Institute for Research of Workings of the Human Heart

The Institute of HeartMath in northern California is the site of some revolutionary research into the workings of the human heart. At this privately-funded, eight-year-old research enclave, scientists are showing that the heart plays a larger and more independent role than previously thought. They believe the heart's electrical signals not only shape the way the brain thinks about certain kinds of events, but that the heart itself may be able to remember emotion-charged events. This paper will look at these developments, and the experiences of some heart transplant recipients and their stories of memories relating to the organ donors.

Claire Sylvia became the recipient of the first heart-and-lung transplant ever done in New England in 1988 (Smith, 1997). The donor was an 18-year-old Maine man killed in a motorcycle accident. In the years that followed, Sylvia claims she found herself with new, odd tastes. Previously she had hated green peppers, now she loved them; she developed a passion for fried chicken; her tea-sipping was replaced by a love of beer, a drink she'd never liked prior to the transplant; and she felt herself acting more confident, more aggressive, and more masculine.

In a dream, she was convinced she met the heart donor, a man named Tim, and later, when she met the donor's family, found out that was indeed his name. Sylvia has turned her experiences into a book, "A Change of Heart" (1997). She tells of other heart transplant recipients with whom she

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or herself, she told Pearsall she had felt him come in about thirty minutes previously, feeling the presence of her dead husband's heart. She put her hand on the young man's chest, and, speaking to her dead husband through his heart, now in the young man's chest, told him everything was now copacetic. The boy's mother, in a strong Spanish accent, told the woman that her son used that word all the time now, but never had before the transplant. The boy had also developed some of the dead man's characteristics - eating meat and fatty foods, though he had been a vegetarian before the transplant, and loving fifties rock-and-roll, where before he had been a lover of heavy metal music. HeartMath's director, Rollin McCrary, points out that it has only been in the last decade that the medical literature has recognized that the heart has its own "brain" - a network of different kinds of neurons, identical to many of the kinds of neurons and neural networks that are found in the brain (Daviss, 1999, p. 24). He believes these two "brains" are connected by the vagus nerve, and that messages are continually flashed between the two. The current consensus among researchers, McCrary says, is that the body's neural system is a distributed

Category: Medical - I