The Mystery of the Vanished Citations
James McConnell’s Forgotten 1960s Quest for Planarian Learning,
a Biochemical Engram, & Celebrity
by Mark Rilling
The Missing 1960s Decade
Memory transfer: McConnell’s Blind Alley
McConnell’s Struggle With Critics Over Invertebrate Learning
Controlling for Experimenter Bias
Controlling for Pseudoconditioning & Sensitization
McConnell’s Origin Myth for Planarian Learning
Escaping peer review as a celebrity-scientist
The Worm Runner’s Digest: Peer Review Versus the 1960s Counterculture
Attracting the Unabomber. While overselling behavior modification
The Assassination Attempt
Overpopularizing Behavior Modification
Conclusion: Some Historical Lessons for Today from the 1960s
References
McConnell’s next big break in scientific journalism was provided by Arthur Koestler (1965), the British novelist, social critic, and scientific journalist. Koestler and McConnell became friends when Koestler visited Ann Arbor on a personal quest for an experience of LSD.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, and known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug.
Koestler had a bad trip with LSD, but he was impressed with McConnell. Koestler was one of the 20th century’s great writers, and he wrote a superb article for the London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million.
Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper published on Sundays.
that was reprinted in the United States in The Washington Post.
The Washington Post, also known as the Post and, informally, WaPo, is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C.
For scientists, the news was that invertebrates could learn, but inherited memory, not learning, was the element of the story that was emphasized by Koestler and the media. The figure for the story had the following caption:
How a Worm’s Tail Inherits Memory: University of Michigan Researchers Use Flatworms to Demonstrate How Learning May Be Inherited.
In The Washington Post, the headline for the study was
Michigan Crawlers Are Crossing Up Mendel & Some Genetic Heresies Are Suggested by Experiments in Ann Arbor.
The media wrapped planarian learning with a bizarre cachet about inherited memory. The public was not let in on the inside story—that language McConnell borrowed from genetics about successive generations was metaphorical, so a casual reader could easily have been misled into believing a story about a Lamarckian
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist, biologist, academic, and soldier. Saturday Evening Post,
The Saturday Evening Post is an American magazine, currently published six times a year. the magazine of middle America, carried a feature story on McConnell (Bird, 1964). By 1964, McConnell had moved from regeneration to cannibalism, so now the public relations effort switched to the new work on memory transfer. The magazine told readers (Bird, 1964) that
uneducated worms can acquire the wisdom of more intellectual ones by eating them. This suggests a theory of knowledge which, avoiding outright cannibalism, might someday enable us to learn the piano by taking a pill, or to take calculus by injection.
McConnell was one of the first psychologists to recognize the potential of radio and television for public education. Prior to receiving his PhD, McConnell worked in radio and television as a disc jockey and script writer. During the 1960s, Steve Allen
Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen as an American television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer and actor.
was one of the pioneers of the television talk show. His shows were seen by millions. The script for McConnell’s appearance on the Steve Allen Show Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen as an American television and radio personality, comedian, musician, composer, writer and actor.
Moskowitz, (1964) was simply a televised version of the McConnell story in the Saturday Evening Post.
McConnell carried his apparatus to Los Angeles
Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., officially the City of Los Angeles, is the most populous city in the U.S. state of California. for the taping, so millions of viewers heard a lecture from McConnell about Pavlovian conditioning in invertebrates. However, the price for communicating the basic science was packaging the top and bottom of the show with wild science-fiction speculation about memory pills, predictions about the future of man, and showbiz hype.
McConnell was extremely skillful in calibrating his rhetoric to his diverse audience, even to the extent that his scientific writing and private letters to individuals sometimes contradicted the impression left by his media work. McConnell generalized freely from planaria to humans when his audience was the readers of Time, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post. When writing for a scientific audience, he cautioned that
one obviously should not generalize these results to the human level too readily
Although McConnell’s media work made it appear that memory pills were just around the corner, individuals who wrote to McConnell requesting information on where to obtain memory pills received a very conservative, cautious form letter (McConnell, January 14, 1966), which stated that
the memory molecule [RNA] is merely an assumption on our part …. At the moment, there is no such thing as a memory pill,
McConnell’s strategy of publicity at any price was a double-edged sword. The publicity probably attracted some scientists to planarian learning, but McConnell’s flair for speculation put him on the fringe of scientific respectability.
Why Mathematics Is a Language
by Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D.
[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.
Key Takeaways: Why Math is a Language
- In order to be considered a language, a system of communication must have vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and people who use and understand it.
- Mathematics meets this definition of a language. Linguists who don’t consider math a language cite its use as a written rather than spoken form of communication.
- Math is a universal language. The symbols and organization to form equations are the same in every country of the world.
What Is a Language?
Whichever definition is used, a language contains the following components:
There must be a vocabulary of words or symbols.
Meaning must be attached to the words or symbols.
A language employs grammar, which is a set of rules that outline how vocabulary is used.
A syntax organizes symbols into linear structures or propositions.
A narrative or discourse consists of strings of syntactic propositions.
There must be (or have been) a group of people who use and understand the symbols.
Mathematics meets all of these requirements. The symbols, their meanings, syntax, and grammar are the same throughout the world. Mathematicians, scientists, and others use math to communicate concepts. Mathematics describes itself (a field called meta-mathematics), real-world phenomena, and abstract concepts.
Vocabulary, Grammar, and Syntax in Mathematics
could be stated as Three added to five equals eight.
Breaking this down, nouns in math include:
Fractions (1⁄4, 5⁄9, 2 1⁄3)
Variables (a, b, c, x, y, z)
Expressions (3x, x2<, 4 + x)
Diagrams or visual elements (circle, angle, triangle, tensor, matrix)
Infinity (∞)
Pi (π)
Imaginary numbers (i, -i)
The speed of light (c)
Verbs include symbols including:
Actions such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division (+, -, x or *, ÷ or /)
Other operations (sin, cos, tan, sec)
If you try to perform a sentence diagram on a mathematical sentence, you’ll find infinitives, conjunctions, adjectives, etc. As in other languages, the role played by a symbol depends on its context.
