February 10, 2025

Athens News

News in English from Greece

Donor memory: myth or reality


Research shows that patients who have had organ transplantationcan inherit memory And personal qualities their donors.

People who have received organ transplants report strange changes in your emotions, tastes and memories. This phenomenon is most often seen in heart recipients, but is also seen in those who have received kidney, lung, and even face transplants. They notice changes in their preferences in food, music and sometimes sexual orientation, the publication writes. dailymail.

Some patients find that their new hobbies and preferences match those of their donors, raising questions among experts about whether recipients can also receive their donors' memories:

  • In one of the cases described in the review, a nine-year-old boy received the heart of a three-year-old girl who drowned in a swimming pool. Although the boy did not know how his donor died, his mother said he became “deadly afraid of water”.
  • In another case, a college professor who received a heart transplant from a murdered police officer saw “flash of light” before my eyes and said: “My face gets really, really hot. It really burns”.
  • A lesbian woman who received a heterosexual woman's heart noted that after the transplant she became attracted to men and began to question her sexual orientation.

Increasing research indicates that this may be due to the fact that heart and brain are inextricably linked, since the heart contains neurons and cells similar to the brain. In addition, organ transplantation can cause changes in the genes that control personality traits and cause them to appear differently.

In a review published in 2024, researchers noted: “Heart transplantation may involve transferring personality traits and memories from the donor to the recipient, challenging conventional ideas about memory and identity. The cardiac neural network and bidirectional communication with the brain support the concept of a heart-brain connection in memory and personality.”.

The research team speculates that these changes may be caused by transmission cellular memorysuggesting that individual cells can form memories. However, the mechanism of this process still remains unclear.





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