by James McConnell
U-M psychology Prof. James V. McConnell will receive the American Psychological Foundation’s annual Award for Distinguished Teaching in Psychology for 1976.
The award including a check for $1,000, will be officially presented at a dinner ceremony Sept. 4 during the Foundation’s annual convention in Washington D.C.
McConnell joined the U-M faculty in 1956, and has been a full professor in psychology and research psychologist with the U-M Mental Health Research Institute since 1963.
The teaching award closely follows McConnell’s recent selection as one of 26 outstanding college and university teachers by Change Magazine.
Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning is an academic magazine devoted to the study of higher education, described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as a stalwart of higher education.
McConnell has attracted national attention for his undergraduate psychology course, Introduction to Behavior Modification, in which U-M students have successfully worked as behavior therapists in area mental hospitals, schools, prisons and other institutions.
He is also known as the founder and editor of the humorous scientific magazine, The Worm Runner’s Digest, whose origins he describes in the current issue of The UNESCO Courier*,
UNESCO Courier is the main magazine published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
an international monthly publication of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Published as a joke in 1959, the Digest immediately drew serious as well as satirical contributions, and today the publication divides the two carrying a second title of The Journal Biological Psychology.
The Worm Runner’s Digest derived its name from McConnell’s landmark planaria research. In the late 1950’s, he found that could be transferred, via the chemical RNA in cells, by feeding pieces of trained flatworms to untrained flatworms. The findings continue to influence national research on RNA and memory.
McConnell, who has written extensively in both the professional and popular press, is also the author of Understanding Human Behavior, an introductory psychology textbook published in 1974 and currently in use by more than 300 college and university campuses.
* Репринт этой статьи читайте в нашем журнале. — Редакция ТЧК.
Some Animals Can Consume Knowledge Through Cannibalism
Certain species of flatworm have been gradually taught to run a maze. If you grind them up and feed them to a second batch of flatworms, the second batch can run the maze on the first try.
In A Nutshell
The Whole Bushel
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.
