Will Your Personality Change After Organ Transplant?

A new study shows that a surprising amount of organ transplant recipients undergo rather profound personality changes.

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Health Viewpoints

When you receive an organ transplant, you may be getting more than just a new liver, kidney, or heart.

Some recipients appear to acquire new personas, thoughts, and behaviors belonging to their donors, according to new research from the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

The study explores how lifesaving organ transplants can, in some cases, lead to profound personality changes and what seem to be transfers of memories from the deceased donor to the living recipient.

Physical and Personality Changes Are Common: Study

The cross-sectional study, published in Transplantology, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, focused on comparing personality changes in heart transplant recipients and those who received other organs. It involved an online survey of 47 participants, including 23 heart recipients and 24 recipients of other organs.

Almost 90 percent of all transplant recipients experienced personality changes after surgery, with no significant difference between the two groups. However, there was a statistically significant distinction regarding physical attributes between heart and other organ recipients.

Although variations existed in the types of personality changes, the sample sizes were too small to establish statistical significance. Overall, the study suggests that personality changes can occur after any organ transplant, not just heart transplants. Apart from physical attributes, the reported personality changes were similar between the two groups.

Donated Life, Donated Psyche

The paper discusses various personality shifts, such as changes in preferences for food, music, art, leisure activities, and careers. Researchers also found some individuals experienced new memories, increased social adaptability, improved cognitive abilities, and spiritual or religious awakenings.

While these modifications were often seen as neutral or positive, reports of distressing changes like delirium, depression, anxiety, psychosis, and sexual dysfunction also emerged. Numerous recipients shared “memories” unrelated to their personal experiences.

These memories often involved sensory perceptions unknowingly connected to their organ donor. For instance, the paper mentions a 56-year-old college professor who received a heart from a 34-year-old police officer killed by a gunshot to the face. After the transplant, the recipient described a peculiar experience: “A few weeks after I got my heart, I began to have dreams. I would see a flash of light right in my face and my face gets real, real hot. It actually burns.”

What Exactly Is Happening?

Numerous theories have been proposed to explain the personality changes observed in organ transplant recipients. These theories can be categorized into three main groups: psychological, biochemical, and electrical/energetic.

Psychological

Psychological theories suggest that the personality traits of organ recipients themselves can influence transplantation outcomes. Some believe that fantasies about the donor and their organ may lead to personality changes.

Additionally, recipients may employ defense mechanisms to cope with the stress of the transplant process, leading to personality shifts.

Furthermore, magical thinking, the belief that certain words, thoughts, emotions, or rituals can impact an external world, and analogy thinking have been proposed as potential explanations. Analogy thinking involves the belief that individuals become a combination of their own body and the donor’s organ, similar to a mixed substance displaying characteristics of all its components.

Biochemical

Several biochemical hypotheses have been put forward. One theory proposes that memories and personality traits from the donor may be stored in the transplanted organ and transferred to the recipient.

For example, engrams (hypothetical neural tissue encodings underlying memory) formed in the donor’s brain could be transmitted to the recipient’s brain through exosomes (small sac-like structures containing cellular proteins, DNA, and RNA).

“Nobody knows for sure” why this is happening, Dr. Mitchell Liester, a psychiatrist and a co-author of the study, told The Epoch Times. However, the cardiac nervous system could be a leading candidate, he noted.

There are two cardiac nervous systems: the intracardiac, which consists of nerves within the heart itself, and the extracardiac, which comprises nerves connecting the heart to other parts of the body. The intracardiac nervous system contains the same neurotransmitters and synaptic connections between nerve cells that are believed to be crucial for memory formation in the brain.

“So it appears logical that these nerve cells and synapses in the heart could store memories like the ones in the brain,” Dr. Liester said. “But this is just a hypothesis at this point.”

Energetic

Another hypothesis suggests that changes in the recipient’s electromagnetic field could play a role, with the donor’s personality information potentially being stored in the electromagnetic field of their heart and transferred during surgery, resulting in personality changes in the recipient.

While this theory may seem far-fetched, it’s important to note that the human body is an electrical entity composed of charged particles and heavily influenced by the principles of electromagnetism.

Dr. Liester emphasized that we still don’t know exactly why organ recipients’ personality changes occur. What we do know, however, is that sometimes changes happen, and sometimes they are profound.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.