Have you ever wondered about those people who get transplanted organs from other people and whether or not they feel any different with someone else’s organs? Well, researchers are finding out that there may be something with having another’s organ within you. There have been startling reports of how people have taken on personality quirks, mannerisms and desires from people from whom they received their hearts. Some of these reports are truly remarkable and will really make you think. I have read in a couple of sources that the mind is not in the brain. Scientists have studied, sliced, magnified and electrified the brain to exhastion, and in the end, there is still no central source or processing unit. Meaning, no one is behind the wheel, so to speak. So if it is not in the brain, where does it exist and what makes us… well, us? Is it in every organ, tissue, cell? Is our mind encoded in our DNA?

As reported in the June, 07, Ode magazine, there was a woman, Glenda, who lost her husband, David, in a car crash. David stipulated that he wanted his organs to be available for transplant before he was unexpectedly killed. Glenda made David’s heart available to a young Spanish-speaking man and went on with her life. A few years later, as a part of a study by neuro-psychologist Paul Pearsall, she met the man who had received her late husband’s heart. When she met the man, she was suddenly filled with emotion and asked if she could put her hand on the man’s chest. As she did she said, “I love you David. Everything’s copacetic.” The young man’s mother standing near by was startled when she heard the word “copacetic”. She said that the first thing her son said after the operation was that word. The mother continued by saying that he never said that word before the operation and says it all the time now. But the funniest thing is that the word doesn’t even exist in Spanish.

There were other things that had changed about the young man. Before, he had been a health-conscious vegitarian. After the transplant he craved meat and greasy food. He had loved heavy metal music before. Now he listens to nothing but fifties rock ‘n’ roll. Glenda reported to the mother that David had been an ardent meat-lover and played in a old rock ‘n’ roll band. What does this mean? Obviously there is more to our existence than we think. Our brain might be just a part of the mind, quite an essential part, but a part none-the-less.

There are other remarkable examples of transplanted hearts with some type of “mind” still attached with it. An eight year-old girl received the heart of a ten year-old girl who had been murdered. The recipient ended up in a psychiatrist’s office with recurrent nightmares about her donor’s murderer. She proclaimed to the psychiatrist that she knew who the murderer was. After police were contacted, with the girl’s instructions, the police were able to track down the murderer. The man was convicted on evidence the girl had provided concerning the time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, and what his victim told him. Everything that she had reported turned out to be true.

Then there was the eight year-old Jewish boy who died in a car wreck whose heart was donated to a three year-old Arab girl. As soon as the girl woke up from the anaesthesia after surgery, she asked by name for a particular type of Jewish candy she could not have known existed.

In a book written by Paul Pearsall, called The Heart’s Code, he provides other remarkable examples of transplanted hearts with memories, traits or personalities. Pearsall argues that the brain is not the only center of human intelligence. He says that the heart carries equal importance. And, he says that the body is made up of cells that transmit “information” in which the cells communicate this information to each other electromagnetically. Thus, he continues to state, “a transplanted organ can continue to broadcast old information.

Another strange example of our unordinary attachment to our bodies is the Phantom Limb or Pain Syndrome (PLS). PLS is a strange phenomenon where an amputee will still have “feeling” or “pain” associated with the lost limb. Patients will often complain about their missing leg or arm hurting, in an uncomfortable position, or itches. There have been quite a few studies where researchers have conducted simple experiments with sufferers of PLS. One such study was done by Ramachandran & Blakeslee. Here is what was said about one such study:

I placed a coffee cup in front of John and asked him to grab it [with his phantom limb]. Just as he said he was reaching out, I yanked the cup away.
“Ow!” he yelled. “Don’t do that!”
“What’s the matter?”
“Don’t do that”, he repeated. “I had just got my fingers around the cup handle when you pulled it. That really hurts!”
Hold on a minute. I wrench a real cup from phantom fingers and the person yells, ouch! The fingers were illusory, but the pain was real - indeed, so intense that I dared not repeat the experiment.

– Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain, p. 43. (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998)

Is this consistent with the cell communication? Does the remaining stub continue to broadcast signals to the brain that communicates that the missing limb is still there? The strangest and probably the most difficult to understand is how there have been reports of children born with missing limbs, yet they too can have problems with phantom limb syndrome. Does it go back even further, suggesting that our “mind” is designed to perceive our bodies to be normal even if one is born deformed? This would suggest nature creates our mind, and nurture develops the brain. This may explain how some people no matter how they are brought up are the antithesis of what they “should” be.

What is interesting about this is that the medical community has suppressed a lot of this information in fear that if people were made aware of these types of carryover memories that they may not be as anxious to get transplants. So there are critics out there who even when presented with all the evidence, deny the existence of these claims. They even go on to assert that recipients who get transplants can be affected with these types of strange behaviors due to the heavy drugs that they are taking.

Although I find the latter absolutely ridiculous in an attempt to explain these strange phenomena, it is sad that the medical community will not address these issues. If we could put aside our fears and greed for money, we might be able to tap into what and who we really are. Is our mind the same thing as a soul or spirit, where the “energy” of the limb is still present without its physical counterpart? Or the organ still carries the energy of its prior owner, and its memory, traits and personality comes along with it? Who knows, but if we don’t allow ourselves and our scientific professionals the freedom to study and research this subject, we could miss out on something that could explain what it means to be alive.