Newsflash: Your Heart Has A Memory

A ballet dancer, choreographer, and health food enthusiast, Claire Sylvia received a heart-lung transplant in 1988. Shortly after her discharge, Claire developed a sudden, unwelcome craving for Kentucky Fried Chicken nuggets. And that wasn’t the only change she noticed. To her family’s surprise, she became impulsive and argumentative, qualities she’d rarely displayed before the surgery.

When she met her donor’s family, Claire learned that her new personality traits matched his perfectly. Even more surprising, he was a regular at KFC; uneaten chicken nuggets were found in his pockets when he died.

Carter, a 7-month-old boy, received a heart transplant from a 16-month-old boy. Half a year later, Carter’s family had just entered a crowded church service when he let go his mother’s hand, darted into the throng of seated congregants, climbed into the lap of a stranger, and hugged him, calling him “Daddy.” The man, it turned out, was none other than the father of Carter’s heart donor, Jerry. When his bewildered parents asked why he’d done it, Carter insisted that “Jerry did it,” and that he’d simply gone along with Jerry. The families hadn’t yet met, and Carter had never heard his donor’s name.

Claire and Carter are by no means anomalies.

Since the late 1960s, researchers and journalists have documented the migration of memories, emotions, and experiences from donors to recipients after a heart transplant.

The migration can take several patterns, including changes in affinity for certain foods, music, art, and even sexual preference.

A 47-year-old man reported a sudden affinity for classical music, a genre he’d strongly disliked before. His donor was a 17-year-old violinist who dreamed of playing at Carnegie Hall, and who died hugging his violin.

And a 29-year-old woman who was gay before her transplant became engaged afterward to a man. She still believed that she was gay, yet was no longer attracted to women. “I think I got a gender transplant,” she said of the surgery. Her donor was a 19-year-old woman attracted to men.  

Food, music, and sexual preferences aren’t the only qualities that come with the new heart.  

Transplant recipients have inherited sensory “memories” that mirror the exact manner in which their donors died—and in the absence of information about their deaths. One young woman described repeated pressure in her chest that echoed the car accident that killed her donor, who was crushed behind the steering wheel of his vehicle. Another had repeated sensations of flying through the air; her donor had been thrown many yards from the scene of the motorcycle crash that had caused his death.

Many scientists dismiss such reports as “magical thinking,” or as the “side effects” of stress due to illness, transplantation, and immunosuppressant medication.

But others compile evidence that the heart is far more than just a pump for the circulatory system or an organ that takes direction from the brain.

The heart, they say, has an agency, intelligence, and even a memory of its own.

The Heart-Brain Axis

Most of us know about the gut-brain axis: The brain influences the gut, and the gut shapes the brain in return.

But the notion of reciprocity doesn’t do justice to the gut’s profound awareness, or to its massive influence on the brain.

The gut plays a starring role in immunity, mood, and well-being. It makes its own neurotransmitters. It produces feelings.

And it thinks and acts independently of direction from the brain.

Gut health is a major precursor of brain health. In this article, I detailed the discovery of inflammatory gut molecules that cross the blood-brain barrier many decades before illnesses like Parkinson’s disease manifest in the brain.

Multiple traditions—Chinese, Hindu, Islamic, Christian, and Hebrew, among them—have long viewed the heart as the seat of emotion, desire, and wisdom.

Science is just beginning to catch up.

Emerging research supports the notion that the heart has an intelligence of its own. Like the gut, it has a sophisticated, bi-directional relationship with the brain.

In 1991, just three years after Claire Sylvia received her heart transplant, Dr. J. Andrew Armour proposed the concept of the heart-brain, referred to today as the heart-brain axis.

In some regions of the brain, multiple networks of cells influence the rhythm and function of the heart.

But the heart also directs the brain.

The heart generates approximately 40-60 times more electrical power and 5,000 times more electromagnetic power than the brain.

It The heart a neural network of its own, called the “intrinsic cardiac nervous system.” This network contains 40,000 neurons capable of sensing, feeling, learning, and, researchers think, retaining memories.

Like their counterparts in the gut, intrinsic cardiac neurons can initiate activity without input from the nervous system.

The heart produces and releases neurotransmitters, which enable communication between the heart’s neurons and the brain, as well as other organs.  

One such neurotransmitter is atrial peptide, which inhibits the release of stress hormones, reduces the outflow of the sympathetic nervous system, and regulates motivation and behavior. Others include norepinephrine, histamine, serotonin (yes—not just in the gut but in the heart!), dopamine, acetylcholine, vasoactive intestinal peptide, and nitric oxide. The heart also plays a role in making oxytocin, the “social bonding” hormone.

The heart is interwoven with vagus nerve fibers, a whopping 80 percent of which ascend to the brain. This asymmetry leads many to think that the heart speaks more to the brain than the brain does to the heart.

These factors point to the heart as a sentient organ of perception, complex and self-directing, that maintains a continual stream of reciprocal communication with the body and the brain, as well as between them.

How might this new understanding of the heart lend insight to the experiences that a donor’s heart bequeaths to its recipient?

The Body Has A Memory

Memory involves the ability to acquire, store, and retrieve information, activities long limited solely to the domain of the brain and nervous system.

Yet considerable evidence points other versions of memory echoed throughout the body.

Immunological Memory

As an example, memory is a central function of the immune system.

Take SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

Our white blood cells memorize the genetic code of any pathogen—bacteria, virus, or fungi—they encounter. When they come into contact with that pathogen again, they recall and activate the code that destroys it.

Immunological memory underlies the very existence of vaccines. It allows epidemiologists to create just enough of the virus that, when introduced into our immune systems, allows us to eliminate or mitigate it. This, incidentally, is a form of “memory migration” from a vaccine to our bodies.

Immunological memory is encoded not in neurons but in the cells of the immune system, which makes it cellular memory.

The cells of the human heart also contain multiple types of cardiac immune cells, which makes it highly likely that they have immunological memory.

The intracardiac nervous system remodels itself after a heart transplant. This process is known as neuroplasticity, the term used to describe how the brain and nervous system learn from experience.

Neuroplasticity is thought to play a role in the formation, retrieval, and storage of memories.

Yet I’d argue that the remodeling of the heart’s own nervous system (and the immune system, gut, and other bodily forms of learning) could be better named as bioplasticity, the way cells, organs, tissues, and functions of the body learn in response to new experience.

The existence of immunological memory and neuroplasticity (bioplasticity) in the heart’s own nervous system makes it highly possible that memories are stored in the intracardiac nervous system and that, at the time of transplantation, they “migrate” to the heart’s new recipient.

Genetic Memory

Other kinds of cellular memory exist to support the notion of a heart memory, including genetic memory.

We’re getting into molecular biology here, which is decidedly not my lane. But here are a few nuggets.

Multiple scientific studies have extracted RNA from trained human donors into untrained (naïve) recipients. The findings suggest that RNA-mediated mechanisms could play a role in conveying memories or behavioral traits from heart donors to transplant recipients.

Trauma and Epigenetic Memory

The field of epigenetics explores variations not to DNA or the genetic code itself, but to the expression or suppression of genes. These often chemical changes have been implicated in the storage and modification of memory across multiple generations.

In one well-known study, researchers conditioned mice to feel fear in response to the smell of acetone, a fruity, pear-like odor. (This kind of conditioning is itself a form of memory.) The conditioning occurred before the conception of their offspring, and therefore was not shaped by experiences in gestation. Yet the researchers found that the next two generations of mice “remembered” the noxious experience. They displayed anxiety toward the conditioned odor but not to other odors. The results even held up in mice conceived using in vitro techniques.

The Sea Mollusk. Photo: Michael Bentley

In another animal study, scientists showed that memories could be transferred from one sea mollusk to another. They trained the mollusks to respond to an electrical shock to their tails, doing so over time to establish long-term memory. Then they removed RNA from the trained animals and injected it into untrained ones. The naïve animals responded with fear, as though they themselves had been trained, a demonstration that long-term memories can be transferred via RNA.

And in humans, Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues found that the offspring of trauma survivors exhibited endocrine changes, increased inflammatory markers (there’s that immune system memory coming into play!), and altered immune-related genes.

What’s the relevance of epigenetic, RNA, and DNA memory transfer to the heart?

Muscle cells of the heart known as cardiomyocytes contain both DNA and RNA. Plus, these muscle cells convey biological messages to target cells.

Fascia + Its Memory

Our fascia, or connective tissue matrix, is a sentient, intelligent system made up of continuous, uninterrupted, and intertwined solid and liquid elements. Each cell communicates with every other cell in a manner that is chaotic and described as quantum entanglement.

According to fascia research, multiple types of fascia cells exist. Each has a memory and, in addition, an awareness of both its mechanical and metabolic environments.

Visceral fascia surrounds the heart. And fascia infuses the heart-brain axis, allowing electrical, chemical, and mechanical signals to flow between the two intelligent structures.

Why The Heart’s Memory Matters

Before the 1900s, doctors officially declared time of death as the moment when the heart and lungs stopped working.

In the 20^th century, the medical field redefined death as “irreversible coma” or brain death. This definition of death is deeply neuro-centric.

It posits our life force as a function of the brain, not of the body, and certainly not of the heart.

But tracing memory across the systems of the body, across the bridge of time, and between us and others begins to tell a different story.

During the ten days it took me to research, write, and edit this piece, I kept interrogating the factors—the why—that compelled me to do so.

I appreciate the way science can serve to ground our gnosis, what we already intuit to be true. And yet, it seldom applies its method in the context of the collective.    

In this extended moment, we bear witness to so much chaos and suffering.

It feels compelling, even urgent, to understand the human heart as a sentient force that extends beyond the confines of the body, and to grasp its relevance to our larger social body.

That our heart has a memory which travels through space and time, which emits an energy that others can register, transmutes the heart from a noun to a verb.  

Our hearts, brains, and nervous systems can align for destructive purposes, as white nationalists in the U.K. (and, it must be said, Europe and the U.S.) are doing in acts of terrorism toward Black and Brown people. As Israel and its allies are doing toward Palestinians in Gaza. As others are doing in the Congo, Sudan, Tigray, Ukraine.

But they can also align in compassionate action. We can rise up with our whole hearts to create a different social system: an equitable one in which we, others, and the natural world around us are in a state of heart-brain-body coherence.

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Sources:

Shortly after discharge, she developed sudden, inexplicable, and unpleasant cravings: Sylvia, C., and Novak, W. (1997). A change of heart. New York, NY: Warner Books.

The transfer of personality characteristics from the donor to recipient: Lunde, D. T. (1969). Psychiatric Complications of Heart Transplants. AORN Journal, 10(6), 86–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0001-2092(08)70715-4

Carter, a 7-month-old boy, received a heart transplant from a 16-month-old who’d drowned: Pearsall, P., Schwartz, G. E. R., & Russek, L. G. S. (2000). Changes in heart transplant recipients that parallel the personalities of their donors. Integrative Medicine, 2(2), 65–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-2190(00)00013-5

A 47-year-old heart transplant survivor said he felt “like a teenager” after: Pearsall, P., Schwartz, G. E. R., & Russek, L. G. S. (2000). Changes in heart transplant recipients that parallel the personalities of their donors. Integrative Medicine, 2(2), 65–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-2190(00)00013-5

One recipient described repeated pressure in her chest that echoed the car accident: Pearsall, P., Schwartz, G. E. R., & Russek, L. G. S. (2000). Changes in heart transplant recipients that parallel the personalities of their donors. Integrative Medicine, 2(2), 65–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-2190(00)00013-5 In: Al-Juhani, A., Imran, M., Aljaili, Z. K., Alzhrani, M. M., Alsalman, R. A., Ahmed, M., Ali, D. K., Fallatah, M. I., Yousuf, H. M., & Dajani, L. M. (2024). Beyond the Pump: A Narrative Study Exploring Heart Memory. Cureus, 16(4), e59385. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.59385.

In a 2004 paper, researchers characterized a belief in inheriting a donor’s attributes: Inspector, Y., Kutz, I., & David, D. (2004). Another person's heart: magical and rational thinking in the psychological adaptation to heart transplantation. The Israel journal of psychiatry and related sciences, 41(3), 161–173.

You can think of this relationship as the heart-brain axis: Hu, J. R., Abdullah, A., Nanna, M. G., & Soufer, R. (2023). The Brain-Heart Axis: Neuroinflammatory Interactions in Cardiovascular Disease. Current cardiology reports, 25(12), 1745–1758. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11886-023-01990-8

Also referred to as the “intrinsic cardiac nervous system,” the heart has its own neural network: Al-Juhani, A., Imran, M., Aljaili, Z. K., Alzhrani, M. M., Alsalman, R. A., Ahmed, M., Ali, D. K., Fallatah, M. I., Yousuf, H. M., & Dajani, L. M. (2024). Beyond the Pump: A Narrative Study Exploring Heart Memory. Cureus, 16(4), e59385. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.59385

Immunological memory is coded not in brain cells, but in the cells of the immune system: Liester M. B. (2020). Personality changes following heart transplantation: The role of cellular memory. Medical hypotheses, 135, 109468.

Cardiomyocytes, muscle cells of the heart, contain both DNA and RNA: Waldenström, A., Gennebäck, N., Hellman, U., & Ronquist, G. (2012). Cardiomyocyte microvesicles contain DNA/RNA and convey biological messages to target cells. PloS one, 7(4), e34653. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0034653

The intracardiac nervous system remodels itself after a heart: Grupper, A., Gewirtz, H., & Kushwaha, S. (2018). Reinnervation post-heart transplantation. European heart journal, 39(20), 1799–1806. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehw604

Multiple scientific studies have extracted RNA from trained human donors into: Gaudi, S., Guffanti, G., Fallon, J., & Macciardi, F. (2016). Epigenetic mechanisms and associated brain circuits in the regulation of positive emotions: A role for transposable elements. The Journal of comparative neurology, 524(15), 2944–2954. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.24046

Researchers Initially identified them as infectious substances: Al-Juhani, A., Imran, M., Aljaili, Z. K., Alzhrani, M. M., Alsalman, R. A., Ahmed, M., Ali, D. K., Fallatah, M. I., Yousuf, H. M., & Dajani, L. M. (2024). Beyond the Pump: A Narrative Study Exploring Heart Memory. Cureus, 16(4), e59385. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.59385

In one well-known study, researchers subjected mice to feel fear at the smell of acetone: Dias, B. G., & Ressler, K. J. (2014). Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nature neuroscience, 17(1), 89–96. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3594

In a study of sea mollusks, scientists showed that memories could be transferred from one member: Bédécarrats, A., Chen, S., Pearce, K., Cai, D., & Glanzman, D. L. (2018). RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia. eNeuro, 5(3), ENEURO.0038-18.2018. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0038-18.2018

And Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues found that the offspring of human trauma survivors: Daskalakis, N. P., Xu, C., Bader, H. N., Chatzinakos, C., Weber, P., Makotkine, I., Lehrner, A., Bierer, L. M., Binder, E. B., & Yehuda, R. (2021). Intergenerational trauma is associated with expression alterations in glucocorticoid- and immune-related genes. Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 46(4), 763–773. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-020-00900-8

Each has a memory and, in addition, an awareness of both its mechanical: Bordoni, B., & Simonelli, M. (2018). The Awareness of the Fascial System. Cureus, 10(10), e3397. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.3397