Word: shock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THEIR DOUBTS increased when they found that a trained animal generally remembered its skills despite attempts to disrupt its cerebral electrical activity by intense cold, drugs, shock or other stress; only short-term memory?of recently learned skills?was impaired. There was an obvious conclusion: while short-term memory may be partly electrical, long-term memory must be carried in something less ephemeral than an electric current...
Other experiments based on the RNA-protein theory may demonstrate actual chemical memory transfer. Among the most publicized are those of University of Michigan Psychologist James McConnell and Neurochemist Georges Ungar of the Baylor College of Medicine. McConnell works with planaria, or flatworms, conditioning them by electrical shock to contract when a light is flashed. He then grinds them up and feeds them to untrained worms. Once they have cannibalized their brothers, the worms learn to contract twice as fast as their predecessors. What may happen, McConnell theorizes, is that the first batch of worms form new RNA, which synthesizes...
Ungar's experiments are similar. Using shock, he conditions rats to shun the darkness they normally prefer, then makes a broth of their brains. This he injects into the abdominal cavities of mice, which seem to react with a parallel unnatural aversion to the dark. Moreover, the more broth Ungar injects, the faster the mice seem to learn this fear. His theory: the memory message (that darkness should be avoided) is encoded by the rats' DNA-RNA mechanism into an amino-acid chain called a peptide, a small protein that Ungar managed to isolate and then synthesize. His name...
...Future Shock, Toffler...
...Future Shock, Toffler...