Are Heart Transplants telling us something interesting?

[QED]

The ancients assumed the heart to have a far greater role than just being a pump. Now it seems that evidence is mounting that they may have been right all along:

Professor Schwartz has detailed over 70 cases which demonstrate this phenomenon.

In one such case, a young dancer received a heart-and-lung transplant. Before the operation, she had been very health-conscious; yet, the very first thing she did on leaving the hospital was to head for a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, and wolf down an order of chicken nuggets‹something she would never have done before. Her personality changed, too: she became aggressive and impetuous whereas, before, she had been calm and conservative.

She decided to investigate and, after much battling against the medical bureaucracy, she discovered that her heart­lung donor was an 18-year-old man who had died in a motorcycle accident. He had been an aggressive and impetuous lad who had a passion for Kentucky Fried Chicken‹in fact, uneaten KFC nuggets had been found in his motorcycle jacket on the very day of his death.

Another notable case is that of an eight-year-old girl who had received the heart of a 10-year-old girl who had been brutally murdered. After the transplant, the recipient began to experience horrifying nightmares. Her dreams were consistently about being murdered, and they were so traumatic that a psychiatrist was called in to help. What he heard convinced him that the girl was describing the actual circumstances of her donor¹s murder. When the details were given to the police, these proved to be so accurate that the killer was easily identified and apprehended.

A recent TV program (UK: Mindshock C4) interviewed a number of patients mentioned in the above study and presented a highly compelling case that some aspects of personality are indeed being transplanted along with the donors organs. If this indicates that personality is a material property that can literally be patched-in from one person to another, then doesn't this damage the claims of dualists that personality is something that transcends the material components of our bodies?

[Confused]

While I won't dispute the transcending issues, I will say that during a heart or lung transplant, just as during a heart CABG surgery, the patients major arteries and viens are cut from the organ and attached to a heart/lung bypass machine. Similar to a dialysis machine except this machine pumps the blood, adds oxygen and removes CO2, essentially performing all the normal functions that the heart and lungs do. If the procdure runs long or has complications or the patient remains on the bypass machine for extended periods of time, it is not uncommon for personality changes to occur.

So, given that the bypass equipment wasn't a source of contrasting personality, the personality changes would be entirely down to the stresses brought about through inadequate oxygenation etc. OK, that's a very useful observation. Either way the patient wouldn't have a clue what brought about their changes and might understandably pay undue attention to coincidences. After all, there is a very marked tendency for people to read too much into coincidences.

As a nurse I know people can go through major personality and preference changes after a long illness, tramatic injury, or being near death. It is known that children even fall back a few years in mental developement and physical abilities by just the stress of being in the hospital and being very sick.

That's so sad to hear of children. Your personal experiences sound very similar to the ones in the Program except for the element of bewilderment that the patients seemed to be experiencing. It's hopelessly difficult to untangle the reporting, but there did seem to be a feeling of being taken over by something. But I suppose that's what a physical change in a persons condition could feel like.

I still feel it likely that there are factors supplied by key organs like the heart which are communicated to the brain in order to regulate the demands that might be placed on them. Certainly when we catch Flu it is common for our bodies to want to shut down and we lose a certain amount of interest in the world. A transplant could represent a step-function in someones health and, as is being suggested, supply a totally new outlook on the world for the recipient.

So the "funny" stuff comes down to how much is being read into the coincidences. There's never any shortage of mileage in that!

As I said, it may not have been a coincidence in the cases you mentioned. But it is a higher probability that it is (though it is impressive).
I am not sure I would put so much importance on the heart though. I think the brain is the only organ we cannot live without or transplant. So I would be more inclined to think that it is our brain that supplies factors to be communicated to our organs that may affect our perceptions of the world or our internal homeostasis.

[Galphanore]

Not really, the heart was considered the seat of the soul. If we take that literally then you could say they had a soul transplant with their heart transplant. So, philosophically, it seems that this study is evidence for dualism. Though it does bring up some disturbing other questions. If we actually could prove that we had souls and they were transplanted with your heart, what impact would that have on us as a society?

Could there be a brain transplant? What would happen if you replaced a defective or cancerous amygdala, thalamus or hypothalamus?

Way future medicine. Problem is that to get to these protected areas we must cut through healthy brain tissue. Brain tissue doesn't regenenerate, so to get to some of these areas, we would likely do more damage than the transplant could salvage. Though at some point, it may be a possibility. I just don't see it in mine or my childrens lifetime happening.

Not entirely accurate, more recently we found that the brain can regenerate it's self in some instances. (which is really cool)

[WelshBoy]

I would posit that the changes in personality that are experienced by transplant patients, are in fact hormonal changes which, as we all know having been teenagers, have a profound impact on moods, appetite and the like. Though I don't have any evidence for this and I'm just theorising, I would guess that the new male heart affected the balance of adrenaline in the female recipient, and potentially altered her body's production of testosterone (which women do produce). These hormonal changes would easily account for differences in appetite and mood.

Of course, one would have to measure levels of these hormones before and after transplantation, which I imagine in most cases doesn't happen. As for her desire to eat KFC's, do we really consider this a 'personality-trait'? An in any case the significance is limited by the fact that many people buy food from KFC.



Luke

[Galphanore]

Personally I would guess that getting a new hear just might be a rather major event in someones life and would lead to changes do to stress, if nothing else, and the few times when the changes coincide with something similar in the life of the person who's heart they got are just coincidence. The vast majority of the time the changes have little, if anything, to do with the person who's heart they got....so why assume that those few prove that something specific is being transplanted along with the heart? Anomaly hunting rarely leads to anything worth consideration.

• "The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other."

--Sir Francis Bacon

[methylatedghosts]

This reminds me of a book I once read. I can't for the life of me find the book or remember the title but basically went something like this.

A woman in the US got diagnosed with cancer (liver, I believe). She was mid-30s I think and didn't want to undergo treatment. (chemo/radio). Soon enough, she eneded up talking to some guy. This guy then later on taught her a visualisation technique that involved imagining she was travelling through her own body and explored around her liver. In her liver she saw a mass of black substance. Then she walked into it and found there, past memories that she had been hurt by. She saw people she knew treating her unfairly etc etc etc. None of these negative memories were outside of this mass of black stuff she found - only inside it. After "talking" to these memories and working out every situation, her cancer disappeared without treatments.

Now, I'm not sure if I believe that BUT the theory here is that your memories and the way they affect you are "stored" in your body.

I have also heard a case where a man got an organ transplant and suddenly had entire new memories that he'd never had before. for example he suddenly had memories of being in fiji, when in actual fact he'd never been. After investigation he found the family of his organ donor and recognised them immediately and knew them all by name, when none of them knew who he was.

[Goat]

This reminds me of a book I once read. I can't for the life of me find the book or remember the title but basically went something like this.

A woman in the US got diagnosed with cancer (liver, I believe). She was mid-30s I think and didn't want to undergo treatment. (chemo/radio). Soon enough, she eneded up talking to some guy. This guy then later on taught her a visualisation technique that involved imagining she was travelling through her own body and explored around her liver. In her liver she saw a mass of black substance. Then she walked into it and found there, past memories that she had been hurt by. She saw people she knew treating her unfairly etc etc etc. None of these negative memories were outside of this mass of black stuff she found - only inside it. After "talking" to these memories and working out every situation, her cancer disappeared without treatments.

Now, I'm not sure if I believe that BUT the theory here is that your memories and the way they affect you are "stored" in your body.

I have also heard a case where a man got an organ transplant and suddenly had entire new memories that he'd never had before. for example he suddenly had memories of being in fiji, when in actual fact he'd never been. After investigation he found the family of his organ donor and recognised them immediately and knew them all by name, when none of them knew who he was.

There was an article about cancer survivors, where one of visualised the cancer as bits of carrots, and had a rabbit go and eat the carrost, something a long the same lines. OF course, he was also going through traditional treatment at the same time.
However, I find it interesting that the two people did the similar things.

[methylatedghosts]

Yes, I also heard of another guy who imagined his cancer as an angry barking dog that just got smaller and smaller every day.

Problem is, I cannot find any references to these cases. It's making me frustrated