The idea that the heart contains the essence of a person may be more than just a spiritual concept. Since the first human heart transplant, In 1967The patient reported: Often unwillinglyThere are strange and mysterious changes in their personalities.
Some people feel less like themselves after surgery and more like their donor: One transplant patient in the 1990s, for example, reported a sudden love of music after receiving the heart of a young male musician.
“I couldn't play before, but after my transplant I fell in love with music. I felt it in my heart,” she said. Said In a paper published in 2000, the scientists wrote:
Other transplant patients To tell After the surgery, they developed new tastes in food, art, sex, and careers, and some even claimed to have new “memories” implanted in them.
take Anonymous Cases A 56-year-old university professor who received a heart transplant from a police officer who had been shot in the face and killed said, “A few weeks after the transplant, I had a dream in which a flash of light appeared in my face. Just before that, I had a glimpse of Jesus.”
“That's just how Carl died,” the donor's wife said. He told the researchersShe said the prime suspect “looks a bit like a painting of Jesus.”
These controversial stories seem incredible, but a new study from the University of Colorado (CU) suggests that it's not just heart transplants that can cause such radical changes to personality.
If these symptoms can be directly linked to organ transplants, perhaps it means that our “sense of self” is contained in every cell of our body, not just one or two organs.
An online survey of 23 heart transplant recipients and 24 other organ transplant recipients found that nearly 90% experienced personality changes after the transplant operation, regardless of the type of organ they received.
The majority of patients in the study said they experienced four or more personality changes, and most of these changes were related to temperament, emotions, food, identity, religious/spiritual beliefs, or memory.
While the study was too small to be statistically significant, medical researcher Brian Carter and his CU colleagues Conclusion “It may not be unusual for heart transplant recipients to experience personality changes after transplantation.”
Instead, they Assert“Such changes could occur following any organ transplant,” so further research is needed.
CU's study is one of the first to quantify the personality changes that occur after various organ transplants, and previous studies have tended to focus on heart transplants because these anecdotes are thought to be the most extreme and long-lasting.
In liver and kidney transplants, previous studies have shown that patients Tend Report Changes in feelings of stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.
Some researchers explanation These differences areA little brain in your mindHowever, these potential explanations do not consider transplanted organs other than the heart.
In that case, perhaps Immunosuppressants The cause of personality change may lie in memory, or perhaps a person's “memory” is stored widely throughout the body, rather than just in a few vital organs.
The “systematic memory hypothesis” predicts that all living cells have a “memory” and that transplant recipients can sense the donor's history through the tissue.
Although the nerve connections of the transplanted organ are severed, nerves may still function within the organ. Some evidence is Nerve connections may be partially restored one year after transplantation. Neurotransmitter interactions A transplant based on the donor's memories could trigger physiological responses in the recipient's nervous system and affect their personality.
Scientists discovered that the donor's cells circulated within the recipient's body. Two years after transplantWhere those cells go and what happens to their DNA is unclear. Causes inflammationand chronic low-level inflammation Shown to change personality traits.
If personality changes are as common and widespread as CU's small study suggests, more research is desperately needed. Over 150,000 organ transplants It is being implemented worldwide.
This study Transplantation.
