As Prof mentioned in class, many people who get organ transplants often “inherit” characteristics of the donor. When this was brought up in our last class, it seemed to be quickly dismissed as coincidence or learning about the donor through the surgeon, neighbor, etc. However, this idea intrigued me, so I did a bit of research. The first thing I found was an article written by Paul Pearsall, PhD, Gary E. Shwartz, PhD, and Linda E. Russek, PhD that examined this phenomena, different narratives, and one mechanistic explanation for it.
Some of these case studies include a man who received a transplant from a woman and afterward began to love the smell of feminine perfume and the color pink, both of which he disliked before, a sixteen month boy who called his donor’s parents (whom he had never met before) “Mama” and “Daddy”, singling the father out of a crowd, a man who formerly hated classical music but grew to love it after receiving a transplant from a devout classical music fan, and a man who formerly loved meat but hated it after receiving a transplant from a health store manager and vegetarian woman.
Over the past ten years, Pearsall has had 74 transplant patients who claimed this phenomena happened to them. Of course, there are many factors to take into account, such as normal personality changes/truth in anecdotal evidence, but the fact that so many people have claimed to have this happened means that the phenomena does deserve some attention.
Past mechanistic explanations for this phenomena have included effects of immunosuppressant drugs, psychosocial drugs, and pre-existing pathopsychology of the patients. This article, however, identified a new mexhanistic explanation for this phenomena. This explanation is called “living systems theory”, which posits that “all living cells possess “memory” and “decider” functional subsystems within them”. The recent integration of systems theory with the concept of dynamical energy systems theory allows us to hypothesize that all dynamical systems (i.e. from cells –> tissues –> organs) store information and energy to various degrees. Thus, all cells have “memory” through feedback loops. As stated in the article, “The systemic memory mechanism has been applied to a variety of controversial and seemingly anomalous observations in complementary and alternative medicine, including homoeopathy. It also makes new predictions. One prediction is that sensitive recipients of transplanted organs can experience aspects of the donor’s personal history stored in the transplanted tissues”.
Now obviously this isn’t a complete explanation. Even if cells had feedback loops and memories, this does not explain how someone could share real, tangible memories with their donor, but it could explain instances of, for example, a meat eater no longer being able to eat meat. I believe a complete mechanistic explanation will need to incorporate the DNA of the donor being placed into the recipient, especially if it holds true that memories can be passed on through DNA.
A vitalistic explanation of this phenomena could be that the recipient is receiving a piece of the soul of the person who gave them their organ. If soul and mind are connected, then soul and personality could be as well, and this would explain why part of the personality is passed on. I, however, do not believe this is the case, as I believe if there is such thing as a soul, it is completely intertwined with the mind of the person, and thus when the mind/consciousness dies, the soul moves on instead of lingering with remaining living cells.
What do you all think about these different ways of explaining the phenomena? Do you believe the phenomena is real at all?
-Elise
I think an important aspect lacking from our discussion (and from most of the related literature, it seems) is the role of bacteria. For every human gene we possess there exist at least three bacterial genes which encode for many different types of bacteria, of which some are geared towards transferring information between our brain and the rest of our body, and regulating brain chemistry. Considering that organs are harvested, stored and transplanted in such a manner as to preserve their functionality, it is likely that the bacteria contained therein would remain alive and hence alter the microbial landscape of the recipient. The various signaling molecules produced by the bacteria activate cellular protein receptors in a manner to which it is perhaps unaccustomed to, which may explain the change in neural activity and consequent behavioral and personality changes.
Perhaps contrasting live tissue samples from both the donated organ and the redundant one and comparing their bacterial compositions would allow researchers to predict changes in the patient’s psyche post transplant (assuming the scientific community is well-versed on the specific effects of each bacteria upon the various receptors of the human brain).
I do think the phenomenom is real but I do not believe the explanation provided is adequate for explaining everything. Like Elise said, the mechanistic explanation is a good way of explaining changes in preference in diet or even scents, but it does not necessarily explain how a recipient could recognize people that their donor knew or have some recall of how they died. The article touches on the point that recipients can be reluctant to discuss certain aspects of their experiences with other people including physicians, but it also suggests that people who have these experiences were somehow more open to receive them. It talks about the changes which can be related back to the donor but what if are there other changes which occur which they don’t focus upon because they can’t be attributed to the donor. Other people may experience similar changes but attribute it to the illness or transplant surgery and not to their donor.
The article Caroline posted says that recipients of kidney, liver, and other organs had more transitive experiences which could be more readily associated with medication and other factors of transplantation. I wonder about the importance of there being more information on heart recipients having more elaborate memories. The article talks about energy cardiology, but I think there is some significance in that we tend to talk about the heart as the symbolic spiritual, emotional, or moral center of people. I wonder if there is some unique assumptions or emotions people would have for receiving a heart more than another organ.
I like Jamie’s point about how our culture places emphasis on the heart as the spiritual, moral, or emotional center of the body and whether this influences how people react to receiving a heart transplant. This made me curious if more people report changes in various personality traits when they receive a heart versus other organs. If so, could this possibly be some consequence of something similar to the Rosenthal effect?
After doing some research, I also found that not all cultures consider the heart to be the spiritual center of the body. Some cultures consider the liver to be the most spiritual organ, and necessary in “digesting” and understanding religious experiences. I have to wonder if such cultures find more of the reported changes in traits after liver transplants instead of heart transplants. Although research into this would not provide a mechanistic explanation for this phenomenon, I think it would be fascinating to see how cultural beliefs and expectations could potentially influence the changes that organ recipients have after their operation.
http://occult-advances.org/nc-health-spiritual-liver.shtml
Following up on my previous post, I feel I need to address the credibility of the source I cited. This website is a website devoted to discussing extremely alternative views of the body, earth, and spirituality. The specific page that I referenced is written in conjunction with the PLIM Report (Power Latent in Man), a magazine that aims to prove “God is a part of man’s consciousness.” Due to the aim of this journal, it is safe to assume the information presented is biased towards supporting evidence of the spiritual and religious importance of different parts of the body. However, the claims that I made can be supported by more reputable sources as well.
The cultures I discussed that consider the liver to be the emotional center of the body include the Hmong people who live in the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. In the “Physicians Guide for Understanding Hmong Healthcare Beliefs,” the liver is described as the emotional center of the body and is likened to the American view of the heart. http://www.d.umn.edu/medweb/Erwin/
Due to this belief, many Hmong people are strongly opposed to receiving liver transplants. Some go so far as to liken a liver transplant to accepting death because replacing your liver is essentially giving the body an entirely new personality. The Hmong people believe that any liver transplant will transfer characteristics of the donor to the recipient and can have negative spiritual consequences. In this culture, transferring of characteristics generally is the expected result of a transplant, not the relatively small alternative belief held in Western cultures.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Uo5iIkzuSfEC&pg=PA441&lpg=PA441&dq=liver+transplants+in+hmong+people&source=bl&ots=eeYTuCRBx9&sig=LY49VFAGRjuKczrYeOecmKfaseg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bvxVU-rGFs2KyAT-64KYCw&ved=0CFYQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=liver%20transplants%20in%20hmong%20people&f=false
Here’s the article I used, which I think is the one Elise used as well.
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/salud/esp_salud25.htm
I agree with Elise in that these mechanistic perspectives such as the “livings systems theory” are not a complete explanation, but I can see how these solutions could be accurate. It makes sense that our cells that control responses, memories, and feelings could trigger similar responses when transferred to another body. Similar electrical signals being fired would cause similar processes to occur. However, with our little knowledge on the soul and mind, it is hard to completely discredit the vitalistic perspective of this phenomenon that a recipient is receiving part of the donor’s soul due to transplant. I definitely think this phenomenon is real, and the scientific explanation sounds like a strong argument to mechanistically and accurately explain it.
What I caught first when reading this article, was how the ages of each person in the different stories between donor and recipient, correlated in different ways. Many were very close in age, such as the 16-month-old boy and the seventh month old boy. Others were the same exact age, i.e. the lovers who were both 18. Others had one similar number such as the 17-year-old boy and 47-year-old man. The last and least noticeable was the 34 year old and the 56 year old whose numbers in age increased in order from 3 to 6. This may have no correlation to anything at all and maybe they set it up in this way for the experiment, but it brought up the question in my mind coincidence, fait, or possibly science-related? Looking at two people of the same age group, could this cellular memory be more easily accessed due to a person’s cells already having some common characteristics? Could the firing between different nerve cells be similar in people of the same age group, giving recipients the ability to better access memories of their donors? However, for the other ages that correlate in different ways, this idea is not in any way applicable. This correlation is unexplainable. And what is to say of the boy who wrote poems years before he died and stated in the poem directly the name of the girl to whom he would give his heart in years to come. It’s a truly out of this world, higher power type occurrence. It is unexplainable and difficult to believe; yet completely discrediting it is a mistake.
A follow up for the researchers’ theory would be to see if transplant recipients who received the same type of organ developed the same personality changes. For example, if most if not all liver transplant recipients were able to identify the parents of their donors, or if all kidney transplant recipients’ preferred a different scent after their surgery. This would possibly strengthen their hypothesis, showing that certain organ cells store particular memories or traits.
Moving away from that far-fetched idea that is slightly reminiscent of traditional Chinese medicine theory, the theory of these researchers may be plausible with the additional support of the quantum theory from Jamie’s articles. Following those arguments, perhaps not all of the dead individual’s quantum particles were flushed into the universe, and some still resided in the microtubules of the transplanted and therefore affect the recipient’s own quantum particles, and thereby affecting their “soul” or “mind.”
Excellent find, Elise! Please give us links to your sources and tell us why or to what extent you find them credible. Is this a single aberrant source, or is this something confirmed by other, too?