Most of McConnell's academic career was spent in the
psychology department at the
University of Michigan, where he was a
professor from 1963 through his retirement in 1988. He was an unconventional scientist, setting up his own
refereed journal, the
Journal of Biological Psychology, which was published in tandem with the ''
Worm Runner's Digest, a planarian-themed humor magazine. His paper Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians
, published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry'', reported that when planarians conditioned to respond to a stimulus were ground up and fed to other planarians, the recipients learned to respond to the stimulus faster than a control group did. McConnell believed that this was evidence of a chemical basis for memory, which he identified as
memory RNA. Although well publicized, his findings were not completely reproducible by other scientists and were therefore at the time completely discredited (for review, see Chapouthier, 1973). McConnell's work has been referred to by a scientist who hypothesized that McConnell's results could be explained by
RNA interference (Smallheiser, 2001). McConnell originally published satirical articles alongside serious scientific articles in the
Journal of Biological Psychology but received complaints that it was difficult if not impossible to tell which was which. He decided to publish the satirical ''
Worm Runner's Digest upside down with its cover as the back of the Journal of Biological Psychology'' to make it clear which articles were satire. This, he said, created problems with librarians returning the Journal to the publisher with the complaint that it was improperly bound. He was amused by this. He spent many of his evening hours in the 1960s in informal rap sessions with students in their dorms. He was prone to making provocative statements, believed that memory was chemically based and that in the future humanity would be
programmed by drugs. He once commented that he would rather be "a programmer than a programmee". McConnell, in addition to his work with planarians, wrote several works about non-planarian psychology. These include papers about autism, learning, biorhythms, and memory transfer. In addition to his papers McConnell also wrote an introduction to psychology textbook. In his introduction to psychology textbook, and a later paper, McConnell writes about fellow psychologists
John B. Watson and
Rosalie Rayner, more specifically their sexual affair and it’s supposed usage to collect data on sexual arousal in humans. He suggests that this research, not just the affair with Rayner, is the reason for Watsons ousting from
Johns Hopkins University McConnell was one of the targets of
Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber. In 1985, he suffered hearing loss when a
bomb, disguised as a manuscript, was opened at his house by his research assistant Nicklaus Suino. McConnell died of a heart attack at St. Joseph's Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1990. ==Short fiction==