Re: ality

From: Keith Henson (hkhenson@cogeco.ca)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 18:16:12 GMT

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Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 13:16:12 -0500
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@cogeco.ca>
Subject: Re: ality
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    At 12:56 AM 07/02/02 -0800, "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com>
      wrote:

    snip

    > >Sorry, this is an Urban myth kind of meme. Poor poor controls had the
    > >flatworms following slime trails.
    > >
    > >Shame too, because I once helped write a humor story about university
    > >course content being broken down into such small pieces it could be taught
    > >to flatworms.
    > >
    > >Then knowledge in the form of ground up flatworms was fed--like liver pate
    > >on crackers--to the students.
    > >
    >How did the slime trails elevate?

    http://iubio.bio.indiana.edu/R426302-430599-/news/bionet/general/9612.newsm

    Krister is correct in that the original theory that RNA is the code for
    memory storage was eventually discredited after being viewed as an
    important discovery.

    If anyone's interested, I have a citation for the original article (I
    don't have the article itself, but this comes from Schneider & Tarshis,
    2/e, 1980, one of my old Physio. Psych textbooks ):

    McConnell, JV. 1962. Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians.
    Journal of Neuropsychiatry 3 (Supplement no. 1): 542-548.

    I like the notion that the slime track was responsible for the putative
    "memory enhancement," but don't have a reference for it. Perhaps
    Krister or another NG reader would?

    Also, did they ever use a new T-maze for the memory test? Some might
    argue that this presents different environmental cues and would confound
    the results, but this could be easily controlled.

    S&T mention (p.451) that Hartry's group (published in Science, see
    below) used two groups of "donor" planaria: one group trained to avoid
    shock, the other group was just randomly shocked. RNA from both donor
    types produced the transfer effect in the recipient planaria, suggesting
    that shock itself, rather than learning/memory, changed the performance.

    Hartry, AL et al. 1964. Planaria: memory transfer through cannibalism
    re-examined. Science 146: 274-275.

    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&threadm=32AC3476.77BE%40dendwrite.com&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3D%2Bflatworm%2BOR%2Bplanarians%2B%2522slime%2Btrack%2522%26hl%3Den%26selm%3D32AC3476.77BE%2540dendwrite.com%26rnum%3D1

    Keith

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