He was the grumpiest fellow I’d ever met, and I was hella umimpressed. I tried a couple times to exchange pleasantries but after another minute or two, I gave up and stopped trying altogether. I turned in my seat and started chatting with another acquaintance instead.

It was years until I’d meet him again. But this time, he was quite simply, a delight. He had had an organ transplant and was quite the changed man. After a fun and lively chat, I remember thinking to myself that his new organ seemed to have blown a whole new personality into him…

It turns out, I might have actually been on the money.

There have long been stories of the recipients of organ transplants assuming some of the personality traits of their donor. Scientists have been studying the phenomenon for decades, in fact. There is a ton of empirical evidence – too much to dismiss it as fantasy or coincidence – and there are several theories as to why this occurs.

But what kind of changes are we talking about here?

Taste in art and music is one. One man developed a sudden appetite for classical music and never thought it would be anything to do with his donor – a young black man who had been killed in a drive-by shooting. Unbeknownst to him, the teenager had been hit while walking to a violin lesson.

A young woman described her new love of guitar thus: “I could never play
before, but after my transplant, I began to love music. I felt it in my heart. My heart had
to play.” Her heart had come from a donor who was a musician.

Not all reported changes have been positive, though. A 5-year-old boy who loved to swim suddenly developed an incredible fear of the water. He had no way of knowing that his donor had drowned.

Some transplant recipients say that they ‘know’ their donor somehow. Young children have been able to name their donor and describe them. One young woman started a support group for heart transplant recipients after she dreamed she was standing with her donor and she knew his name. The description and name matched.

In her support group, she discovered that her experience was not unique. “All of us had some sense after the transplant that we were not alone. And each of us had at some point spontaneously experienced our new heart as an ‘other’ with whom some form of communication was taking place.”

Dreams of how their donor died seem to be quite common. Feeling the impact of a car crash, or being thrust through the air after coming off a motorcycle. One man received the heart of a police offer who had been killed after being shot in the face. He began to dream of a bright light and a burning sensation in his face.

In the food category, there are many stories of food preferences changing. One woman who received the heart of a vegetarian said, “I was McDonald’s biggest money maker, and now meat makes me throw up.”

But the story that really gripped me was that of a 47-year-old man who received the heart of a 14-year-old gymnast. The young girl had sadly had food issues. She would often skip meals, and sometimes she would purge. After his transplant the man said, “There’s something about food. I don’t know what it is. I get hungry, but after I eat, I often feel nauseated and that it would help if I could throw up.”

Something about the way he described that feeling seems so authentic to me. It’s exactly how my clients describe it.

His new heart was trying to give him bulimia.

A lot of people will dismiss all this as figments of the recipient’s imagination. Maybe side-effects of immunosuppressant drugs. But there’s another theory that I think makes an awful lot of sense.

We think of memories as things that are stored in our brains, but memory can be stored in our cells as well (cellular memory). When we are exposed to a sickness, our immune system develops a sort of memory of it. And when we make lifestyle changes, or alter our environment, we can ‘dial up’ or ‘dial down’ our genes. This is the study of epigenetics and it relies on our body creating a kind of memory of our environment.

Animal studies have shown that transferring RNA between animals can transfer long-term memories. And it’s definitely plausible that DNA itself, or prions, could impart a kind of memory to a transplant recipient.

And of course the electromagnetic field that surrounds each of us could have a kind of memory. The heart generates it’s own electromagnetic field, so some people have suggested that a heart transplant will alter the recipient’s electromagnetic field. If information can be stored in that field, it’s possible that it could transfer that information to the recipient.

10 years ago, I would probably have dismissed most of this as woo-woo. But the more I learn and the more experience I gain in my career and my life, the more I acknowledge just how much we don’t know about the human body and mind.

It frustrates me to no end that mental and physical health are treated so separately in our healthcare system, when they are so clearly intertwined. The interplay between them is encapsulated in nutrition and lifestyle medicine so well. Symptoms of anxiety and depression can be alleviated through exercise and good nutrition. Our mindset around stress can change our physiological response to it. And you cannot heal someone’s disordered eating through talk therapy alone – they need to eat and eat consistently as well.