There are still people who associate the heart with the seat of our feelings, our emotions, our character, love and even our soul. I recently received a reader’s letter which stated: “The professor keeps hammering on the brain, while the heart and its emotions is the exact counterpart of the brain”.

Of course, madam, we sometimes feel our heart pounding with excitement, but that is in response to a signal from our brain, transmitted through the autonomic nervous system to ensure that our body is ready to flee, to fight or to make love.

The mystical position of the heart is supported by anecdotes meant to “prove” that with a heart transplantation, information about the donor is transplanted, too. The Telegraaf newspaper reported an unusual story this year.

New heart

Sonny Graham was given a new heart 12 years ago. The donor had shot himself through the head with a gun. The original organ was from Terry Cottle, 33 years old at the time. Graham was so happy with his new life that he began to correspond with Cottle’s widow. And one thing led to another.

“It felt like I had known her for years,” said Graham to a local newspaper. “When I saw her for the first time, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”

In 2004, the widow married the man with the heart from her first husband, according to Fox News. Recently, Sonny Graham did away with himself, in the same manner as the first “owner” of the heart.

Cheryl, now 39, has become a widow for the second time. The Telegraaf did not conclude that it is apparently difficult to live with Cheryl. No, instead the newspaper claimed: “And that brings us back to the story that if you transplant an organ like the heart, you also transfer the soul of the deceased”.

Character traits

The Telegraaf is known for printing these kinds of stories. A headline in one of its weekend supplements was: “Does your soul live in your heart? Claire Sylvia (47) was given the heart of a boy. Now she whistles at girls and drinks beer”.

Sylvia, who published a book about her experiences in 1997, was convinced that these were the character traits of the young motorcyclist who donated his organs for her heart-lung transplant.

There are also anecdotes of heart transplant patients whose taste in music changes to that of the donor. A man who was given the heart of a woman was suddenly crazy about the colour pink, a colour that he loathed before the operation. A woman claimed that she suddenly became good at chess after being given the heart of a chess player. There was also someone who dreamed about the face of his donor’s murderer after a heart transplantation.

Anecdotes

Such stories are published in a magazine I had never heard of before, the Journal of Near-Death Studies. The problem with these studies is that the recipients of a transplanted heart had information about the donor, like gender, age, cause of death, and many other details of their life.

Before we can take these anecdotes seriously, well-controlled studies are required, in which the recipient of the heart obtains absolutely no information about the donor. A heart transplantation is a tremendously difficult, stressful, life-threatening operation, which can have a radical effect on the personality.

People often become more spiritual, have feelings of guilt towards the deceased donor and feel that the donor is still alive in their body. The strong medication given to prevent rejection of the transplanted organ also influences behaviour. All in all, there are sufficient reasons to feel different after such a transplantation.

No nerve connections

On the other hand there is no way of explaining how the transplanted heart, which has no nerve connections to the recipient’s brain, could send complex, simultaneously transplanted information about the donor to the recipient’s brain and thus change his character.

Until well-controlled studies have confirmed the opposite, we have to assume – based on the available clinical and experimental literature – that our character traits are situated only in our brain and that the heart is only a pump which can be replaced, without transposing the character traits, good or bad, of the donor.

Dit verhaal is geplaatst op donderdag 30 oktober 2008 om 11:22 uur.