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Did anyone else see this?

Many people who have undergone heart transplants have expereinced a dramatic change in their personality and their interests - and what's more it turns out that in a lot of those cases they had taken on some of the traits and interests of their deceased donor, mostly often without knowing anything about them at all!

This lead scientists to conduct some research in to the heart and it turns out that the heart could potentially be more than just a pump, but an organ that has the ability to learn and to remember stuff; instead of memories just being stored in the CNS from the head to the neck they could also be stored in the heart! I for one found this a very intruiging programme and revelation, and while I don't think that this has been proven to be 100% true yet it is still very fascinating.

What do you guys think? There cetainly seems to be strong overwhelming evidence, and according to the programme new advances in electronic equipment have shown that the heart could potentially be able to store memories.

..that would be interesting, so perhaps heartbreak really is felt in the heart to a certain extent...

...i wonder if other ahem organs have such memories too?

...my liver would want some 'time apart' i know that...

Wow!

That's really interesting, shame I missed the said program.

Well, amazingly, the heart does have its own local group of neurons, but I'd have thought they were more to do with pumping blood than storing arbitrary thoughts. The reason I think this is twofold. Firstly, because there really aren't enough of them to store anything much, and they don't have many external connections. Besides, the way associative memory works makes transplanting data from one neural network to another impossible or at least very complex. It's far easier to copy it by giving examples that the network then incorporates on its own terms. Secondly, there's no evolutionary advantage to storing memories in the heart.

There have been several articles over they years on this syndrome and at least a handful of thriller novels (and B-Rate movies) put out on the premise that the transplanted organ allows the former personality (an enraged killer or rapist) to take over the recipient.

Hmmm... I wonder if we were to have a heart transplant from a magician who was exceptional adept at manipulation let's say, if that would improve our abilities in that area?

Michael Caine was in The Hand wasn't he...that was enderingly rubbish...

abraxus wrote:Michael Caine was in The Hand wasn't he...that was enderingly rubbish...

But so much fun...

... What was the B-Rate parody (teen) film from a few years ago with the kid that had a demon hand that made him kill people... came out around the same time as the orignal Buffy the Vampire Slayer came out...

I love all that corn, it's one of my favorite types of "escape the world" flicks... especially the Wayan Crew and the SPOOKY MOVIE projects.

Ah but the original Buffy movie wasn't a patch on the series that it spawned!

But ahem...back on topic .

I found the following websites which might be of some interest both for those who did and did not catch the original show:

http://www.chisuk.org.uk/articles/result.php?key=172

and:

http://ellisctaylor.homestead.com/cellularmemory.html

Oh, and Tomo - I can see and understand your point, especially as it's given that the mind has around abouts one billion neurons and the heart has, I would imagine, comparatively less - but I think that in the programme they detailed an experiment which found out that in some cases it was the heart that reacted first to some negative images and then alterted the brain.

Cardza wrote:Oh, and Tomo - I can see and understand your point, especially as it's given that the mind has around abouts one billion neurons and the heart has, I would imagine, comparatively less - but I think that in the programme they detailed an experiment which found out that in some cases it was the heart that reacted first to some negative images and then alterted the brain.

Images? I don't get it. I know our hand and arm reacts on its own if you pick up something hot and have to drop it. The neurons that handle reflexes are in the spinal column. The brain is the last to know. It's more efficient to have reflexes happen locally in response to pain than have to sent a lot of messages to a brain that's thinking of cocoa and not hot milk spilling and damaging the body. I'll have to watch the links and get back to you. Weird stuff, eh?

was it called Idle Hands? Popcorn was another ridiculous film...

I've wondered about those new fangled face-transplants actually...

i wonder how the lines on the 'new' face correlate to the other person's facial structure and muscles? obviously theyd have to be similar in the first place surely to match up on some kind of level...

Would face-reading still work on that person properly after the op?

Tomo, I wasn't very clear; I think that I have the experiment that they did somewhere on tape...I will hopefully clarify it in a bit. It's not really anything to do with the Reflex Arc though.

Okay, having re-watched the tape the details of the experiment are as follows:

It was an experiment which showed the heart's role in processing information; subjects were shown a random assortment of highly emotional images at six second intervals; some of the pictures were of positive things, others of not.

In the prestimulus period - those six seconds between the pictures, after the previous one and before the next one, the heart and the brain reacted differently; the heart reacted sooner than the brain and made an intuitive response before a disturbing image; this anticipatory response sends a message to the brain's emotional centres and the brain then prepares the body to take action.

So that was the experiment - it was the heart that responded first and sent messages to the brain's emotional centres which then prepared the body to take action.

That sounds interesting. There's an experiment in Mind Hacks (hack #80) in which you place a hand on a table and try to see it as just another object. Then you randomly select a finger and wiggle it. It turns out that the relevant areas controlled by the subconscious are activated before the areas asociated with conscious selection. The subconscious is saying "you've selected that one" and we simply rationalise it away as being a conscious decision. The book says we tend tend to sense the decision of which finger to move an average of 400ms after the finger moves. Weird or what?

I find this sort of stuff fascinating...I think that I might look in to that book, it sounds quite interesting .

Here's a review of it too: http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic5722.php