be then manipulated.
Speaker 1: Of course, yeah, it's sort of like searching for the atom.
Speaker 1: What the atom is to matter, the ingram would be
Speaker 1: to memory. What is the fundamental unit that that physically
Speaker 1: indicates in the body a memory has been formed? And
Speaker 1: of course one motivation for studying whether simpler organisms like
Speaker 1: worms and other invertebrates could in fact learn associations through
Speaker 1: classical conditioning was that this might help move along the
Speaker 1: search for the ingram. If a biological phenomenon seems too
Speaker 1: complex to understand in one organism, you know, if you
Speaker 1: can't find it in a rabbit, everything is just too complicated.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can get a foothold to understanding by looking
Speaker 1: for analogous phenomena in simpler organisms and then build your
Speaker 1: way back up. And it's a sensible way to go
Speaker 1: about it, of course. Uh So research in the middle
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century tried to locate the ingram two
Speaker 1: changes in a specific part of the brain and a rat,
Speaker 1: but these efforts failed. In fact, rat brain memory research
Speaker 1: he demonstrated that there was no one location or structure
Speaker 1: in which the fundamental unit of memory association was to
Speaker 1: be found. Instead, learning seemed to involve wide swaths of
Speaker 1: the rat cortex, and today we know that certain regions
Speaker 1: of the brain are especially important for memories. For example,
Speaker 1: fear based conditioning, like if you condition somebody to respond
Speaker 1: to a stimulus through conditioning due to an electric shock,
Speaker 1: that this seems to strongly implicate the amygdala, not just
Speaker 1: fear actually, but other types of emotional memory as well.
Speaker 1: I think while memory of spatial locations and physical maps
Speaker 1: seems especially to implicate the hippocampus, But memories for complex
Speaker 1: actions maybe finding your way around a maze, as was
Speaker 1: often tried with rats, will involve lots of different parts
Speaker 1: of the brain at so you can't point to the
Speaker 1: memory in one specific part of the brain. It's using
Speaker 1: the whole brain basically. In the nineteen fifties, this wasn't
Speaker 1: yet clear. It was It was just clear that memory,
Speaker 1: contrary to the expectations of many psychologists, couldn't be located
Speaker 1: in one particular structure or single point physical change in
Speaker 1: the brain. And because of the failure of researchers to
Speaker 1: locate a structural ingram at a single point in the brain,
Speaker 1: some researchers began to turn to other explanations, and McConnell
Speaker 1: was one of them. McConnell wondered, what if memories were
Speaker 1: not stored exclusively in structures in the brain. Could you
Speaker 1: have memories in your hands, in your blood, in your guts.
Speaker 1: Was there a deeper chemical rather than structural basis for
Speaker 1: our memories. And here's where the planarians again become an
Speaker 1: invaluable research tool in looking into could you have memories
Speaker 1: outside the brain? Could there be such a thing as
Speaker 1: a memory chemical or a memory molecule found throughout the body.
Speaker 1: And yeah, this we come back to the regenerative powers
Speaker 1: of the planarian. We described this in the first episode
Speaker 1: as being something like The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the old Disney
Speaker 1: animation from Fantasia, in which the uh what what is it?
Speaker 1: It's a broom that is brought to life to do
Speaker 1: a particular task to carry water from a well, I think,
Speaker 1: and then yeah, it was it's a well. And then
Speaker 1: and then Nikki, the Sorcerer's Apprentice in this case, ends
Speaker 1: up having to to destroy it. So he chops in
Speaker 1: into a million pieces with his axe, and then all
Speaker 1: those millions of pieces, each little sliver of the broom
Speaker 1: comes back to life and grows into a whole new, fresh,
Speaker 1: uh broom with that walks around on two legs and
Speaker 1: carries buckets of water. Right, And this connects to the
Speaker 1: regenerative powers of planaria, because if you cut a planarian
Speaker 1: in half, one of these flatworms just chop it in
Speaker 1: half crosswise, separating the head from the tail. Each half
Speaker 1: of the worm would grow the part it lost, So
Speaker 1: the decapitated head could regrow a tail, and the decapitated
Speaker 1: tail could regrow ahead, which means regrowing a brain. So
Speaker 1: McConnell's question was, if I condition a flat worm to
Speaker 1: learn something, maybe have a response to a stimulus like
Speaker 1: a flashing light, and then I cut it in half,
Speaker 1: which half of the worm will retain the response if
Speaker 1: either Now you might think the answer is obvious, right, Well,
Speaker 1: obviously the head half is where the brain is, so
Speaker 1: the head half will retain the conditioning if either side does,
Speaker 1: and the tail half won't. Right that that seems like
Speaker 1: the obvious conclusion, right, Yeah, that's what you would assume.
Speaker 1: That's what like a basic understanding of monster movies would
Speaker 1: have you assumed. Yes, McConnell found this was not exactly
Speaker 1: true in his experiments on freshwater flat worms called dogs
Speaker 1: a Dorado cephala. If you classically condition the worm to
Speaker 1: respond to a light and then you cut the flat
Speaker 1: worm into two halves, both halves retained the condition ng,
Speaker 1: and in a few cases the tail retained the conditioning
Speaker 1: more strongly than the head. So you could cut the
Speaker 1: head off, the tail would regrow ahead, and it would
Speaker 1: still respond like the way it had learned to respond
Speaker 1: when it had its original head. So if all the
Speaker 1: learning was in the brain, how could that be possible? Right?
Speaker 1: This would seem to indicate that there's some sort of
Speaker 1: memory retention or memory storage going on within the body itself. Right,
Speaker 1: And these results were eventually published in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Comparative and Physiological Psychology. But then it gets even weirder
Speaker 1: because we're going to start playing flat worm Ship of Theseus?
Speaker 1: Uh So a refresher on the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, Robert,
Speaker 1: do you want to do the honors here? Oh? Sure?
Speaker 1: This is the basic idea. If you you have this ship,
Speaker 1: for this legendary Ship of Theseus, you're celebrating it across
Speaker 1: the decades. Think about it. Is a ship that is
Speaker 1: docked for decades tends to fall apart piece by piece,
Speaker 1: so you replace it piece by piece. Eventually you reach
Speaker 1: the point where you have replaced every single piece of
Speaker 1: this vessel. The question is, is the Ship of Theseus
Speaker 1: any longer the Ship of Theseus? Is it? It's It's
Speaker 1: not physically the same ship it was before, but it
Speaker 1: is the same shape. It's just all the pieces have
Speaker 1: been at this point replaced. Now, what if you in
Speaker 1: fact do this with flatworms since they can regenerate, And
Speaker 1: this is exactly what they tried in a series of experiments.
Speaker 1: McConnell and the Planarian Research Group showed that if you
Speaker 1: cut a word, like, for example, you cut a flat
Speaker 1: worm's head off after it's been conditioned and trained, so
Speaker 1: it has this memory response, and then that tail regrows ahead,
Speaker 1: and then you cut the original tail off, so the
Speaker 1: regenerated head regrows a tail. Now you've got no original
Speaker 1: part of the worm left. So you've been through these
Speaker 1: multiple generations of cutting a worm apart and letting it regenerate,
Speaker 1: and yet their experiments found that some learning training memory
Speaker 1: was retained across the multiple generations where there was no
Speaker 1: original part of the worm left. Again, how would this
Speaker 1: be possible? Like if memories are stored exclusively in the brain,
Speaker 1: how could a memory necessary to establish a conditioned response
Speaker 1: still operate within a tail that had its head cut off,
Speaker 1: or a segment of a worm grown from a segment
Speaker 1: of a worm grown from a segment of a worm
Speaker 1: that had been through the conditioning, and this led McConnell
Speaker 1: to suppose that he had evidence that memory may have
Speaker 1: strong chemical components. They're not limited to activity within the brain.
Speaker 1: There could be actual molecules of chemical memory coursing through
Speaker 1: the worm's body. Now, if this were true, this would
Speaker 1: of course be a revolutionary discovery, right right right, because
Speaker 1: of course it would conceivably apply to other organisms. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's the thing. It might force us to completely
Speaker 1: rethink what we thought we knew about memory, right And
Speaker 1: of course if it were true of flat worms, as possible,
Speaker 1: it would only be true of flat worms. But yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't know where else this would lead. Could it
Speaker 1: even be true of more complex animals. So it was
Speaker 1: this line of research about cut up flatworms retaining memories
Speaker 1: that led actually to the founding of the magazine we
Speaker 1: talked about in the last episode, The Worm Runners Digest.
Speaker 1: This was McConnell's magazine that quite strangely combined both real
Speaker 1: research on on planarians. It was like real flatworm research
Speaker 1: published alongside weird poems and joke articles and satirical articles
Speaker 1: and stuff. It's such a weird title. The worm part
Speaker 1: clearly relates to the worm experiments. But it also brings
Speaker 1: to mind like blade Runner, except it's worm runner. And
Speaker 1: it also makes me think of various Gary Larson far
Speaker 1: Side cartoons which a worm is perhaps, you know, wearing
Speaker 1: sweatpants and linn running. That's good, But the joke and
Speaker 1: title in the title is actually a reference to like
Speaker 1: common terms used by psychologists of this period, lots of
Speaker 1: research about learning and memory involved rats and mazes, and oh,
Speaker 1: researchers who did this kind of work referred to themselves
Speaker 1: jokingly in the nineteen fifties as rat runners. McConnell's variation
Speaker 1: is self explanatory. Jerry the worm Runner, not Jerry Jr.
Speaker 1: Jerry O'Connell, James JF there James the worm Runner then,
Speaker 1: but yeah, actually so coming back. So this led to
Speaker 1: the founding of this strange magazine that he became very
Speaker 1: well known for. Uh. The story has summarized by Larry Stern,
Speaker 1: and I mentioned several sources at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: last episode. We're still referring to those sources in this episode.
Speaker 1: One was an article by Larry Stern that that talked
Speaker 1: about the founding of this magazine. So in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: McConnell presented some of this work uh this work about
Speaker 1: chopping up flat worms and then supposedly retaining memories to
Speaker 1: an annual convention of the American Psychological Association the a
Speaker 1: p A. And this included results collected by a member
Speaker 1: of the planary in research group named Riva Jacobson. And again,
Speaker 1: this research showed that not only could a decapitated flatworm
Speaker 1: retain associate of learning, but essentially the ship of THESEUS
Speaker 1: flatworm containing no tissue of the original worm could also
Speaker 1: retain learning. And after the presentation, Newsweek published an article
Speaker 1: summarizing the research. This led to a huge surge of
Speaker 1: popular interest in McConnell's work, and so Larry Stern writes quote.
Speaker 1: Shortly after the Newsweek coverage, McConnell was inundated with letters
Speaker 1: from high school students from around the country asking where
Speaker 1: they could obtain worms for their projects and how they
Speaker 1: should go about caring for and training them. Some students,
Speaker 1: according to McConnell, demanded that he sent them a few
Speaker 1: hundred trained worms at once, as their projects were due
Speaker 1: within days. It sounds a little familiar, right, Students don't
Speaker 1: do things like this, But McConnell did want to help
Speaker 1: students conduct their own flatworm research. I get the feeling
Speaker 1: he was into this idea, but he realized very quickly
Speaker 1: that it didn't make sense to try to respond to
Speaker 1: each letter individually, so instead he decided to publish a
Speaker 1: manual on how to replicate the experiments performed by the PRG,
Speaker 1: and he titled this document The Worm Runners Digest. However,
Speaker 1: after publishing this manual under that title, McConnell started getting
Speaker 1: submissions to appear in future issues, so he began publishing
Speaker 1: this so called journal on a regular basis, again, including
Speaker 1: both real research and psychological in jokes, cartoons, poems, and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff interesting, So it's kind of
Speaker 1: accidentally became a continuing publication. Yeah. Now, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: some people didn't take kindly to this mix of subject matter.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty four, after some readers complained that they
Speaker 1: couldn't tell the real research from the jokes and the satire,
Speaker 1: they started publishing the satirical elements upside down in the
Speaker 1: back half of the journal. So there was some attempt
Speaker 1: there to clear up the confusion. But I think for
Speaker 1: a lot of scientists, the pure proximity of the different
Speaker 1: material was was a problem no matter how clear the division. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that's understandable. We talked before about the Ignoble Prizes,
Speaker 1: for instance, about most of the individuals involved and honored
Speaker 1: by these prizes that celebrate, you know, scientific studies that
Speaker 1: are legitimate scientific studies, but that are in on some
Speaker 1: level humorous or amusing. But you still have some individuals
Speaker 1: in the scientific world who do not see the value
Speaker 1: of that. So if they're so, if feathers are ever
Speaker 1: ruffled by the Ignoble Prizes, obviously something like this would
Speaker 1: ruffle feathers as well. Yes, uh so. Then in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven there came another split where the serious half
Speaker 1: of the journal was just formally cleaved and renamed in
Speaker 1: fact cloven and half like a flatworm, uh, chopped right off, decapitated.
Speaker 1: The serious half was renamed the Journal of Biological Psychology,
Speaker 1: and the worm runners Digest became the soul Haven of Humor,
Speaker 1: and it continued publishing that way until all. Right, on
Speaker 1: that note, we're going to take a quick break, but
Speaker 1: we will be right back. Alright, We're back alright, So
Speaker 1: to jump back into the progression of James McConnell's research.
Speaker 1: We're we're brought back to this uestion of a non
Speaker 1: brain chemical basis for memory. Couldn't memory, or at least
Speaker 1: some memory, some types of memories be stored chemically rather
Speaker 1: than structurally dispersed in the body, in molecules. And here's
Speaker 1: where we get to the cannibalism. So if there were
Speaker 1: in fact molecules within an animal representing some kind of
Speaker 1: chemical memory, such as memory of how to navigate a maze,
Speaker 1: could this be demonstrated? Could those molecules be shared from
Speaker 1: one animal to another? And this makes sense, that's what
Speaker 1: creatures do. They take molecules from each other, from other
Speaker 1: organisms and put them into themselves. Sure, we absorbed the
Speaker 1: molecules existing in other organisms for nutrition. Uh so maybe
Speaker 1: you could molecules be absorbed from one organism to another
Speaker 1: four memory transfer. So the first method they tried, and
Speaker 1: this is based on the reporting of one of those
Speaker 1: Larry Stern articles. The first method they tried was to
Speaker 1: splice the head of a conditioned worm onto the tail
Speaker 1: of an unconditioned worm to see if it would share molecules,
Speaker 1: right to force them to exchange the alleged memory molecules,
Speaker 1: but the transplant did not work. The head would not
Speaker 1: stay attached. Then they tried to liquefy fully conditioned flatworms
Speaker 1: and inject their juice into untrained worms, but this was
Speaker 1: also difficult. The planarians were too small to be injected basically,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they exploded when injected. In Larry Stern's words, quote,
Speaker 1: it was like trying to impale a prune with a
Speaker 1: javelin a lot of horrific things done to diplanarians in
Speaker 1: these experiments. I guess they are a simple enough organisms
Speaker 1: that have to be so upset about them, I guess,
Speaker 1: But it's still one can't help but pause a little
Speaker 1: on some of these, right, some of the grinding, the sauce,
Speaker 1: the gravy, the flatworm sauce. So how do you get
Speaker 1: those hypothetical memory molecules in there? If you can't inject them,
Speaker 1: you can't transplant ahead on. So the next route they tried,
Speaker 1: and this in the year nineteen sixty was experimental planarian cannibalism.
Speaker 1: This would be the old fashioned way of getting molecules
Speaker 1: from one organism into the other. Sure, so apparently the
Speaker 1: idea came from a flatworm researcher named Jay Boyd Best,
Speaker 1: who communicated to McConnell about the fact that one particular
Speaker 1: species of planarian was known for cannibalistic behavior. So here's
Speaker 1: the answer. You train the worms to respond to to
Speaker 1: a maze or to the light, whatever the conditioning stimulus is,
Speaker 1: and then they learn the conditioning and then you grind
Speaker 1: them up into worm gravy, and then you feed the
Speaker 1: worm gravy to the untrained naive worms, and you see
Speaker 1: what happens. And astonishingly, their early experiments with this method
Speaker 1: looked very promising, including a number of early replication attempts
Speaker 1: with blinding procedures to remove the possibility of experiment or bias,
Speaker 1: supposedly confirming their early results. So, if it were true
Speaker 1: that memory molecules are being exchanged through this strange cannibalistic ritual,
Speaker 1: could I, you know, with this extend to humans? Could
Speaker 1: could I drink your flesh and gain your memories? And
Speaker 1: how was it happening? What was the chemical basis here?
Speaker 1: So one interesting line of reasoning here followed from the
Speaker 1: still somewhat recent discoveries about genetic information being stored in
Speaker 1: and mediated by nucleic acids DNA and RNA remember, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not too far from from the discovery of the
Speaker 1: double helix here. So, if DNA and RNA could be
Speaker 1: involved in an information management process passing genetic information across
Speaker 1: generations from parents to offspring, could the same molecules also
Speaker 1: in code and mediate other types of information? I mean
Speaker 1: information is in the DNA. So specifically, could the information
Speaker 1: content of memories somehow be coded into DNA or RNA
Speaker 1: and then dispersed through the body, but also transferred from
Speaker 1: one body to another. And so this is the line
Speaker 1: they took. A McConnell and his team conducted experiments and
Speaker 1: published results that seemed to back up the idea, at
Speaker 1: least for a while, that RNA played some important role
Speaker 1: in facilitating memory, and that RNA could be used to
Speaker 1: chemically inoculate naive worms with the memory associations of their
Speaker 1: more worldly predecessors. And again, just consider how revolutionary this
Speaker 1: would be If it turned out to be true. You'd
Speaker 1: be forced to wonder how far the principle could be taken.
Speaker 1: What did this only apply to planarians or did it
Speaker 1: extend to other more complex animals. Would there be ways
Speaker 1: in which humans could undergo chemical learning? Could you train
Speaker 1: the mind in some way with an injection alone or
Speaker 1: even a pill. Even if it only worked for like
Speaker 1: broad associative learning such as you know, the kind of
Speaker 1: things you get through classical conditioning with an electric shock
Speaker 1: and a single stimulus, you could still possibly imagine profound benefits.
Speaker 1: Just one idea comes to mind, like say you're struggling
Speaker 1: with a drug addiction. You could you seek out an
Speaker 1: injection of of memory molecules to establish a strong averse
Speaker 1: reaction to your drug of choice such that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to take it anymore. Yeah, Or to get into
Speaker 1: some of the behavioral his ideas that we discussed in
Speaker 1: the first episode, some of those ideas that that that
Speaker 1: McConnell's very outspoken about it, even later in life. You
Speaker 1: could have some sort of a cocktail that could be
Speaker 1: injected into an individual that had a history of violence
Speaker 1: and history of of you know, breaking the law and
Speaker 1: rebelling against authority figures, and you could potentially fix them
Speaker 1: with this injection. Yeah. And of course there you get
Speaker 1: into the more nefarious possible thing, like you can probably
Speaker 1: instantaneously imagine so many horrible, insidious uses for injectable conditioning.
Speaker 1: If such a thing were possible. Oh yes, I mean,
Speaker 1: as with any science, many many fabulous uses come to mind,
Speaker 1: but so many nightmares as well. But we should stop
Speaker 1: and be real for a second here. Even if these
Speaker 1: findings had turned out to be totally solid for plenaria
Speaker 1: and more on that in a moment, we should know
Speaker 1: better than to freely extrapolate from worms to humans. I
Speaker 1: think this is one of the most classic traps that
Speaker 1: people fall into and interpreting biological research. I'd say more
Speaker 1: often as people extrapolating from like rats to humans. But
Speaker 1: this isn't a much larger jump. This isn't even a
Speaker 1: vertebrate animal. Yeah, I mean, you can't help. I often
Speaker 1: find that I can't help, but but at least think
Speaker 1: about that on some level when I read a science headline,
Speaker 1: I can't help it. Put myself into into it somehow
Speaker 1: and imagine myself as the creature, right, And it's often
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just done right there in the press. Again,
Speaker 1: it's fine to wonder about what possibilities could be implied
Speaker 1: by studies in rats for humans, but you can't just
Speaker 1: you know, conclude from one to another. We can't help
Speaker 1: but anthropomorphize virtually any creature, and if that creatures in
Speaker 1: a study, we're also going to end up anthropomorphizing that
Speaker 1: as well. But James McConnell, true to form, as we
Speaker 1: know from the last episode, was not one to be
Speaker 1: shy or cautious about interpreting his findings. He loudly proclaimed
Speaker 1: them to the public, advertising his results on TV programs.
Speaker 1: He apparently embraced the nickname mccannibal. Uh. And he predicted
Speaker 1: an era of memory pills like we just discussed. So
Speaker 1: you might be thinking, like, wait a minute, he should
Speaker 1: know better than to extrapolate from planarian even if you
Speaker 1: assumed the planarian research to be on solid uh. And
Speaker 1: we'll introduce some caveats to that. But even if you
Speaker 1: did assume that, how could you jump from that to
Speaker 1: human memory pills? That seems like a you know, a
Speaker 1: leap of miles of assumptions. Yeah, very much. And it
Speaker 1: does seem from from what I was reading, especially in
Speaker 1: Rilling's paper about McConnell, that it seemed like to him
Speaker 1: he sort of had a sense of humor about talking
Speaker 1: about memory pills, like as if he were sort of
Speaker 1: joking when he talked about memory pills. But that was
Speaker 1: not clear to the popular audience that was listening on
Speaker 1: the TV. You know, they weren't psychologists. They didn't understand
Speaker 1: that he was kind of kidding when he said that
Speaker 1: makes sense, so certainly. And then also they're going to
Speaker 1: be like a few different levels, so I could see
Speaker 1: like he may joke about it here in this paper
Speaker 1: or joke about it to this individual, but then you're
Speaker 1: gonna have different levels of coverage and it's going to
Speaker 1: get out of out of control pretty quickly. Yes, so
Speaker 1: really writes that quote. McConnell's work on retention following regeneration
Speaker 1: and Planaria provides a case study in sensational journalism and
Speaker 1: illustrates how his media work escaped the normal mechanisms of
Speaker 1: peer review. So the idea is that McConnell and colleagues
Speaker 1: would do an experiment, they would obtain a very strange
Speaker 1: and interesting result that looked solid enough to get published
Speaker 1: in an academic journal, and then McConnell would immediately want
Speaker 1: to engage in quote, wild sounding conjectures interpreting the meaning
Speaker 1: of his results and how they would be applied in
Speaker 1: the future. And scientific journals generally are like One example
Speaker 1: was the editor Harry harlow Uh generally refused to publish
Speaker 1: these wild interpretive or speculative addendums to the research. They
Speaker 1: just say, well, we'll publish your study, but you've got
Speaker 1: to cut out this section about memory pills that doesn't
Speaker 1: belong in here. But of course there's no peer review
Speaker 1: in the popular media. So he could go on TV
Speaker 1: and say memory pills as much as he wanted, and
Speaker 1: it turned out that that kind of thing on TV
Speaker 1: gets you booked on TV again because it's exciting, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, that's like something that people can picture, it's
Speaker 1: not hard to understand, and it's it's very like what revolutionary.
Speaker 1: That's what you want in a science segment on your
Speaker 1: your news programs. You want something relatable, and here's this
Speaker 1: guy that is making it relatable and exciting with promises
Speaker 1: that are not at all implied by the research being discussed.
Speaker 1: Even if the research itself is a solid and retrospectively
Speaker 1: that maybe in doubt. So just one example, in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine, an article in Newsweek covering McConnell and the
Speaker 1: PRG research claimed it may be that in schools of
Speaker 1: future students will facilitate the ability to retain information with
Speaker 1: chemical injections. Apparently, there was also a lot of misunderstanding
Speaker 1: in the media, misunderstanding the fact that multiple generations of
Speaker 1: regenerated planaria could retain training, and they misunderstood this is
Speaker 1: the fact that memories can be inherited in apparent to
Speaker 1: child sense, which led to all kinds of Lamarckian interpretation.
Speaker 1: So I think there there's all. There was also just
Speaker 1: confusion stemming from the use of the word inherited and generations.
Speaker 1: He was talking about like generations being chopped up and regenerating,
Speaker 1: which is quite different than what we understand, right, and
Speaker 1: again he's coming down he's talking about memories here. There
Speaker 1: are other things that you know, there's certainly things that
Speaker 1: affect that have generational effects in biology and in human biology.
Speaker 1: I think we've talked about studies before and about body
Speaker 1: size following periods of starvation, that sort of thing. But
Speaker 1: but again we're talking about memories here. He is explicitly
Speaker 1: talking about memory. Yes, And and the one that that
Speaker 1: was quoted in Rilling was regarding cannibalistic memory transfer, the
Speaker 1: one where you eat the worm gravy and you gain
Speaker 1: that worm's memories. Supposedly, there was a nineteen sixty four
Speaker 1: article in the Saturday Evening Post that claimed we quote
Speaker 1: might someday enable us or it might someday enable us
Speaker 1: to learn the piano by taking a pill, or to
Speaker 1: take calculus by injection, which at that point is is
Speaker 1: very crude, gross, kind of like over interpretation of what
Speaker 1: the memories here are and the you know, the leap
Speaker 1: from one organism to another, you just like do a
Speaker 1: line of ground up Beethoven. Yeah, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: this is so outrageous that, like I I feel like
Speaker 1: I would I would feel like I was over stretching
Speaker 1: to use this as an outrageous example of a possibility,
Speaker 1: you know, like earlier I I did the the far
Speaker 1: future example of criminals being treated like this seems even
Speaker 1: this is even seems crazier, but on the same hand
Speaker 1: also attractive the idea of being able to, uh, say,
Speaker 1: master calculus by simply in acting something into your body. Yeah,
Speaker 1: though I hope also our questions about potential applications if
Speaker 1: this were true were heavily caveat, so in the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties there were even studies following up on this,
Speaker 1: cannibalism research claiming to bear out chemical memory transferring other species,
Speaker 1: such as in rats. Again, that's kind of hard to believe.
Speaker 1: And so like. For a few years there in the sixties,
Speaker 1: things looked incredibly promising with this research. But fortunately or unfortunately,
Speaker 1: depending on how you look at it, it was not
Speaker 1: to last. There was a problem with the p RGS
Speaker 1: cannibalistic memory transfer research, and it was just that it
Speaker 1: didn't hold up to sustained scrutiny over time. Over time
Speaker 1: properly blinded and controlled efforts to replicate McConnell's results, a
Speaker 1: few of them came in saying yeah, we replicated, but
Speaker 1: a lot did not produce the same effects for cannibalism
Speaker 1: or other chemical methods of memory transfer. According to Rilling
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, I guess this would be as
Speaker 1: a result of some of these failures, the Planary in
Speaker 1: Research group lost its grand support and this led McConnell
Speaker 1: to change focus. And after this in the seventies he
Speaker 1: went on to write a very influential and from what
Speaker 1: I can tell, mostly well regarded textbook for introductory psychology. Apparently,
Speaker 1: one thing that set it apart in the field was
Speaker 1: that it used a lot of fiction. It introduced students
Speaker 1: to psychological research methods with the use of stories and
Speaker 1: like fictional framing narratives to explain the principles that were
Speaker 1: discussed in each chapter, even including one chapter about memory,
Speaker 1: it seems to begin with a fictionalized version of the
Speaker 1: story of his research with Thompson in nineteen fifty four
Speaker 1: five or so, uh, though incorporating lessons about control groups
Speaker 1: that he had not learned very well back then, and
Speaker 1: as we discussed more in the previous episode. Later in
Speaker 1: his career, I think he was known more maybe for
Speaker 1: being a fierce public advocate of the powers of behavior
Speaker 1: modification through conditioning. Again, this was an era in which
Speaker 1: behaviorist psychology was seen by many as a potentially revolutionary
Speaker 1: scientific tool for minute control of human minds and lives.
Speaker 1: This is the birth of the modern concept of brainwashing, right,
Speaker 1: and McConnell wrote and appeared on TV arguing the behavioral
Speaker 1: conditioning would fundamentally alter the nature of criminal justice in
Speaker 1: democratic society itself. I think there was one article he
Speaker 1: wrote that was titled something like we must brainwash criminals. Now, well,
Speaker 1: that's a great headline though, no doubt about it. Yeah, certainly,
Speaker 1: if you want to get the clicks. Uh, yeah, he
Speaker 1: was maybe he maybe he was clickbait before the internet.
Speaker 1: He does, he does seem very clickbaity. And this is
Speaker 1: something some of his colleagues said about them. Is quoted
Speaker 1: in the Rilling paper that he wanted to shock people.
Speaker 1: He wanted to say things that would make people say, what,
Speaker 1: what's this guy talking about? That can't be true? And
Speaker 1: he said, you know, the idea was you you bring
Speaker 1: people in by shocking them, and then you educate them
Speaker 1: with the science. And you know, I guess that can
Speaker 1: be an okay method if what you if what you
Speaker 1: say in order to shock people isn't fund mentally dishonest
Speaker 1: in some way, right, Yeah, I mean it's it's kind
Speaker 1: of it kind of gets into a similar of like
Speaker 1: leading with an example, you know, and sometimes it's an
Speaker 1: outrageous example. Sometimes, like on this show, we we bring
Speaker 1: up a monster, something fantastic, and we use that to
Speaker 1: talk about something that is that is real and talk
Speaker 1: about actual scientific studies or actual biology that someone matches
Speaker 1: up to that. But well, I hope we never do.
Speaker 1: I hope if we start with god Zilla, we don't
Speaker 1: leave you with the impression at the end of the episode,
Speaker 1: that Godzilla is real and true. Right, Yeah, But it
Speaker 1: is interesting how it seems like some of the things
Speaker 1: that did make him such a great communicator and ultimately
Speaker 1: like a great author of an introductory psychology book. Uh,
Speaker 1: those are also some of the things that got him
Speaker 1: in trouble. Yeah, that totally seems to be true based
Speaker 1: on everything I've read. But but coming back to the
Speaker 1: memory transfer issue, I just want to say that I
Speaker 1: think the conclusion, unfortunately at the end, is that the
Speaker 1: cannibalistic memory transfer saga is widely regarded now as a
Speaker 1: dead end. Despite a few reports of moderate replication successes,
Speaker 1: McConnell's results ultimately did not hold up to widespread scrutiny
Speaker 1: and the rigorous application of controls by others. And it
Speaker 1: looks like his supposed discoveries about memory transfer through injection
Speaker 1: or cannibalism were probably wrong, but not all of his
Speaker 1: conclusions were necessarily wrong. I mean again, one of the
Speaker 1: points of Rilling's article seems to be that despite the
Speaker 1: ultimate failure of the memory transfer through cannibalism theory, McConnell
Speaker 1: did make truly important contributions to research on invertebrate learning
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties, and while the memory transfer, the
Speaker 1: memory molecule transfer through cannibalism is almost definitely a dead end,
Speaker 1: more recent studies have sort of raised the question of
Speaker 1: whether his like decapitation and transplantation research might have been
Speaker 1: on the right track. All Right, we're gonna take one
Speaker 1: more break. When we come back, we're going to discuss
Speaker 1: some of these modern follow ups regarding planarian decapitation and
Speaker 1: brain transplant. Alright, we're back. So we discussed through through
Speaker 1: the end of the career of of James V. McConnell,
Speaker 1: who studied planarians memory memory transfer, or memories outside of
Speaker 1: the brain, and we we brought up the idea that
Speaker 1: this subject has been revisited by researchers just in the
Speaker 1: past few years who think that while McConnell was probably
Speaker 1: wrong about, like say, eating flat worms and gaining their memories,
Speaker 1: there may be some truth to the idea of memories
Speaker 1: somehow being stored outside the brain or transferred without a
Speaker 1: full brain. Yeah. So, for instance, it has been demonstrated
Speaker 1: that if you transplant the planarian's brain into another worm's body, uh,
Speaker 1: it will result in at least partial recovery or of function,
Speaker 1: even if the brain is put in backwards or transplanted
Speaker 1: across species. Uh. The author Pagan, who we brought up earlier,
Speaker 1: who wrote the first brain uh, he points this out,
Speaker 1: points out that basically the cross species transplants held meaning
Speaker 1: there was no rejection, and forty eight hours later the
Speaker 1: worm retained mostly normal behavior. I mean, that's pretty weird,
Speaker 1: but again it's worms. Like Yeah. One of the big
Speaker 1: take comes from all of this is that planarian brains
Speaker 1: and polinarian in general are strange. Right, So a lot
Speaker 1: of what we determine what a lot of what we
Speaker 1: learned from this research you could interpret as some fascinating
Speaker 1: deeper insight about biology as a whole, or you could
Speaker 1: interpret it as fascinating specific facts about these flatworms. Absolutely
Speaker 1: h So in particular, though, the gun and there are
Speaker 1: referring to a study by Davies at all, and they
Speaker 1: were working with a species of planarian that actually can't
Speaker 1: regenerate brain tissue, but a transplanted brain will take root
Speaker 1: and quote nerves exiting the brain tended to join with
Speaker 1: the peripheral nerves closest to them, which I think is
Speaker 1: a hederful image of the brain being implanted in this
Speaker 1: creature and then like the like the like roots forming,
Speaker 1: like the vein connects itself, it hooks itself up like
Speaker 1: a car battery that has been placed in the inside
Speaker 1: another via a new vehicle, and all the things just
Speaker 1: kind of hook up automatically, plug and play. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: or like like mistletoe or some other kind of parasite
Speaker 1: that like sticks, it's little, it's how stori um or whatever,
Speaker 1: the little spikes down into the host. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's weird. It's definitely not the human experience. I mean
Speaker 1: not to not to discuss, you know, the whole body
Speaker 1: transplant or human brain and head transplant much in this episode,
Speaker 1: but basically it's very complicated, if not impossible in humans. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and again to look at memory more broadly, neuroscientists today
Speaker 1: mostly broadly understand memories to be neural networks, right. Networks
Speaker 1: within the brains are strings of reinforced connections between neurons
Speaker 1: and brain regions that specified memories by their cross linked structure.
Speaker 1: A memory is in some way a series of connections
Speaker 1: between neurons and the brain. Uh. Though that does seem
Speaker 1: to be the case. Beyond that broad picture, there's still
Speaker 1: a lot we don't know about the physical basis of memory,
Speaker 1: and so even in especially in organisms like flatworms, there
Speaker 1: are ways in which memory could be operating and that
Speaker 1: are still mysterious to us right now. Of course, the
Speaker 1: quest to solve these mysteries continues. A great deal of
Speaker 1: planarian research is still going on, and you see quite
Speaker 1: a bit of it come out of Tufts University, and
Speaker 1: you'll see UM a researcher by the name of Michael
Speaker 1: Levin often is a is a head author or co
Speaker 1: author or contributing author on these papers. Yeah, and there
Speaker 1: was one big study that got some press being connected
Speaker 1: back to McConnell's research that Levin was at least one
Speaker 1: of the authors on UM and and basically it had
Speaker 1: to do with replicating a version of the decapitation experiment
Speaker 1: showing that somehow it appeared memory if the study was
Speaker 1: designed properly and there wasn't some kind of flaw that
Speaker 1: people didn't notice in there, that memories maybe were somehow
Speaker 1: being transferred through the decapitation process. Right This is a
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen Tough University study that found that a
Speaker 1: decapitated flat worm that grows a new head keeps its
Speaker 1: old memories. Uh. For instance, the serahs sing article about this,
Speaker 1: it appeared in Nautilus, carried the title decapitation but not cannibalism.
Speaker 1: Might transmit memories without context. That's a pretty weird title, right,
Speaker 1: But then within context of the article refers back to
Speaker 1: McConnell's work quite a bit. And the idea here is
Speaker 1: that some trace of the of memory might be stored
Speaker 1: in neural circuits outside the brain. And certainly when you
Speaker 1: take that and you compare it to these you know,
Speaker 1: these other into this previous study. Uh, with with one
Speaker 1: brain being dropped into a new creature, a new a
Speaker 1: new individual and seeing it to you know, take root
Speaker 1: and uh and seemingly bounced back. Uh, that becomes all
Speaker 1: the more interesting. Yeah. One of the things that has
Speaker 1: clearly been the case, and this was discussed in that
Speaker 1: article in the Verge we talked about in the last episode,
Speaker 1: is that Levin's research has been focused on trying to
Speaker 1: eliminate some of the problems that could have existed in
Speaker 1: the original McConnell research. One example is that that he
Speaker 1: helped to create um and a thing called an automatic
Speaker 1: training apparatus. Basically, it's a robot for conditioning the flatworms
Speaker 1: to take the human element element out of the training process,
Speaker 1: to eliminate any kind of bias or error that could
Speaker 1: be introduced that way. But I love the idea in
Speaker 1: general of a robot for training worms. So that that
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen study especially generated quite a bit of interest,
Speaker 1: and at the time there was there was mixed response
Speaker 1: from the scientific community. Now, I do want to drive
Speaker 1: home that it is not my interpretation that Michael Levan
Speaker 1: is anything like a McConnell figure. He seems he seems
Speaker 1: to be a very suspected researcher, and most of his work,
Speaker 1: like I said, he's seeing on a lot of studies
Speaker 1: for this general planaria research right now, I mean I
Speaker 1: don't I haven't seen anything where Michael Levin is going
Speaker 1: on TV and saying memory pills right right, uh and
Speaker 1: and and by and large it seems like most of
Speaker 1: his work just deals with with regeneration, uh in these
Speaker 1: planaria worms. But yeah, so you had plenty of people
Speaker 1: that that were supportive and thought that, you know, they
Speaker 1: might be onto something. Others were a little critical at
Speaker 1: the time. Robert Kintridge, as a it was a psychologist
Speaker 1: at Durham University, and he pointed out in a two
Speaker 1: fifteen Verge article that Verge article we cited earlier that
Speaker 1: it might be simply related to quote behavior induced by
Speaker 1: a stress hormone itself triggered by the the textualized petrie
Speaker 1: dishes unquote. And to clarify, they're part of what the
Speaker 1: study looked at to see conditioning in the flatworms was
Speaker 1: you'd have these textured petrie dishes where they would be
Speaker 1: swimming around the food they were gonna eat, and how
Speaker 1: fast they approached the food in a newly textured petrie
Speaker 1: dish environment was taken as a signal of their memory
Speaker 1: or familiarity with the environment. Like you put a new
Speaker 1: flatworm and a textured petrie dish its circles for a
Speaker 1: while before going for the food because it's exploring its environment.
Speaker 1: It doesn't know. But after it's been trained with the
Speaker 1: texture and a petrie dish, it goes straight for the
Speaker 1: food because it already knows the environment. Right. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: so basically a number of individuals said, well, there there
Speaker 1: are aspects of the study that could have been better designed. Sure.
Speaker 1: Now again, Michael Levin his research continues, he and you
Speaker 1: you'll find a number of studies from very recently that
Speaker 1: he's been involved with. He was an author on a
Speaker 1: study earlier this year neural control of body plan access
Speaker 1: in regenerating planaria. And in two thousand fifteen he put
Speaker 1: out a paper on the planarian regeneration model is deciphered
Speaker 1: by artificial intelligence and uh that same year he was
Speaker 1: also a co author on another study, uh that included
Speaker 1: the growth of extra heads. Yeah. I've seen also that
Speaker 1: I think, both within and outside of planaria has just
Speaker 1: generally studied regeneration. Yeah. And with the pouplinaria, of course,
Speaker 1: it's it's just such an amazingly regenerative creature. You get
Speaker 1: things like like this. Uh. The second study that I
Speaker 1: mentioned from they were able to induce one species of
Speaker 1: flat worm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another
Speaker 1: species of flat worm without altering genomic sequence, and then
Speaker 1: the individual later regenerated to the appropriate head shape. Huh.
Speaker 1: Now quickly, I guess one thing worth discussing is if
Speaker 1: the research associated with with Michael Levin is in fact correct,
Speaker 1: the results are valid, there's not some kind of flaw
Speaker 1: we're missing in the design of the study. And uh,
Speaker 1: and this is really going on the memories are surviving
Speaker 1: the regeneration without an original brain. How would you interpret this, Like,
Speaker 1: what does it mean if this is in fact true?
Speaker 1: Uh So, a couple of ideas are given in the
Speaker 1: Verge article. Leven Hy Quote hypothesizes that memories could spread
Speaker 1: beyond the brain thanks to electrical charges generated by cells
Speaker 1: and the rest of the body. So there's some kind
Speaker 1: of information encoding that's just like coming from cells in
Speaker 1: the other body that are electrically stimulating something like a
Speaker 1: memory response. But then there's another thing cited in the
Speaker 1: same piece by Ava Jablanca, a developmental biologist at Tel
Speaker 1: Aviv University, and she offers a speculative explanation involving particles
Speaker 1: called quote small r n a s, which are short
Speaker 1: copies of DNA, but they don't turn into proteins. They
Speaker 1: don't generate proteins. So when a flatworm learns an association
Speaker 1: or an episode, something in this model about the brain
Speaker 1: chemistry would change, and then these changes alter the small
Speaker 1: RNA's present in the body, which of course are not
Speaker 1: confined to the brain because they migrate around between cells.
Speaker 1: And by migrating around between cells, she says, perhaps they
Speaker 1: end up in stem cells that remain in the body
Speaker 1: after the worm's head is cut off, and to read
Speaker 1: from the article quote, when the worm's head grows back,
Speaker 1: the small rnais migrate back to the head, changing the
Speaker 1: brain's chemistry and allowing it to learn certain behaviors more quickly. Um.
Speaker 1: If true, the memory that Levin thinks is stored outside
Speaker 1: the brain wouldn't be memory at all. Rather, the small
Speaker 1: RNAs would allow the flatworm to recover a brain environment
Speaker 1: that helps them learn a specific behavior more quickly. So
Speaker 1: the idea there is that if this speculative idea is correct,
Speaker 1: and again she she's very clear to stay this, this
Speaker 1: isn't something we know. Is just a speculative interpretation. Maybe
Speaker 1: it works this way. Then what would be happening is
Speaker 1: these little chemical molecules don't transmit the memory prepare the
Speaker 1: new brain to learn a memory that was previously learned
Speaker 1: more quickly. Okay, so at least we have a hypothetical
Speaker 1: model of how this would actually work, which or at
Speaker 1: least here's one model presented anyway, Sure, but ultimately we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure. And again, another thing that we
Speaker 1: don't know for sure is if these results do hold up.
Speaker 1: Is this something that's specific to planaria. Is it flatworms
Speaker 1: only that can transfer memories in this way, or could
Speaker 1: this be more applicable beyond flatworms to other organisms, because
Speaker 1: that's the thing. Other organisms can't regenerate like a like
Speaker 1: a planaria can. But at the same time, we one
Speaker 1: of the one of the things that's often cited for
Speaker 1: research and clanaria regeneration is that we might learn something
Speaker 1: that could be appliable to humans, of course, especially and
Speaker 1: we're not even getting into memory implantation, just the idea
Speaker 1: that they have such impressive neural regenerative powers, the ability
Speaker 1: to regenerate like damaged brain cells. You know, if we can,
Speaker 1: if we could develop some better method of doing that
Speaker 1: based on our studies of these organisms, then that would
Speaker 1: be tremendous. Of course. I mean though it when you
Speaker 1: introduce the idea of brain regeneration or anything like that
Speaker 1: to a human context, things emerge that don't necessarily seem
Speaker 1: to be of concern when you're talking about planaria. Planaria
Speaker 1: don't seem to have extremely distinct personalities, uh, you know humans,
Speaker 1: do you know, however much we want to joke about
Speaker 1: humans acting like sheep and all being the same we
Speaker 1: you know, we we've got a lot of different stuff
Speaker 1: going on in our heads. If you cut your head
Speaker 1: off and regrw it, what indication would you have that
Speaker 1: the new head would be you in any sense other
Speaker 1: than sharing your d n A. Well, I guess as
Speaker 1: long as it's said all the right things and I
Speaker 1: mean just go along just fine, it would be like
Speaker 1: a psmbie perhaps, Well, I mean, would it? I guess
Speaker 1: it would be a question of whether it would retain
Speaker 1: any memories from your life. You could you talk about
Speaker 1: whether that might be stored in the body somehow, or
Speaker 1: even if you assume it, okay, it retains no memories
Speaker 1: whatsoever because those are just stored in the brain. Whatever
Speaker 1: may or may not be happening in flatworms doesn't happen
Speaker 1: in all at all in humans. Even if you assume
Speaker 1: all that, you'd also have to ask, like, what it's
Speaker 1: per senality be the same as your as personality is
Speaker 1: so shaped by life experience. I don't know. It makes
Speaker 1: me wonder has anyone ever considered creating as like a
Speaker 1: science fiction yarn in which you look at what would
Speaker 1: human society be like if we had regenerative properties like this, like,
Speaker 1: what would war be like? What would uh what would
Speaker 1: reproduction and society be like? I mean, granted, I think
Speaker 1: the obvious answer, it would absolutely change everything. But the
Speaker 1: fun thing about science fiction is you don't you don't
Speaker 1: have to go all the way. You can just sort
Speaker 1: of like tweak it, Like, what would this if we
Speaker 1: if I were to look at this particular vision for
Speaker 1: a totally regenerative clinary in human species, then what could
Speaker 1: I perhaps unravel about our actual human condition? Well? I
Speaker 1: mean I think we pretty much all at some state,
Speaker 1: at some point or other, get into a get into
Speaker 1: a place where not very happy with our own brain.
Speaker 1: We don't like the emotional patterns were feeling. Maybe we're
Speaker 1: ruminating in bad ways. I mean, this happens pretty often
Speaker 1: to people. So what if you had the option to
Speaker 1: you get into a bad state like that, you know,
Speaker 1: you can just cut your head off and grow a
Speaker 1: new one. These are exactly what the horrifying orange creatures
Speaker 1: in Labyrinth they're all about when they come up to
Speaker 1: Sarah and they encourage your Hey, take your own head off,
Speaker 1: throw it around, try on a different head, Let your
Speaker 1: head try it out, try itself out on a different body.
Speaker 1: See how it shakes out. Just you know, have to
Speaker 1: have a little fun. You're not a flat worm. Don't
Speaker 1: try it people, All right, We're gonna go ahead and
Speaker 1: close this out then, but we hope that you have
Speaker 1: enjoyed and then learned from this exploration. Perhaps you'll think
Speaker 1: of flat worms in a new light now, and perhaps
Speaker 1: you will even second guest memory a little bit as well.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you want to check out other
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