Astral Codex Ten

McConnell

4 min read

McConnell

Article

McConnell is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 29, 2025 and September 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “led by Senators Collins, Britt, and McConnell”; “experiments, using light-shock conditioning and other learning tasks, suggested (albeit controversially) that the answer is yes (McConnell et al., 1959)”; “Eminently quotable, McConnell referred to his work as confirming the Mau Mau hypothesis”. It most often appears alongside A Change of Heart, Abraham, Adams.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 29, 2025
  • Last seen: September 12, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Open Letter To The NIH
August 29, 2025 · Original source
We present this request in the spirit of the broad, bipartisan consensus in favor of spending appropriated NIH funds. In their July letter to the Office of Management and Budget, fourteen Republican senators, led by Senators Collins, Britt, and McConnell, forcefully argued that suspension of NIH funds “could threaten Americans' ability to access better treatments and limit our nation's leadership in biomedical science.” The case for investment in medical research transcends political divides as it serves our collective national interest.
Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis
September 12, 2025 · Original source
… if repeatedly shocked after presentation of a light, a planarian will learn to avoid the light (Thompson and McConnell, 1955). Now suppose you cut off a planarian’s head after it has learned to avoid light. Within a week, the head will have regrown. The critical question is: will the new head remember to avoid light? Remarkably, a number of experiments, using light-shock conditioning and other learning tasks, suggested (albeit controversially) that the answer is yes (McConnell et al., 1959; Corning and John, 1961; Shomrat and Levin, 2013). What kind of memory storage mechanism can withstand utter destruction of brain tissue?
James McConnell was a psychologist interested in learning and memory, among other things. Inspired by the idea that learning and memory might ultimately be stored in molecules, in 1962 he performed a simple experiment with worms: if you train a worm to be afraid of a light stimulus (by associating it with a shock), and then grind it up and feed it to another worm, does the second worm acquire the fear? Said differently, do you acquire the fears of the animals you eat? In an article hilariously titled “Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians”, McConnell showed that the answer seemed to be yes!
Inline links: James McConnell
The cannibalism studies, both startling and vivid in their imagery, and McConnell, never one to shy away from the media, caught the public eye. At a time when scientists remained sequestered in their labs, McConnell appeared with his cannibalistic worms on television (i.e., “The Way Out Men,” “Mr. Wizard” and “The Steve Allen Show”), while articles profiling his work appeared in Time, Newsweek, Life, Esquire and Fortune. Eminently quotable, McConnell referred to his work as confirming the Mau Mau hypothesis, and the “McCannibal” moniker didn’t bother him one bit. He made grand pronouncements about the future of “memory pills” and “memory injections,” promising more than he and others working in the area could actually deliver.