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Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

This is wild, but many studies have reached the same conclusion.

I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.

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A theory I have seen is that we tend to mix up cause and effect.

So, for example, a dangerous situation causes stress and stress causes the heart to beat faster, all normal. But make the heart beat faster through external means and it will also cause stress. So it is not clear which one is the cause and which one is the effect, probably some weird combination, with all sorts of feedbacks. Life is messy.

So get a heart that isn't yours and it will not beat in a familiar way, which, in turn may be interpreted as changing emotions. And even if memories are entirely contained within the brain, what if the heartbeat is part of these memories, with a heart that reacts differently, the meaning of these memories may change.

For a tech analogy, in order to record a video game session, it is common to only record player input. If the game is deterministic, you just need to run the game with the recorded inputs and the session will be faithfully reproduced. It is much more compact than something like a video. Now imagine we change the game engine so that it responds slightly differently to inputs, now, when replayed, the game will appear different. If we imagine memories are "replays" and the engine is our body, than altering our body will also alter our memories.

> I remember reading somewhere that heart transplant recipients have random memory flashes that are not their memories, and sometimes they develop new personality traits.

Wild. Doesn't necessarily surprise me too much that the body stores some memories outside the brain, but it seems _very_ surprising that another body/brain can read and understand ones created by another. I'd assume that the whole mind and memory system is one big correlated mess, not essentially composed of data files in a ~standard encoding.

It would be hasty to assume that any memories would be transferable in such a way. If your hypothesis is that transplant recipients can have their memories altered by interpreting information carried by foreign organ cells, start by assuming they're reading junk data that they cannot decipher. Brains are great at turning junk data into something that feels real.

That was my followup question, are the memories accurate (even as much as normal memories are), or are they nonsense? Or even better, it'd be fun if they're not completely nonsense, but corrupted in some understandable way (like people/places are substituted for instance). There's no way at all that memories are encoded as essentially mpeg files, so _something_ has to be wrong with them.

But yeah, you're right, odds seem good that they're just nonsense, but even then it just feels weird that the body can even interpret them as memories in the slightest.

Maybe it's all about encoding and it IS pretty standard? Brain can decode vision through tongue nerves [1] as long as it looks like vision data and is correlated with head movements. There were experiments with other senses sent through different means or whole new sense (magnetic [2] and echolocation [3]). Looks like brain is so flexible, that anything resembling sensible information will be decoded.

[1] https://news.wisc.edu/a-taste-of-vision-device-translates-fr...

[2] https://blinry.org/compass-belt/

[3] https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/echolocation-in-peo...

I would probably ascribe it to the procedure itself. Like I imagine if you put someone under, opened up their chest, took their heart out and then... put it back in - that the stress of that whole thing would be enough to seriously mess with your head.

You could probably test that theory. Just compare heart transplants against similarly invasive surgeries and see if the same effects exist.

Rabies virus induces the same behavior across different species (the victims in terminal state are terrified by swallowing liquids).

That sounds really interesting! Can you cite any articles or anything?

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38694651/

Also relevant: https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2

> In addition to changes in preferences, some recipients describe new aversions after receiving a donor heart. For example, a 5-year-old boy received the heart of a 3-year-old boy but was not informed about his donor’s age or cause of death. Despite this lack of information, he provided a vivid description of his donor after the surgery: “He’s just a little kid. He’s a little brother like about half my age. He got hurt bad when he fell down. He likes Power Rangers a lot I think, just like I used to. I don’t like them anymore though” (p. 70, [8]). Subsequently it was reported that his donor had died after falling from an apartment window while trying to reach a Power Ranger toy that had fallen onto the window ledge. After receiving his new heart, the recipient refused to touch or play with Power Rangers

This is the most fascinating thing I've read in a long time. Thanks for the link

There’s a similar story I’ve read before in a different paper regarding about an organ donor who drowned and then the recipient developed an extreme aversion to water.

I don’t recall what the exact title or link to the article was though.

Man that seems like such a fantastical claim — but yeah, it does seem like the physical structure to support it could be there.

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