Some years back, I tried out a mind-body discipline that knocked me sideways. The details aren’t important; suffice it to say I hadn’t thought of myself as someone with character armour until I was cracked open like a Christmas walnut. Afterward I could feel my heart in a way I hadn’t before.
I remember visiting my mother’s place soon after. In the bathroom, my gaze locked on hand towels decorated with little hearts radiating wavy lines. It struck me that beyond the kitschy decorative surface there was symbolism conveying the living reality of heart energy.
Change of heart, change of diet
A number of years back, the Daily Mail did a series on heart transplant patients who claimed to have taken on the personality traits of their donors. In one tale, a middle-aged man developed a newfound love for classical music after a heart transplant. “It transpired that the 17-year-old donor had loved classical music and played the violin. He had died in a drive-by shooting, clutching a violin to his chest.”
Dr. Gary Schwartz claims he and his co-workers at the University of Arizona have documented dozens of cases of a similar kind. “It’s a targeted personality change,” he told the Daily Mail. “If this is the result of drugs, or stress, or coincidence, none of those would predict the specific patterns of information that would match the donor.”
The Daily Mail article floated the idea of “cellular memory.” Nonsense, responded skeptics, who argued there is no hard-core scientific evidence for any such occult mechanism. They also claimed that Schwartz had not done properly controlled scientific studies to back his claims of personalities accompanying heart transplants, and was relying exclusively on anecdotal tales.
Considering that thousands of heart transplants are performed daily across the world, and the significant mind/body responses to postoperative drugs, to say nothing of the trauma of the surgery itself, is it not reasonable to expect occasional coincidental connections between donors and recipients, behaviourally speaking?
Yet in one case, Schwartz says a young patient had been very health conscious after her heart surgery, and one of the first things she did after leaving the hospital was to visit a fast food outlet, something she had previously avoided. She also became “aggressive and impetuous.”
On his “Neurologica” blog, Steven Novella notes that all of the patient’s postoperative traits – aggression, impetuousness and hunger – were hardly a mystery. “Those happen to all be typical side effects of prednisone, an immunosuppressant drug that many transplant recipients require,” he explains.
The Daily Mail also excerpted passages from A Change of Heart, the 2007 memoir of Claire Sylvia. At the age of 47, Sylvia was dying from a disease called primary pulmonary hypertension. In 1988, she had a heart-lung transplant, then a radically new procedure in the US.
Sylvia was the first person in her state to have such an operation, she writes, and there was a lot of publicity. Two reporters came to the hospital to interview her, and one asked what she wanted to do more than anything else, after this miracle. “I’m dying for a beer right now,” she replied. She was mortified that she had given such a flippant answer, and also surprised. “I didn’t even like beer. But the craving I felt was specifically for the taste of beer.”
Sylvia found she’d developed a sudden fondness for certain foods she hadn’t liked before: Snickers bars, green peppers, Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway. The changes in her behaviour gave her an alarming thought: what if her male donor’s heart started to affect her sexual preferences? Over time, she found she was still attracted to men, but she didn’t have the same desire to have a boyfriend. “I was freer and more independent than before – as if I had taken on a more masculine outlook,” she writes in her memoir.
Sylvia noted that even her walk became more manly. Her daughter asked her why she was lumbering around like a football player. “This new masculine energy wasn’t limited to my walk,” she explained. “I felt a new power that I associated with strength and vibrancy.”
Her postoperative condition reminded of being pregnant, when she experienced something she described as “foreign and beyond my control, yet terribly precious and vulnerable [as if] a second soul were sharing my body.”
All she knew of the donor was that he was an 18-year-old boy who had been killed in a motorcycle accident. Against the hospital’s advice, she decided to track down the donor family. She discovered that the young donor’s likes and dislikes were exactly in line with her personality changes.
From meat pump to little brain
There’s no greater expression of western culture’s schizoid nature than how we think of the heart. To most scientists and doctors, the heart is nothing more than a glorified pump. William Harvey’s 17th century discovery that the heart pumps blood through the body’s circulatory system is one of the touchstone moments of medical history.
Yet in many cultures throughout history, the heart has been considered the source of emotions, passion and wisdom. For example, the Chinese term hsin means the totality of our psychic functioning, and more specifically, the centre of that functioning, which is associated with the central point of the upper body, in the chest. And the heart chakra is the central physical element in the Yogic tradition, of course.
In the pre-allopathic medicine of the west, the heart was referred to as a thinking, feeling organ in its own right, summed up in philosopher Blaise Pascal’s line that the “heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.” The “heartache” of a lost loved one, or from unrequited love, is a universal human experience. For most of us, the heart’s joys and pains aren’t just vacuous greeting card sentiments, but an experiential reality.
In fact, the heart is a rather more remarkable organ than we give it credit for. There isn’t just neural traffic from the brain to the heart, but the other direction as well. J. A. Armour at the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal has written on what he calls the heart’s “little brain,” a “nervous system intrinsic to it.”
“These studies provided the scientific basis to explain how and why the heart affects mental clarity, creativity and emotional balance,” writes Mohamed Omar Salem, assistant professor of Psychiatry and Behavioural Science at the United Arab Emirates University. He cites a 2002 paper in which scientists claim to have discovered a neural pathway and mechanism whereby the heart’s neural input could inhibit or facilitate the brain’s electrical activity. The heart appears to have its own “peculiar logic” that often departs from the direction of the autonomic nervous system, Salem observes.
The heart’s afferent nerves enter the brain at its base, and cascade up to the higher cognitive centres in the cortex, where they are able to influence perception, decision-making and other cognitive processing. The heart’s nerves also connect with the limbic system, the emotional centre of the brain.
In fact, the heart’s independent nervous system is the very thing that allows it to survive surgical transplants. “Normally, the heart communicates with the brain via nerve fibres running through the vagus nerve and the spinal column. In a heart transplant, these nerve connections do not reconnect for an extended period of time; in the meantime, the transplanted heart is able to function in its new host only through the capacity of its intact, intrinsic nervous system,” writes Salem.
The organ also releases noradrenaline and dopamine neurotransmitters, once thought exclusively limited to the central nervous system. It is also a hormonal gland, producing a hormone called atrial natriuretic factor. ANF affects the blood vessels, the kidneys, the adrenal glands and a large number of regulatory regions in the brain.
Scientists have also discovered that the heart secretes oxytocin, the “love” or bonding hormone. According to Salem, “In addition to its functions in childbirth and lactation, recent evidence indicates that this hormone is also involved in cognition, tolerance, adaptation, complex sexual and maternal behaviour, learning social cues and the establishment of enduring pair bonds. Concentrations of oxytocin in the heart were found to be as high as those found in the brain.”
A radiant organ
The organ also has a powerful electromagnetic field, that can be detected by instruments several feet away from the body. The heart ‘glows’ – not just metaphorically, but in a measurable, scientific sense. Those kitschy little tea towels at my mom’s place really were conveying a universal truth.
And even more remarkably, human hearts will synchronize. It seems unlikely this is possible without it being mediated by the heart’s electromagnetic field.
We’re obviously talking about a much more sophisticated device than a pump made of meat. It’s a complex self-regulating and radiating system with its own neural network that communicates with, and influences, the brain through chemical signals and neural pathways, just as the enteric nervous system does. What’s the enteric nervous system? That’s the name given to the network of neurons associated with the gut, and the likely source of those infamous ‘gut feelings.’
Mainstream scientific opinion draws the line at spooky, postoperative personality trait transfers, however. Yet is it so incredible to hypothesize that memory might inhere in the heart’s workings? That might be a bit of stretch for anyone who still clings to the idea of the heart as a glorified pump, of course.
Remember Claire Sylvia, who developed a taste for beer after her heart-lung transplant? After a series of bizarre dreams about her young donor, she managed to track down his family. During a visit with the parents, she says she confirmed that all of her newfound character traits – her taste for particular foods and beverages and sense of independence – were identical to those of her teenage donor.
During her visit, Sylvia sat with the donor’s parents, who gave her a framed photo of their son to look at.
In this photo, he looked about 14. He was dressed in formal clothes, standing beside a priest… June (the mother) started to say something about Tim when she suddenly choked up. Now the tears flowed. I felt a bond between us like nothing I had ever known. But I couldn’t quite comprehend this: me holding Tim’s picture in my hands and his heart in my chest. I paused to take a breath and Tim’s lungs filled with air. Except that they were my lungs now.
If the enteric nervous systems of disabled veterans can demonstrate memory and learning, can the “little brains” of healthy people’s hearts also demonstrate similar capabilities? And if desires and feelings are inscribed in the cryptic language of neuropeptides and synapses, could these desires and feelings be reexpressed in another body, via a transplanted organ?
You can’t say the scientific jury is still out on this – the jurors have yet to be called. Is Claire Sylvia’s strange story the result of chance, confirmation bias, or a folie à deux between her and the donor family? There is probably enough in her story, and those of other heart transplant patients, to make a case worth pursuing in the court of science.
Well I'm glad you mentioned oxytosin and the electromagnetic field as well as the enteric nervous system and it's connection to the gut wherein lies our immunity. The heart's memory is a valid one which connects us to a greater power and also to one another. So important to consider being "cracked open like a Christmas Walnut." (walnuts not only simulating the heart but providing the EFAs to help it pump)...opening up to the idea of something new being born, a new 'discovery' made, the cracking open of the sky at the crucifixion, the renting of the temple, the spirit emanating from the heart....the Sacred heart. And with its predominating connection to the brain, the heart being the seat of all wisdom. The HeartMath Institute has much to say about our heart's connection to our brain and you have touched on many of these absolute affinities...revving up my oxytocin supply to both. Thank you.❤️
Wouldn't it be fascinating if the scientific community somehow acquired an open mind and an open heart? Imagine what we would discover...great piece, Geoff. I've always wondered about these heart transplant reports and maybe one day, we will find the courage to investigate.