Heart Memory: Insights Doctors Rarely Share About a Heart Transplant

Professor Christian Barnard, heart transplant pioneer, and his wife.

Where Do Memories Live in Our Body?

Where do our memories reside? In the brain or in every cell of our body? The latter seems to be the case if we consider the experiences of people who have had heart transplants, tell us. We often refer to our heart when we talk about our emotions and are frequently mocked for mistaking heart for the brain. But are we wrong to connect emotions with the heart instead of the brain?

Cellular memory is an emerging field of science, and evidence suggests that the heart possesses some of the capabilities traditionally attributed to the brain. Perhaps it is time to consider the heart's role in our emotions and intellect, challenging the traditional dominance of the brain.

The human heart has a complex neural network. Recent research reveals that memories and emotions are stored there, though not as extensively as in the brain. When a heart is transplanted, the recipients often report experiencing new feelings and memories that correlate with those of the donors.

A 2024 study acknowledges that heart transplantation and related experiences have revealed many phenomena involving memories, emotions, personal tastes, and personalities that challenge our traditional views.

After Heart Transplant: A Few Case Studies of Heart Memory

After a heart transplant, the neural network of the heart forms a connection with the brain and begins communicating with it. This neural network is sometimes named, ‘heart brain’. This ‘heart brain’ changes the personal memories and identity of the organ recipient in many subtle ways by adding to them, the feelings, personality traits, and memories of the donor, stored in it.

Amazingly, the recipients sometimes begin to like a specific food item that they despised before the surgery. Sometimes, they find their sexual orientation changed. Here are a few case studies cited in the 2024 study undertaken by Al-Juhan et al, and published in Cureus.

• A 29-year-old woman, a voracious consumer of meat-based fast food, received a heart from a 19-year-old teenager, a vegetarian. After the surgery, she began to feel an aversion towards non-vegetarian food.

• In another case, the donor was a 14-year-old with irregular eating habits. The 47-year-old recipient began to experience nausea and vomiting sensation after eating.

• The donor was fond of chicken nuggets and green peppers. The recipient developed a craving for these two food items after the transplant.

• A 45-year-old recipient suddenly began to like loud music after receiving a heart transplant from a younger person.

• A musician’s heart was transplanted into a teenage girl. After surgery, she developed a new love for music.

• The heart of a young African American, who loved classical music, was transplanted into a 45-year-old man. The recipient found out that he had a newfound love for classical music.

• A male recipient received a heart from a lesbian artist. He began to feel an enhanced sexual attraction towards women.

• A lesbian, on the other hand, after receiving a heart from a heterosexual donor, was more attracted to men.

• A 9-year-old boy began to experience the sadness and fear of a 3-year-old donor, who had many negative experiences in his life.

• A boy, receiving a heart from another boy, knew the donor’s name without anyone telling him.

Case studies of heart memory abound in transplant history. Yet, neither scholars nor doctors are comfortable talking about this phenomena because it will lead to complex questions about mind and conswciousness, which are not easy to answer.

Our Understanding About The Heart Is Changing

If the heart can be the place of origin for emotions, the heart can certainly store information. All stirring emotions are first felt by us where our heart is located. There must be a reason for this.

The experiences of organ-transplanted patients gave rare insights into the mini-brain throbbing inside our hearts. Scientists gradually gathered the courage to talk and think about the heart as a place of thought and emotion.

One must always remember that as our knowledge horizon expands, so do the domains of wisdom that defy our understanding. It is always one step forward, and two steps backwards. Will the questions that eluded our brain all this time be answered by our heart? Isn’t an intelligent heart amazing?

First, the medical world carefully trod from ‘closed heart’ surgeries to ‘open heart’ surgeries, and then the real revolution, the heart transplant, came. In 1967, Christiaan Bernard, one of the world’s second-generation cardiac surgeons, carried out the first heart transplant in the world.

One overlooked question about organ transplants is, what happens to the gene and DNA of the transplanted organ. Does the new organ lose its genes and DNA residing inside its cells and gradually acquire the DNA and genes of the recipient or does the implanted organ remain like an isolated genetic island inside the body that received it?

We now know that the latter is the case. The transplanted organ always remains an alien in the body that carries it. This is why a transplant recipient has to take medicines lifelong to prevent the body from rejecting the organ.

As Thomas R. Verny reminds us in his book, ‘The Embodied Mind’, genes are the ultimate proof that “everything is connected”. Even when staying a stranger to the recipient body, the transplanted organ has cells that learn to connect with their surrounding fellow cells.

When we study more, we realise that memory is a maze, all-pervasive, and exists everywhere in our body. This great upheaval in our hearts when we are excited when fear creeps in, and when facing a loss, what we experience in our heart is not something we merely imagine. It is not cultural conditioning or poetry. Your cellular brain and its higher concentration inside your heart are responsible for it.

References

Al-Juhani et al., 2024, Beyond the Pump: A Narrative Study Exploring Heart Memory, 16 (4), Cureus.

Thomas R Verny, 2021, ‘The Embodied Mind: Understanding the Mysteries of Cellular Memory, Consciousness, and Our Bodies, Pegasus Books.