Transplanted organs take their memories with them

Adding to the list of things that cannot be explained by mainstream science, here's a weird one about a neuropsychologist who found 73 case studies of memories from organ donors manifesting in the organ recipients.

Transplanted organs impart memories onto recipients


(NaturalNews) Becoming an organ donor is a great way to help out a person in the event of one's death. A study has shown, however, that sometimes donor recipients take on certain characteristics or personality traits from the donor, a phenomenon that researchers are having a difficult time explaining.

Paul Pearsall, a neuropsychologist, wrote about this interesting topic in his book, The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy. In it, he provides insight into his belief that the physical heart contains within it memories belonging to its person. Part of Pearsall's research for the book included tracking several real life cases of heart transplant recipients who mysteriously inherited some of their donors' traits.

In one case, a Spanish-speaking man began using words that he had not used prior to his transplant. He received his heart from a man named David who had died in a car accident. David's wife, Glenda, when meeting the recipient of her husband's heart for the first time, used the word "copacetic" to describe the situation. The recipient's mother quickly replied that her son had begun using that word for the first time and that it did not even have a Spanish equivalent, indicating that he had adopted the word from David.

The recipient's son, who had before been a vegetarian, began craving meat and greasy food after his transplant. His music preferences also changed from favoring heavy metal to preferring fifties rock 'n' roll. All of these preferences turned out to be David's preferences as well.

In another case, an 8-year-old girl who had received a heart transplant from a 10-year-old girl that had been murdered, began to have nightmares about the donor's murderer. After several consultations with a psychiatrist, it was decided that the police should be notified. The 8-year-old recipient was able to identify key clues about the murder, including who the murderer was, when and how it happened, and even the words spoken by the murderer to the victim. Amazingly, the entire testimony turned out to be true and the murderer was convicted for his crime.


Read more: Natural News

That last one was totally creepy.

It's good to see that the transplant helped solve the murder but could you imaging being the little girl who got that heart and had to go through those nightmares! I hope solving the mystery made the dreams stop.

[edit on 4/9/10 by FortAnthem]

Makes you wanna get one of those organ doner card.
Save someones life if you die and also keep a part of you alive

reply to post by freebourn


lol.

To the OP, indeed, that last one is creepy, like a Stephen King or Twilight Zone story.

I am curious that if you were to eat the organ instead of have it inplanted would you still retain the memories. Just thinking about the cannibalistic societies, some say you are what you eat.

reply to post by (C2C)


LOL
thats sick man..

I doubt if you eat somone you acquire his qualities..
Otherwise we would all be a bunch of cows & sheep... erm.. wait....

Yeah the organs take memories with them. Memories of drinking, smoking, drug abuse, and fat or sugar intake.

Originally posted by freebourn
reply to post by (C2C)

 

LOL
thats sick man..

I doubt if you eat somone you acquire his qualities..
Otherwise we would all be a bunch of cows & sheep... erm.. wait....

Very, very funny! You have unwittingly figured out why most of mankind has turned into sheeple!!!! Cowple? LOL

Wonder if the same would be true for vegetarians and plants.
Although it doesn't seem possible, this notion has been around for a long time, but not been proven. Gaining your enemy's strength, an elder's wisdom, or even a savior's holiness - all by consumption.

Back to the OP - great find! If it were looked into more, it would change everything we think about memory and the brain - and also how we would handle donations in the future. Possible ethical issues?

Awesome find! I've always believed that you could get personality-changes and memories from the person you get the organ from.
So when they make new parts for us from pigs and mice, will it make us want to roll around in dirt or search for cheese?

Memory transfer seems like an innate way to maintain a healthy balance between the needs of the donor's organ and the recipient's body...

reply to post by (C2C)


Almost certainly not. Digestion - both mechanical, such as chewing, and chemical, such as stomach acids effect - ought to destroy any meaningful information stored in the tissue. What was left would be simple constituent substances, and would be absobed through the intestines. It doesn't seem likely that this method could result in any meanginful transmition of information, although the entire process described in the article is somewhat mysterious and not well understood.

It's hard to know what to make of this. There is a lot of real evidence connecting memory to brains. We can't dismiss the brain/memory connection, it's been proven many time experimentally. We do need to account for anomolous observations like the ones in this article though. Promoting observations such as the one in this article is very important and very productive, because the way that theories are replaced with better theories is that thay cannot account for anomolous observations.

We often conceptualize the brain as something very discrete; well defined and localized, but this isn't quite right. Chemical signialing, especially the endocrine system, is encorporated into the function of all parts of the body and is inseparable from the neurological system(although they are distinct, they both contribute in necessary ways to the body's internal communication system). The other organs, too, communcate with the brain and the rest of the body through both conventional neurological methods, but also through other chemical signals. There is neurological tissue all throughout the body; the brain is made of it, but so is the spine, and nerves are found all over the place. A correct concept of body function is one characterized by distributed systems interconnected all over the body, not localized device-like organs which are highly compartmentalized and independent of everything else. It should be expected that changing any one part of the system effects the other parts, and that transplanting on element of one system(individual body) to another(individual body) should result in certain characteristics of the first system being transplanted to the second. That is what happened here.

Some interesting questions: If the person gains characteristics/informaiton from their donor, do they themselves lose some of their own characteristics when their failing organ is removed? Did the little girl lose any of her own memories when she gained the memories of her donor? If some memories are stored in the heart, the little girl would have lost those memories.

This is a very interesting topic, and because it is at odds with the amount of emphasis mainstream science puts on the brain/memory relationship, it is a topic which has an air of the paranormal. I am sure nothing paranormal is going on here, and that eventually these phenomena can be explained by conventional means. We must be very careful to avoid psuedoscientific conclusions when dealing with topics like this.

Thanks though, S&F.

I think that in time, we may learn something along the lines of the fact that the entire nervous system is a multi-layered redundant memory construct, and that our bodies shift and translate memory back and forth through the system at all times.

I would wonder if such a theory has been proposed (not being a medical researcher I wouldn't know)?

Such a theory might allow for the 'accidental' or 'incidental' influx of new sensory or perceptual data into a recipient's body, as well as the absence of a 'loss' from those who 'donate.'

reply to post by Lolliek


LOL

Perhaps we should all start eating Lions and Wovles...
Start kicking ***

reply to post by FortAnthem


Thanks for posting this. A while back when I found ATS I tried to find a similar article to share but couldn't find it! It was about a heart transplant patient who started to develop a strong passion for art and music. He started drawing very well even though he never had drawn before. I just ran a search for it again and still can't find it

However, I did find something even better... a study was conducted and showed that the heart responds BEFORE the brain to emotional information! This article also shows additional examples:
www.unclesirbobby.org.uk...

People were shown a series of pictures which were meant to provoke strong emotional reactions. His tests showed that the heart responded before the brain. So the heart must have an ability to process emotional data.

EDIT: Finally found it! The ART transplant! Man I want to make a thread just for this but since its still page 1 of this article I'll put it here:

But days after his transplant, he began creating this amazing, elaborate artwork," she said. "It was really quite amazing how his talent blossomed."

Yesterday, Mr Sheridan met the mother of the heart donor and handed her a sketch of a large hand holding a heart with the inscription: "You gave me more than a heart. Thank you.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk...

[edit on 9-4-2010 by truthquest]

Good stuff, very interesting and some more information on this:

Cellular Memory

Cellular memory is the hypothesis that such things as memories, habits, interests, and tastes may somehow be stored in all the cells of human bodies, not only in the brain. The suggestion is based largely around anecdotal evidence of organ transplants after which the recipient was reported to have developed new habits or memories.[1] To date, no case where personality traits or memories have been passed from donor to recipient following an organ transplant has ever been recorded in a peer reviewed medical or scientific journal.

Edit:

Wasn't there also a movie about this kind of thing with Jessica Alba where she received some girls eyes and saw crazy stuff?

[edit on 9-4-2010 by Crossfate]

Ah, it's called the eye.

[edit on 9-4-2010 by Crossfate]

I'll probably need a kidney transplant one of these days, and I've always wanted to learn Spanish. So maybe I'll get lucky and get a Spanish kidney. LOL!

Originally posted by Lolliek
Back to the OP - great find! If it were looked into more, it would change everything we think about memory and the brain - and also how we would handle donations in the future. Possible ethical issues?

The ethical issues could be interesting.

What is the donor was a criminal or even a murderer, How would that affect the recipient?

What about someone who feared their soul could be trapped here on earth after death, should they refuse to be a donor?

Could this be a possible avenue to immortality? Could a person stipulate in their will that their organs HAD to be transplanted in order to prolong their existence after death?

In one of my recent magazine readings, an article pointed out that for years, doctors have known that the human stomach contains a certain number of brain cells, they just don't know why.

So perhaps the human brain has always had distributed processing. Hmmm.

When I find or remember the source of that observation, I'll post that link.