In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist pureed a bunch of planarian worms and fed them to other ones. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right? On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel and columnist Claire L. Evans discuss the weird history of memory transfer experiments, and their recent resurgence — and some them appear to be working.  This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.  

Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.

At the end of the episode is a clip from a 1966 Sound Seminars lecture by Dr. James V. McConnell called Cannibals, Chemicals and Memory, where he describes how his experimental work led to the conclusion that flatworms can learn. 

Audio coda credit: The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron, Ohio.