James McConnell’s forgotten 1960s quest for planarian learning, a biochemical engram, and celebrity
| Some Animals Can Consume Knowledge Through Cannibalism
In a nutshell The above statement got everyone looking for proof, because even a rotter of a movie can’t throw around scientific statements without there being some truth to them. It turns out that this fact is a fact, true, and very difficult to believe. Experiments from the 1960s show that it even works in rats and mice. The whole bushel The scientist who came up with this experiment is Dr. James V. McConnell, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, who had a hunch that planarians could be trained to run mazes. He proceeded to do so. He first trained them to be afraid of the heat of a bright light, which, after many attempts, made them curl up to protect themselves. Soon they were curling up whenever they felt the heat or saw the light. Then he chopped them up and fed them to planarians unaccustomed to the bright light and heat. This second group curled up the first time he shone the light on them. McConnell was naturally thrilled and took the experiment to the next level. He taught a group of planarians to run a maze. This took a long time of course, since planarians are very simple animals, and the species in question was microscopic. After 150 attempts, the flatworms could find their way correctly every time. McConnell pronounced them knowledgeable of how to run the maze. Then he first tried cutting the head off one worm and grafting it onto another. This didn’t work because the head wouldn’t stay on. Then he ground up this batch of worms and tried injecting them into a second group. This failed because the worms were about the same size as the point of the needle, which crushed them. He might have been stumped at ths point, had it not been for a worm enthusiast named Jay Boyd Best, who wrote him a letter suggesting that feed the worms to a particular species of cannibalistic planarian. So McConnell acquired some specimens of this species of flatworm and fed the trained group to this new group. The new group was able to run the maze correctly the first time, but not correctly every time until they practiced 100 times. He trained a separate control group to run the maze, and this group required about 150, just like the group he ground up. McConnell became famous for a time, even though the very premise of his research seemed too much like a Frankenstein story to grab the scientific community. He did, however, receive a fast promotion to full professor and made it onto some science shows like Watch Mr. Wizard. Scientists who found his work interesting then took the next step, performing the same experiment with mice and rats, and they found that it still worked. Such experiments continue to this day and continue to raise eyebrows. Now I don’t know this for sure but I think it might be more than a little time before these smart pills would ever be on the market. I have to admit that there are more than a few folks I think would benefit from something along these lines! Heck, we could start with passing them out in D.C. and go from there, ya know? Couldn’t hurt! Coffee out on the patio this morning. I’ll share some sausage gravy and fried taters! Текст публикуется по KnowledgeNuts Larry Stern. Psychological hijinks Science, we all know, is serious stuff. If it is to retain its cultural and cognitive authority, it must be seen as an objective, dispassionate and value-free enterprise. But science, at its core, is a human enterprise populated by all types of people. And science and scientists can be awfully funny — without jeopardizing the objectivity of what comes to count as certified knowledge. Comedians and cartoonists have been poking fun at science — and especially at psychologists — for decades. But one need not look outside the halls of academia to find such humor. Indeed, for my money, nothing beats the humor contained in the Worm Runner’s Digest, published between 1959 and 1979. If your library subscribed, you might find it and its twin, the Journal of Biological Psychology, nestled between the serious Journal of Applied Psychology and Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology. The brainchild of James V. McConnell, then an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, the Worm Runner’s Digest burst on the scene as a new 1960s counterculture was beginning to take form. Devoted in part to puncturing the pretentiousness and pomposity of that sacred cow known as science, it was, as McConnell noted, one of the first scientific journals that knowingly published satire. What, then, prompted the creation of this peculiar journal? It began with a paper McConnell presented on the morning of Sept. 8, 1959, at APA’s 67th Annual Convention. In this paper, Apparent Retention of a Conditioned Response Following Total Regeneration in the Planarian, McConnell reported data collected by one of his honors students, Reeva Jacobson, which indicated that separate pieces of trained worms, after being allowed to regenerate their missing parts, retained the initial training of the original uncut worm. Moreover, after several regenerations, worms that contained none of the structure of the originally trained animal also retained some memory of the initial conditioning. On Sept. 21, Newsweek published a summary of this work, triggering a series of events that no one — certainly not McConnell — ever expected. Two years earlier, the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik sparked fears that the United States lagged behind the Soviets in science and technology. One result, designed to ignite the youth of America’s interest in science, was a renewed emphasis on local science fairs. Shortly after the Newsweek coverage, McConnell was inundated with letters from high school students from around the country asking where they could obtain worms for their projects and how they should go about caring for and training them. Some students, according to McConnell, demanded that he send a few hundred trained worms at once since their projects were due within days. After answering the first few letters McConnell realized that something more efficient was needed. So he and his students wrote what amounted to a training manual describing their work and how to repeat their experiments. McConnell firmly believed that
So as a joke, he affixed the name Worm Runner’s Digest to the top of the manual. Adorning the front page was a crest that one of his students designed, complete with a two-headed worm with pharynx fully exposed, a pair of diagonal stripes in the maize and blue colors of Michigan across the escutcheon of said planarian, a coronet made up of a Hebbian cell assembly, a ¥ for psychology, a homage to the stimulus-response of behaviorism, and a motto, ignotum, ignotius which, loosely translated, means When I get through explaining this to you, you will know even less than before I started. To top things off, McConnell labeled it Volume I, No. 1. To McConnell’s astonishment, word of this new journal got out and he started receiving submissions. So he decided to pep things up a bit by scattering poems, jokes, satires, cartoons, spoofs and short stories more or less randomly among the more serious articles. McConnell wrote some of these spoofs himself, including one on learning theory that should be mandatory reading. In it, a psychology professor is walking in the woods thinking about how to teach his intro students the finer points of learning theory when he suddenly finds himself in a giant Skinner box on an alien spaceship, complete with a nipple on the wall that delivers a slightly cool and somewhat sweetish flow of liquidand, later, a lever that when pulled delivers protein balls of food. The experiments the subject endures are classic, and if the denouement does not bring a smile, well, perhaps you are in a perilous state of mental health. Dozens of reputable psychologists contributed humor to the digest as well. Harry Harlow had two pieces: Fundamental Principles for Preparing Psychology Journal Articles and a poem, Yearning and Learning, a somewhat bawdy look at how monkeys learn to copulate. B.F. Skinner contributed two parodies of behaviorism: A Christmas Caramel, or A Plum from the Hasty Pudding, in which he plays the role of Professor Skinnybox, and On the Relation Between Mathematical and Statistical Competence and Significant Scientific Productivity, which he published under the pseudonym of F. Galton Pennywhistle. Spoofs of Freudian theory also appeared. Some Comments on an Addition to the Theory of Psychosexual Development by Sigmund Fraud introduced the nasal stage, occurring between the anal and phallic stages, in which the libido is localized primarily in the mucous linings of the nose. Though the consequences of poor nasal training might not be as drastic as those accompanying poor toilet training, two pathologies might ensue: feelings of superiority that lead you to turn your nose up at others, and/or being a busybody and constantly sticking your nose in others’ business. Other notable contributions that graced the Digest’s pages include faux reports on The Effects of Physical Torture on the Learning and Retention of Nonsense Syllables, The Gesundheits Test and Operant Conditioning in the Domestic Darning Needle. But bona fide experimental reports were included in the Digest as well, and the publication of serious articles side-by-side with spoofs apparently posed a problem for some scientists who complained that they weren’t able to distinguish between the serious reports and the parodies. To deal with this problem, McConnell banished all of the so-called funny stuff to the back of the journal, printing it upside down to make sure that no one would confuse it with the serious work. This began in October 1964. Three years later, the split became formal when McConnell renamed the front part of the journal containing the serious scientific work the Journal of Biological Psychology, retaining the name Worm Runner’s Digest for the back half of the journal. At its peak, the Digest had roughly 2,500 subscribers scattered throughout the world. Since humorous cartoons appear regularly in best-selling psychology textbooks today, it is easy to forget how extraordinary and subversive the Digest was when it first appeared. Responses to the Digest were mixed, reflecting some of the schisms found in the larger society at the time. While admirers hailed the Digest as a scientific Playboy, reveling in its wit, McConnell’s more austere critics referred to it pejoratively as a scientific comic book, arguing that science is not the place for such sophomoric humor. McConnell, in fact, believed that the Digest cost him research grants. McConnell’s bottom line — that science could and should be fun — is perhaps as important today as it was when he began to champion the cause in 1959. If your library does not hold copies of the Digest, you can find the «greatest hits» in two anthologies — The Worm Re-turns and Science, Sex, and Sacred Cows — in used bookstores, or online. Текст публикуется по APA Kenneth D. Mahrer. Why manuscripts fail, according to 12 experts Since this column began, only my views, opinions, harangues, and suggestions on technical writing have been emphasized. As wonderful as they are, this month IÕve broadened the scope to include the opinions and harangues of a gaggle of experts. Recently, I emailed two questions to the Associate Editors of GEOPHYSICS: (1) What are the most common errors, shortcomings, or pitfalls you find in your reviewing and editing? (2) What are the most difficult or most profound errors, shortcomings, or pitfalls you find in your reviewing and editing? I received 12 replies. I think youÕll find the variations in answers very enlightening. I certainly did. Expert 1. (1) English. Maybe more papers are being written by non-English speakers than in other fields, but I can barely read more than half of the papers I get to review. (2) The most profound shortcomings are lack of enough information to be able to reproduce the results or algorithms. This is often not apparent during the editorial process but only shows up when I try to use what is published. I can list at least four examples in the last two years where I have tried to program an algorithm from a published paper only to find that critical details were missing or contradictory. Somehow, we should have a criteria like could a working algorithm be generated from the information in this paper? Expert 2. (1) Incorrect English and incoherent organization are common problems; this is not necessarily limited to those who are not native English speakers. The language and sometimes the style require additional work — in addition to passing on the merits of the science — by editors and referees; if the scientific content deserves it, I consider that a part of the reviewing process. For worthwhile contributions from scientists whose native language is not English, it is not always easy to find somebody with language proficiency who can help polish the manuscript. I believe it … inexcusable when something deficient comes from a native English speaker at a professional level. (2) No answer. Expert 3. (1) Grammar. (2) Grammar. Expert 4. (1) The world is mostly too complicated to model directly, so we used simplified models based upon a lot of assumptions. Most authors do not explain the assumptions that they’ve made, justify them, discuss the limitations they impose on the model, or discuss the consequences, if theyÕre violated. The latter is especially needed to warn people about lifting a model from the literature that was developed for a particular purpose, and then using it for another purpose. (2) People misusing data and models. The most egregious examples are people who chain together a series of models with different sets of assumptions. They’re usually not consistent in the assumptions between the models and may be contradictory. Expert 5. (1) Poor abstracts, introductions and/or summaries. (2) Boring presentations … they are technically correct … but their presentation is a real burden to the reader. Expert 6. (1) It’s hard to attribute poor writing to any one cause. But I think GEOPHYSICS authors commonly write for themselves and not for the audience. I often find myself urging authors to have an English-fluent nonspecialist read their revisions. Of course, this almost never response to (1). Expert 7. (1) Inappropriate abstracts. It took me a long time to understand what an abstract was supposed to be, and even now I donÕt write them as well as I would like. My experience is that most authors are even worse. (2) Authors not making clear the principal point(s) — why the reader should care about this paperÑin combination with the inclusion of marginally relevant material. This is particularly important when the paper is very mathematical. Expert 8. (1) Too much detailed math or algorithms. I tend to agree with (Frank) LevinÕs commentary. Math is often essential but put only the salient results in the body of the paper and carefully discuss their meaning. How often have you read a long section of technospeak and wondered how it relates to the paper? There is often insufficient bridging and motivating material. I think any subsection of a paper should begin with a short summary of what is to be discussed and why. Another common shortcoming is failure to concisely summarize a paperÕs most important points. (2) Usually, I have the most trouble with disorganized or grammatically confused writing. Such stuff can be so far from acceptable that the best editing seems to be a complete rewrite. Expert 9. (1) Papers are sent in too fast after the first draft is written. Authors should learn to avoid the temptation to send it in immediately. They should put the paper away for at least a week, come back to it later, and see if it still seems well written, logical, etc. I recommend giving the paper to a knowledgeable friend to find the obvious problems and fix them before wasting the reviewersÕ time. (2) Is there enough good, original material in this paper to occupy a place in GEOPHYSICS; i.e., are other geophysicists going to be glad they read the paper or was the paper written to boost the authorÕs number of publications, selfimage, or boss’s image of the author? Could the material in this paper be included with material from another paper to make a more substantial and worthwhile publication? Expert 10. (1) I am most annoyed by authors assuming that everybody is familiar with their earlier work or with the background literature. In my opinion, it can be shown is an inadmissible statement; either show (perhaps in an appendix) or give a reference, page number included (e.g., what good does it do to refer to a tome like Morse and Feshbach, if the poor reader must sift through two thick volumes to find what the author meant to say?) (2) Careless derivations, leaving too much to the readers’ imagination. It is completely inadmissible to use lines like this work is proprietary, and thus I cannot disclose the details. Authors who cannot disclose in full detail should not be allowed to publish. Expert 11. (1) Bad English; papers that are poorly organized or don’t maintain a coherent thought stream. (2) Revised papers that really don’t take into account the reviewer’s comments or state that something is important so they left the paper as is. Also, papers that have a lot to offer but are impossible to read [or edit] because the author is such a poor communicator. Expert 12. (1) Vague or broad reference, especially using the word it. For example: Our method uses only the interval velocity, and it doesn’t … Writing like this means you have to get to the end of the sentence (or sometimes a few sentences later) to realize to what it doesn’t refers — the authors’ method or the interval velocity. I get this very frequently and in a variety of forms. (2) Authors who don’t know what their papers are about, so they do a memory-dump presenting readers with a grab bag of loosely related material. Such papers could easily be titled ÒA potpourri of … methods’ instead of a more descriptive title. Beyond this, I think the error I encounter most often is lack of clarity from lengthy sentences. Adding my experience, Expert 13. (1) Failure to explicitly define the problem to be solved; failure to write with any element of persuasion; failure to understand the needs, interests, and reading expectations of readers; failure to discuss the benefits of the work; assuming a captive audience. (2) Lack of understanding or adherence to the principles and guidelines of sound technical writing from micro- through macroscale; irrecoverably incorrect grammar and syntax; disjointed or disconnected structure; camouflaged organization and flow; and self-inflated value. It is very interesting to note that poor English is the most common complaint, but not the only complaint. Many failings can be traced simply to poor writing, which is not a function of the writerÕs native language. This is very important and very significant to prospective authors whose native language is not English. It is very easy for an author who is not a native English speaker to hide behind the excuse of writing in a foreign language. This does, of course, make writing manuscripts doubly difficult. But, as substantiated by the experts, unfamiliarity with English is not the only reason for failed manuscripts. Many manuscripts, from native English speakers and from nonnative English speakers, are simply poorly written. Текст публикуется по The Leading Edge Based on this work, an article was written in Russian. Инженер и гуманитарииПубликуется по Youtube Jus. Вступайте в ряды Фурье![]() QR код на его груди гласит «И кто из нас после этого гик?» |