Get all A's by eating a geek for dinner

In 1955, Robert Thompson and James McConnell trained a group of planarian flatworms by pairing a bright light with an electric shock. After repeating this several times they took away the electric shock, and only exposed them to the bright light. The flatworms would react to the bright light as if they had been shocked. When these warms were cut in half the worms that grew out of the halves were aware of the light situation. In 1962 McConnell ground these worms into small pieces and fed them to other flatworms. These flatworms learned to associate the bright light with a shock much faster than flatworms who had not been fed trained worms. (Apparently the same experiments with more complex animals like mice didn't produce any results. )

Flat worms are very thin, obviously, quite flat, and come in different lengths and colors. Flat worms are the simplest of worms. They poop from the same hole with which they eat.  They have no bones, no spine, no body cavity, no organs, no specialized respiratory, circulatory or digestive systems - the oxygen and nutrients are dissolved in their bodies. They have 2 layers of thin muscles, the eye spots - not real eyes, but spots sensitive to light, plus a couple of bundles of nerves behind the eyes - their brains. A lot of them become two worms if you cut them in half, and some of them split in half sometimes to reproduce, if no other worms are around. (This way they are never lonely.) Here is something cool about flatworms' sex: Some of the larger aquatic species mate by Penis Fencing, a duel in which each tries to impregnate the other, and the loser adopts the female role. That's what I call fair!

Anyway, to get back to the experiment: I find it fascinating, because it could mean that abstract information is stored chemically and can be retrieved. Many scientists said that it isn't so, because the experiments on mice failed. Well, in my opinion, since mice have a complex digestive system that breaks down all the food much more thoroughly, it's like comparing apples to oranges. Scientists amaze me sometimes by their narrow-mindedness. Give me a break: flatworms don't have a stomach - the food is absorbed into their bodies directly, as is, so whatever changes happened in the trained worms' cells due to learning would be incorporated into the new worms' bodies as their own. Which tells me that even after a relatively short training period there were enough changes on cellular level, and, possibly, on a DNA level. The experiment would probably work with mice just fine if a huge chunk of a smart mouse brain could be transplanted directly into the new mouse's head. What would happen if one could take brain neurons from one mouse and inject into the brain of another? That would be more like what happened to the flatworms in the experiment.

I would like to see more experiments done with flatworms in this direction. Like, for instance: would worms still remember their training many generations after? Would it become a genetic trait like hair color passed on to the offspring if those worms were mated sexually with un-trained worms? If they were subjected to bright light of different wavelengths and intensity, would their eye spots start rapidly evolving into regular eyes? Which cells specifically carry that information? Someone should repeat the experiment, but cut the learned worms not just randomly, but separating various types of cells under the microscope and feed different control groups different cells and see if there is a difference.