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Comment by lewispollard | Hacker News Reader

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>Why is this news? Memories aren't stored only in our brains. There have been heart-transplant patients who suddenly craved food they'd never eaten.

wat

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Relevant academic article: "Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients That Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors"

(http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1013009425905)

tldr; "Sensitive transplant patients may evidence personal changes that parallel the history of their donors ... We suggest that cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is a plausible explanation for these parallels."

Madness!

A more reasonable hypothesis: the severance of the autonomous afferences coming from the heart affects the brain stem and / or hypothalamus, which in turns affects the rest of the brain.

It has the advantage of being testable.

Another (IMO less likely) possibility would be that the lack of brain-induced rhythm variations of the denerved heart has an influence on the brain.

It's more reasonable in that it's more palatable to you, but let's be clear: you're speculating.

The speculation that relies on a known mechanism is more believable than the speculation that doesn't even propose a mechanism.

The term 'speculation' implies a mechanism unknown/unproposed. 'Known mechanism' is again shorthand for 'palatable.'

Palatability is an unnecessarily pejorative shorthand for agreement with one's expectations of reality.

I don't read "speculation" as meaning anything other than that the object of speculation is as yet unproven, so speculation that makes an argument based on previously known physical principles can still fairly be called speculation. However, such speculation can rightly be given greater weight than speculation which draws no connection to prior knowledge.

For example, if one were to argue that fairies make plants grow, with no other information, then their argument can safely be ignored. On the other hand, if their argument includes a testable definition of a fairy, suggests a mechanism by which fairies add matter to plants, and provides a way of verifying that mechanism, then the detailed fairy argument should be given higher weight than the unsupported fairy argument, until evidence is available that either disproves the definition of a fairy, disproves the mechanism by which fairies make plants grow, or provides greater evidence for a different mechanism by which plants grow (mitosis, perhaps).

Based on the wording of the abstract, so are the study's authors. (That is, they say "we suggest" as opposed to "we hypothesized and provide supporting evidence." But, maybe they do in the full article, I don't know.)

Definitely, hence "hypothesis" and "possibility".

Another reasonable hypothesis is that the heart bypass pump causes brain damage, the "pump head" syndrome.

Makes we wonder - if somehow we could train our bodies to transfer memories to other body parts... which leads to all sorts of interesting possibilities.

"We conducted open-ended interviews..."

Can you say, "we asked leading questions until we get what we wanted"? Can you say, "Satanic scare fueled by 'recovered memories'"? Good boy.

Rather than being a phenomena that we can't explain, this is most probably a load of ridiculous pseudoscience.

See for example (http://www.quackometer.net/blog/2006/04/cellular-memory-fail...) for one such critism.

sorry for posting rubbish. I will check my sources better next time.

"Journal of Near-Death studies"? Some of the papers in there are interesting, but it does seem kind of .. experimental

The more reasonable explanation is cherry picking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy) Or selection bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias Or some blogger looking for ad revenue from clicks. Take your pick.

Here in Brazil there are several known cases of people changing their soccer team after a heart transplant.

This is known here because soccer fanatism is common, and some of the "victims" would never changed their team normally.

Perhaps they had a change of heart...

Sounds like science to me!

What? Please provide some links. The only story I heard so far about it was this one:

http://www.orfury.com.br/blog/65748/tricolor-de-coracao-e-fi...

And it's pretty clear that what happened is not what you are talking about. (I'm asking for links out of sincere curiosity)

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