Pain is progress

No, not that one! Our approach to control conditions was that it only makes sense to run a lot of controls when you see an effect (which we didn't). We did however run pseudoconditioning controls for at least some of our experiments.

Thanks, would love to see those.

Yes

It still boggles me that we would consistently fail when so many papers have been published on this phenomenon. I'm still waiting for someone to swoop in and show us the error of our ways. But until that happens, our evidence argues against classical conditioning in planarians.

This was an interesting and frustrating saga. One moral is that we need better data sharing and reproducible protocols. Otherwise crazy people like us will have to spend 2 years finding out that things don't work.

We discovered that human annotation of video data is not very reliable across raters. This almost gave me a heart attack: was the entire literature based entirely on unreliable annotation?? We developed a computer vision pipeline to get around this, but still no evidence for learning.

Zach and Maddie traveled to Oregon to talk with some of the planarian researchers, now in their 90s. They retrieved and digitized the old issues of the Worm Runner's Digest sitting in the attic, the infamous magazine that included tips on training planarians (among other weird things).

In addition to lab strains, we sampled planarians from across the country. Zach even traveled to the lake in Michigan where we believed worms had been sourced for the original studies in the 1950s.

We went into this thinking that replicating the learning results would be the easy part, while replicating memory transfer and related phenomena would be hard. But we never got past step 1: we just couldn't get them to learn, despite trying many different stimuli, protocols, species, and strains.

New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).

We should start fixing this by requiring a technical foundation so that equations don't feel scary. It also requires a cultural shift where equations aren't considered optional, but are foundational to empirical work.

If a theorist wants their technical work to be "broadly accessible" they need to remove the math. This dumbing down is slowing down progress. People won't test theories they don't understand. We're mostly stuck at the box-and-arrow stage. Open a neuro textbook and you'll find lots of these diagrams.

Psychology and neuroscience belong to the family of fields where technical work is assigned to a small priesthood of theorists, and it's generally acceptable for experimentalists to ignore this work. Empirical research is perceived as autonomous from theory.

Some fields, like physics and economics, have rigorous technical traditions that every trainee is required to learn. A paper in these fields wouldn't get rejected because it has too much math (probably the opposite).

There seems to be a broad perception across psychology and neuroscience that work shouldn't be "too technical" in order to reach the broadest possible audience. While I think we should strive for accessibility, I feel that this attitude can also be self-defeating: why are we dumbing down?

Oh nice, please send corrections, suggestions etc

If you want to adapt these for your own teaching, I'm happy to provide the Latex source (just reach out).

To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides:
gershmanlab.com/lectures.html
I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

Indeed. Fundamentally, scientific innovation is an unpopularity contest: you have to be willing to think and do things that are iconoclastic, obscure, weird, unfashionable. The "branding" culture works to subjugate these essential anti-social instincts.

I'm going to run a workshop called "building your naive idealism."

My institution is offering training to students on "building your personal brand." This feels yuck to me... Am I being naive/idealistic? What happened to the highest ideals of the academy, the impersonal quest for truth, and all that?

Incidentally, here's a fun discussion of what various interpreters think was going on with Socrates:
sites.psu.edu/moore/2014/1...

Alcibiades tells the story of Socrates so immersed in a problem that he stood rooted to the same spot from one dawn to the next. Zoom ahead two and a half millennia: man stops in the hall on the way to the bathroom, rooted to the spot as he contemplates... his phone. We are all philosophers now.

The grey hairs will come quickly from wrestling with the bureaucracy...

To be fair, the anti-discriminatory policy is there for a good reason. This illustrates the complexity of implementing change when there are many intersecting desiderata, not simply stupid policies.

A few years ago I inquired about increasing the salaries of the postdocs in my lab with kids, for the same reason (childcare costs here are insane). I was told that I couldn't because it's discriminatory.

I would be really interested to hear more on what your vision is for this. I hear you on reducing workload and for broader advocacy. What else can be done? I'm asking as someone who is eager to advocate and would like to understand better what I should be advocating for.

Ask me in an email and if you don't hear back you'll have your answer.

One of the wildest things I learned about planarian flatworms: you can isolate their pharynx (throat) and it will autonomously engage in feeding behavior.
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Utterly incomprehensible, like so much else in this war. My heart aches.

What can the scientific community do? There is just an endless list of things that we're powerless to stop. The scientific community in the U.S. can't even help itself let alone scientists in a country we're at war with.