Transplants, Cellular Memory, and Reincarnation

Cellular Memory 

Following Graham's suicide, the blogosphere lit up with chatter. Some wags cruelly observed that, since both the donor and recipient had married the same woman, she must have driven them both to suicide. The fact that she was a compassionate, caring hospice worker didn't seem to matter.

Most commentators, however, offered the popular “cellular memory” hypothesis—the speculation that memories, habits, interests, and tastes may be stored not only in the brain, but in all the cells of the human body. An extension of this idea is that these traits may be transferable from one person to another via organ transplantation. According to this reasoning, Cottle's donor heart was a vehicle for transferring his suicidal depression to Graham. If true, Graham got not only a living heart, but a death sentence as well.

In 2000, Pearsall et al4 published an influential paper, “Changes in Heart Transplant Recipients that Parallel the Personalities of Their Donors.” Their study consisted of interviews with 10 patients who had received heart transplants—seven males and three females, aged from seven months to 56 years old—and their families and friends. They also interviewed 10 heart-lung recipients—five males and five females, aged 16 months to 34 years—and their families and friends. Also interviewed were the families and friends of the deceased donors.

One donor was a 16-month-old boy, Jerry, who drowned in a bathtub. The recipient of his heart was Carter, a seven-month-old boy diagnosed with tetralogy of Fallot, a congenital heart defect. If uncorrected, 70% of patients are dead by age 10.

The mother of Jerry, the donor, was a physician. She reported:

The first thing is that I could more than hear Jerry's heart. I could feel it in me. When Carter first saw me, he ran to me and pushed his nose against me and rubbed and rubbed it. It was just exactly what we did with Jerry. Jerry and Carter's heart is 5 years old now, but Carter's eyes were Jerry's eyes. When he hugged me, I could feel my son. I mean I could feel him, not just symbolically. He was there. I felt his energy.

I'm a doctor. I'm trained to be a keen observer and have always been a natural born skeptic. But this was real. I know people will say that I need to believe my son's spirit is alive, and perhaps I do. But I felt it. My husband and my father felt it. And I swear to you, and you can ask my mother, Carter said the same baby-talk words that Jerry said. Carter is 6, but he was talking Jerry's baby talk and playing with my nose just like Jerry did.

We stayed with the [recipient family] that night. In the middle of the night, Carter came in and asked to sleep with my husband and me. He cuddled up between us exactly like Jerry did, and we began to cry. Carter told us not to cry because Jerry said everything was okay. My husband and I, our parents, and those who really knew Jerry have no doubt. Our son's heart contains much of our son and beats in Carter's chest. On some level, our son is still alive.

The recipient's mother reported:

I saw Carter go to her [the donor's mother]. He never does that. He is very, very shy, but he went to her just like he used to run to me when he was a baby. When he whispered “It's okay, Mama,” I broke down. He called her Mother, or maybe it was Jerry's heart talking. And one more thing that got to us. We found out talking to Jerry's mom that Jerry had mild cerebral palsy, mostly on his left side. Carter has stiffness and some shaking on that same side. He never did as a baby and it only showed up after the transplant. The doctors say it's probably something to do with his medical condition, but I really think there's more to it.

One more thing I'd like you to know about. When we went to church together, Carter had never met Jerry's father. We came late and Jerry's dad was sitting with a group of people in the middle of the congregation. Carter let go of my hand and ran right to that man. He climbed on his lap, hugged him, and said “Daddy.” We were flabbergasted. How could he have known him? Why did he call him Dad? He never did things like that. He would never let go of my hand in church and never run to a stranger. When I asked him why he did it, he said he didn't. He said Jerry did and he went with him.

The authors found parallels between donors and recipients “in food, music, art, sexual, recreational, and career preferences, as well as specific instances of perceptions of names and sensory experiences related to the donors (eg, one donor was killed by a gunshot wound to the face; the recipient had dreams of seeing hot flashes of light in his face).” They found from two to five posttransplant parallels between donors and recipients per case. They concluded, “The effects of the immunosuppressive drugs, stress of the surgery, and statistical coincidence are likely insufficient to explain the findings. The plausibility of cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is suggested.”

The event that catapulted cellular memory into the national conversation, however, was the case of Claire Sylvia, a 47-year-old professional dancer from New York City. The publication of her 1997 book A Change of Heart: A Memoir5 was like calling down lightning. Sylvia, a lovely, articulate, and talented woman, described how she underwent a successful heart-lung transplant at Yale-New Haven Hospital in 1988 for primary pulmonary hypertension. She believed she got more than new organs. Although she had never liked foods such as beer and chicken nuggets, she began to crave them following her transplant. She assumed a masculine walk and began to swear, which previously disgusted her. For no apparent reason she took up riding motorcycles very fast, which was totally out of character. Following a revealing dream, she made an end run around the medical authorities and sought out the family of her donor Tim, a teenage boy who died in a motorcycle accident. Tim's family verified that her new traits had been typical of him. She even learned that Tim had chicken nuggets in his jacket when he fatally crashed his motorcycle. Sylvia's story resulted in a made-for-TV movie, Heart of a Stranger, starring actress Jane Seymour.6 After her story was featured on 60 Minutes, other transplant recipients came forward with similar stories. Several books followed, almost all invoking the concept of cellular memory as an explanation of the “new” Sylvia.

Skeptics 

Skeptics have strenuously attempted to stem the tide of belief in cellular memory. Robert Todd Carroll, author of the online Skeptic's Dictionary, has explored the origins of this idea. He suggests it came not from science but possibly from the movies. He cites the 1971 award-winning TV movie Brian's Song, in which Brian Piccolo (played by James Caan), a white Chicago Bears football player, receives a transfusion from his black teammate Gale Sayers (played by Billy Dee Williams). Piccolo remarks that the transfusion explains his subsequent craving for chitlins.7

Or perhaps, Carroll says, the idea came from Les Mains d'Orlac, an Austrian silent horror film of 1924 based on a story by Maurice Renard (1875-1939).8 In it, a concert pianist loses his hands in a train accident. When he receives the hands of an executed murderer in a transplant operation, he develops the urge to kill. Several variations of the story have been made into movies, including the 1960 thriller Hands of the Strangler.9 Another version is the 1991 horror movie Body Parts, in which a prison psychiatrist loses an arm in a car accident and receives the arm of an executed serial killer, after which the transplanted arm develops a mind of its own.10 A more recent literary variation is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Edna Buchanan's 1999 thriller Pulse, the story of a heart transplant recipient who learns the identity and mode of death of his donor.11

Disbelievers of cellular memory abound within medicine. Most consider it a fantasy. As cardiologist John Schroeder of Stanford University Medical Center says, “The idea that transplanting organs transfers the coding of life experience is unimaginable. Most scientists believe psychological experience is stored in the brain. This is just not something the [medical transplant world] accepts.” Schroeder's opinion is based on the hundreds of heart transplants that have been performed at Stanford, the first one in 1968. He believes that medications commonly used during and after transplantation alter taste and thereby change dietary preferences. Some psychologists say that the best explanation for changed tastes and new behaviors is wish fulfillment, self-fulfilling prophecy, and suggestion, when recipients suspect or actually learn the identities and personalities of their donors.12

Surgeon Jeffrey D. Punch, MD, chief of the Division of Transplantation at the University of Michigan Health Systems in Ann Arbor, agrees. He says:

Organs are not capable of transferring memory to a person's mind in any conventional sense…. There are several possible logical explanations for why people might assume characteristics of their donors: Side effects of transplant medications may make people feel weird and different from before the transplant. For example, prednisone makes people hungry: The recipient of an organ transplant develops a love of pastry and finds out the person that donated their organ loved pastry as well. They think there is a connection, but really it is just the prednisone making their body crave sweets.

It could also be pure coincidence: The patient watches a TV show while recovering from a transplant that shows older adults rollerblading and decides that it looks like fun, but doesn't make a conscious decision to do anything about it because they are still recovering from the transplant. Months later they are shopping and they see rollerblades and decide to give it a try since it was something they were incapable of doing for heath reasons before the transplant. They like it and get good at it. Later they find out that the donor was a young person that liked to rollerblade. It is easy to understand how the patient and family might believe that the new organ had something to do with Mom's new-found love of rollerblading. In actuality, the only thing the new organ gave her was the health to try rollerblades. The idea came from a TV show she forgot she ever saw.

A transplant is a profound experience and the human mind is very suggestible. Medically speaking, there is no evidence that these reports are anything more than fantasy.13

Another perennial complaint from skeptics about posttransplant changes is confirmation bias. As Tom Rees of the British Humanist Association (BHA) Science Group says in a critique of the above posttransplant study by Pearsall, Schwartz, and Russek,4

If you look at enough things, you will always find a ‘coincidental’ match. The problem is, you need to take into account all the possible ‘coincidences’ that could have occurred but didn't. There's an easy way to get round the problem of confirmation bias. First, you add in some controls—pairs of people who never had a heart transplant, but are otherwise similar to the people you're studying (age, gender, etc.). Then you anonymise the data and give them to an independent reviewer. It they can pair up the transplant donors and recipients, then you know you're on to something. Otherwise it's just balderdash.14

There are problems with this point of view. The fact that scientists are the reviewers does not make the review process foolproof. As skeptic Marcello Truzzi acknowledged, “Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, open-mindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe.”15 The conclusions of independent reviewers frequently depend on who is selected, how they are chosen, and who selects them. What is their belief system? Are they open to the possibility of posttransplant parallels between donors and recipients? If not, they will probably never identify any such parallels even though they may exist, but will toss everything in the coincidence bin.

As the executive editor of a peer-reviewed journal and a frequent peer reviewer for other scientific publications, I have seen reviewer bias work both ways—sometimes reviewers are too gullible, sometimes too closed. Any journal editor knows that independent reviewers can be as bigoted and prejudiced as anyone else, even in their areas of expertise. As Arthur C. Clarke said in his 1963 book Profiles of the Future, “It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with the preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. When this happens, the most well-informed men become blinded by their prejudices and are unable to see what lies directly ahead of them.”16 As one reviewer boasted in rejecting a paper dealing with remote perception, “This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed.”17

Prejudice is particularly likely to surface when independent reviewers are asked to assess phenomena whose existence challenges the conventional view of the brain-mind relationship. For devotees of the dominant view, that all mental phenomena are produced by the brain and are confined to it, posttransplant parallels are impossible by definition. Anything bordering on “ESP” or “parapsychology” must be condemned. Sometimes skeptics concede this. As psychologist Ray Hyman of the University of Oregon, an arch-critic of parapsychology, acknowledges in A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology, “The level of the debate [about parapsychology] during the past 130 years has been an embarrassment for anyone who would like to believe that scholars and scientists adhere to standards of rationality and fair play.”18 This leads to an uneven playing field and shameful double standards when phenomena such as posttransplant parallels are considered.

Critiques such as that given by BHA are woefully uninformed. They are oblivious to the existence of substantial research in telesomatic phenomena, in which perceptions and physical symptoms are exchanged between normal people remotely, beyond the reach of the senses.19 These events manifest as shared thoughts, identical sensations in various parts of the body, a profound sense of connection, and so on. David Lorimer, of the United Kingdom–based Scientific and Medical Network, calls these phenomena examples of “empathic resonance.”20 The BHA critique wrongly assumes that these exchanges between normal individuals simply do not occur, but research says otherwise. Since telesomatic phenomena occur between normal individuals, there is no reason in principle why they could not also occur between donors and recipients, in which case they would appear to be posttransplant parallels.

What about coincidence? Some skeptics accept “mere chance” as the preferred explanation for posttransplant phenomena with breathtaking insouciance. For them, no event is so unusual that it cannot be explained by coincidence. Some events, however, are so uncanny that one wonders if coincidence is being asked to shoulder more than it can bear. Consider, for example, the following case, reported by a psychiatrist, of an eight-year-old girl who had received a heart transplant from a 10-year-old girl who was murdered:

Her mother brought her to me when she started screaming at night about her dreams of the man who had murdered her donor. She said her daughter knew who it was. After several sessions, I could not deny the reality of what this child was telling me. Her mother and I finally decided to call the police and, using the description from the little girl, they found the murderer. He was easily convicted with the evidence my patient provided. The time, weapon, place, clothes he wore, what the little girl he killed had said to him…everything the little transplant recipient reported was completely accurate….21

Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”22 The breezy way chance is invoked by many skeptics may in some instances crosses over into the “too simple” domain.

One of the reasons posttransplant phenomena have such a difficult time gaining traction in the medical-scientific community is the assumption that these happenings violate the laws of nature and therefore cannot possibly be valid. Most skeptics who hold this point of view, I regret to say, are simply not well informed about developments in experimental parapsychology and theory development in this field. As Dr Kit Pedler, the British medical scientist who for many years was head of the Electron Microscopy Department at the University of London, and who, interestingly, was the unofficial scientific adviser to the BBC Doctor Who radio series, said bluntly,

A scientist would have to be either massively ignorant or a confirmed bigot to deny the evidence that the human mind can make connection with space, time and matter in ways which have nothing to do with the ordinary senses. Further, he cannot deny that these connections are compatible with current thinking in physics, and may in the future become accepted as a part of an extended science in which the description ‘paranormal’ no longer applies, and can be replaced by ‘normal.’23

These are strong words, but they express the understandable frustration many clinicians and researchers in consciousness-related fields feel toward the perennial stonewalling of uninformed critics.

Some critics reject posttransplant phenomena because they are inexplicable. Orthopedist and researcher Robert O. Becker points to the arbitrariness that is involved in accepting some mysterious phenomena whereas rejecting others. He observes, “Following the curious dogma that what we don't understand can't exist, mainstream science has dismissed psychic phenomena as delusions or hoaxes simply because they're rarer than sleep, dreams, memory, growth, pain, or consciousness, which are all inexplicable in traditional terms but are too common to be denied.”24 I agree with Becker, but would also argue, as have others, that psychic phenomena are not rarer than any of the categories he mentions; they merely appear that way because they operate mainly in the unconscious domain, off the stage of awareness.25, 26, 27

As I've explored the literature surrounding posttransplant phenomena, I've been saddened by the viciousness of this debate. Those who attempt objectively to study these phenomena are often subjected to ridicule and savage ad hominem attacks. “Outrageous,” “fantastic,” “unimaginable,” “pseudoscientific,” “New Age,” “balderdash,” “delusional,” “gullible,” “naïve,” “junk science,” and “absurd” are commonly used to denounce these reports. These terms have been used for years by many skeptics to discredit paranormal phenomena in general. Some critics despise the idea of these phenomena so intensely that they are apparently willing to die for their beliefs. For instance, the prominent philosopher Daniel Dennett, of Tufts University, is reported by paranormal researcher Dick J. Bierman to have said that he would “commit suicide if paranormal phenomena turned out to be real.”28

This debate is deeply visceral because the supremacy of conventional science is being called into question. Cultural critic Neil Postman got it right in a speech to the German Informatics Society in 1990 when he said, “George Orwell…about 50 years ago…remarked that the average person today is about as naïve as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.”29

Believing in science is one thing; it's the “no matter what” that is troubling. When devotees of a particular perspective in science begin to prefer suicide to a change of view, it's time to take stock and ask what is going on. Posttransplant phenomena, like parapsychology, have the power to cause critics to adopt inflexible, “no matter what” positions. This strategy is traitorous to science and medicine and should be resisted by all who care about science. The statesman Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr. advocated a preferable approach: “If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.”30

Several excellent books have appeared recently that address the dreary complaints of skeptics. Among them are philosopher Chris Carter's Parapsychology and the Skeptics,31 researcher Stephan A. Schwartz's Opening to the Infinite,32 award-winning science fiction writer Damien Broderick's Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come In from the Cold,33 geophysicist Robert M. Schoch's and Logan Yonavjak's The Parapsychology Revolution,34 physician Robert S. Bobrow's The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine,35 and researcher Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe36 and Entangled Minds.37

Why the Heart? 

If cellular memory is real, why should it involve mainly the heart, as the burgeoning accounts seem to indicate? Kidney transplants and skin grafts have been done for decades longer than heart transplants. Why haven't we heard about cellular memory in these cases? Xenografts and xenotransplants—cells, tissues, and organs from another species, such as pig heart valves—have also been implanted in humans for some time; why don't these recipients take on characteristics of their donor animal? What is special about myocardial cells that would make them a better vehicle for memory transfer than liver, kidney, skin, or blood cells?

No one knows the answer to this question, but clues may have surfaced in experiments that researcher Rollin McCraty and his colleagues at the HeartMath Research Center in Boulder Creek, California, published in 2004.38 These studies were based on a series of now-classic “presentiment” experiments by researcher Dean Radin, which he began at the University of Nevada in 1993. I discussed Radin's experiments in this column in a recent editorial about premonitions.39 With your indulgence, I'll repeat this discussion for those who missed it earlier, because of the relevance of Radin's findings to the present topic. For those who are familiar with my earlier essay, you may wish to skip the following seven paragraphs to the discussion of the experiments of McCraty and his associates.

Radin took advantage of the well-known “orienting response,” which is displayed by an organism in a fight-or-flight situation. When humans face a crisis or an unknown, fearful situation, there is a characteristic response of the autonomic nervous system: the pupils dilate, the brain waves alter, there is an increase in sweat gland activity, an increase in the heart rate, and blanching of the extremities as blood vessels constrict. These physiological changes make biological sense, because when we are in danger these modifications sharpen our perceptions, increase our physical strength, reduce the danger of external hemorrhage, and in general make it more likely that we'll survive whatever threat we face.

Subjects in Radin's experiment40 sat in front of a computer screen. On the subject's left hand, Radin and his team measured three physiological responses that indicate physiological arousal: heart rate, the amount of blood in a fingertip, and electrodermal activity or skin conductance, which is an indicator of sweating. In their right hands, the subjects held a computer mouse. When they pressed the mouse, the computer randomly selected an image from a pool of 120 high-quality digitized photographs that were of two types, calm and emotional. The calm photos were pleasant images of natural scenes, landscapes, and cheerful people. Emotional photos were disturbing, shocking, or arousing, such as erotic, sexual pictures and grisly autopsies. After the mouse was pressed, the computer waited five seconds while the screen was blank and then showed the randomly selected image for three seconds. Then the screen went blank for five seconds, and this was followed by a five-second rest period. Then another trial would begin. Twenty-four subjects participated, viewing a total of 900 pictures. During the five seconds after the subjects pressed the mouse and the screen was blank, their electrodermal activity began to rise in anticipation of the subsequent photo; nothing surprising there. The stunning finding, however, was that the electrodermal activity increased more if the future picture was going to be emotional. In other words, the participants “preacted” to their own future emotional states before the emotional pictures were seen and before their computer had selected them. Radin and colleagues called this a presentiment effect, as mentioned, to indicate a prior sentiment or feeling.

By the late '90s, Radin had concluded four separate presentiment experiments.40 Overall, the odds favoring a true presentiment effect in these studies were 125,000 to one. The studies are a profound challenge to common sense because they demonstrate, under double-blind conditions, that when the average person is about to see an emotional picture, he or she will respond before that picture appears. The future, it seems, is now.37

Radin also hypothesized that the greater the emotional content of a picture, the larger or more robust the presentiment effect would prove to be. He tested this possibility and found it to be true: the more the emotionality, the greater the presentiment effect, with odds against chance of 125 to one.37

The electrodermal activity or galvanic skin response that Radin measured is, of course, only one aspect of the body's fight-or-flight mechanism. Would other aspects of this emergency reaction pattern also reflect presentiment? To test this, Radin measured the diameter of the pupil, which dilates when the body is gearing up for fight or flight. He found the same pattern. As with electrodermal activity, pupillary dilation significantly increased several seconds prior to being shown randomly selected images of sex, violence, or mayhem, when compared to peaceful, serene pictures.41 This suggests that the body's entire autonomic system may be capable of apprehending future events.

Might this include the heart, which is richly endowed with connections from the autonomic nervous system? Even to ask the question is heresy, because of the presumption that knowing takes place in the brain and only in the brain. Radin's findings, however, which have been replicated by researchers in various laboratories, challenge this conventional wisdom.

McCraty and his HeartMath colleagues decided to find out if the heart is capable of sensing future events. Following Radin's protocol, they showed emotionally arousing or calming pictures to 26 subjects who were experienced meditators or skilled in emotional management techniques popularized by the Institute of HeartMath. Unlike the subjects studied by Radin, the HeartMath subjects did not demonstrate a presentiment effect in skin conductance (galvanic skin response). The reason, the researchers suggested, was that their subjects had been trained through meditation and other techniques not to react to stressful stimuli.38

The HeartMath subjects, however, showed a significant presentiment effect in the behavior of the heart. Around five seconds prior to viewing the image, the subjects' heart rates began to decelerate before being shown stressful images, but not if calming images followed. Somehow the heart “knew” what lay ahead in the future, even though the subjects were consciously clueless about it. The HeartMath researchers also found significant gender differences. Women demonstrated a greater cardiac presentiment response to future emotional stimuli than did men.

Could the brain have been sensing the future and relaying the information to the heart? The HeartMath researchers say no. They were able to show that the heart registers future events before the brain does, and that the slowing of the heart rate originates within the heart, not in the brain. This goes against the conventional notion that the brain is in charge of how the heart responds to emotional stimuli, by sending signals via the autonomic nervous system.

The HeartMath researchers conclude that “recent work in neurocardiology [suggests that] the heart is a sensory organ and an information encoding and processing center with an extensive intrinsic nervous system, enabling it to learn, remember, and make functional decisions independent of the cranial brain.”38(pp133-143)

Is this research the missing link that explains how the heart might be a carrier for memories from a donor to a transplant recipient? It's too early to make this conclusion, as I'll explain. Still, these are tantalizing findings that may one day revolutionize our basic concepts of time, consciousness, and memory.

Why Now? 

There is a plausible reason why transplant recipients have only recently come forward to reveal their experiences: it has only lately become respectable to talk about them.

A similar situation existed with near-death experiences, which were largely unknown until psychiatrist Raymond Moody sparked interest in them in 1975 with his book Life After Life.42 Soon afterward, it seemed they were everywhere. Now, the Gallup Poll finds that around eight million Americans say they've had a near-death experience.43 Who knew? A parallel situation may well exist with posttransplant experiences.

Reincarnation 

The posttransplant phenomenon is being embraced as something new, but it is essentially an ancient idea whose origins are lost in history. It is a variation of reincarnation—the concept that someone who has died can reappear as a living person. The new twist is organ transplantation, which did not exist in the annals of reincarnation until the development of modern surgical technology.

Can memories and personality traits be transferred from one individual to another without organ transfer? If the answer were yes, this would suggest that the transfer of an organ may not be required in the above cases and that a more fundamental process is at work. The answer to this question, it turns out, appears to be affirmative.

In the field of research dealing with the possibility of reincarnation and past lives, one name towers above all others—the late Ian Stevenson, MD (1918-2007), Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and director of the Division of Personality Studies at the Health Sciences Center, University of Virginia. No one else has approached this area with the scholarship, thoroughness, and dogged devotion to detail as he. Stevenson has combed the planet, from the back roads of Burma and the remote villages of India, to the largest cities on Earth. He has devoted decades to scouring every continent except Antarctica, investigating always the same quarry—children who appear to remember past lives. The scope of his work is breathtakingly universal, and the thousands of cases he has amassed generally awe even skeptics. For example, arch-critic Carl Sagan conceded that there is an area that “deserve[s] serious study—…young children…[who] report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”44

As Stevenson describes in his book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect,45 these cases occur in every culture, including our own, and they demonstrate a strong internal consistency. Typically, a child between the age of two and four will begin to speak about experiences he or she had in a previous life, usually with intense emotions. This usually makes no sense to the parents. Nearly always the child describes his or her death in the previous life, which is usually violent. This is one reason, Stevenson states, why remembering a previous life is almost never a pleasant experience for a child. In addition, “Too often the children are troubled by confusion regarding their identity, and this becomes even more severe in those children who, conscious of being in a small body, can remember having been in an adult one, or who remember a life as a member of the opposite sex. To these tormenting awarenesses may be added a tearing division of loyalties between present and previous families.”45(p9) Between the ages of five and eight, the child generally ceases to speak about a remembered life, as memories fade.

In addition to memories, Stevenson has accumulated evidence suggesting that behaviors may be carried over from life to life. For example, children often experience phobias consistent with the mode of death of the remembered personality. A child recalling a life that ended in drowning may be afraid of being immersed in water. One who remembers a life terminated by a shooting may demonstrate a phobia for guns and loud noises. If death involved an auto accident, the child may be phobic of cars, buses, and trucks. These phobias often begin before the child can speak, and there may be no model for them in the family that might explain them.

“Philias” also occur. These may take the form of a desire for particular foods not eaten in the subject's family or for clothes that are entirely different from whose worn by family members. For example, there may be craving for tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs the previous personality was known to use. Claire Sylvia's experience following the transplantation of Tim's heart and lungs into her body resembles these observations.

Some subjects show skills they have not been taught or have not witnessed, which the remembered personality was known to possess. Children sometimes remember a past life of a person of the opposite sex. Such children almost invariably show traits of the sex of the remembered person, such as cross-dressing, playing games of the opposite sex, and displaying attitudes typical of that sex. As with phobias, these preferences attenuate as the child grows older, but a few children remain intransigently fixed on them.45(p11)

A promethean work that goes into greater detail is Stevenson's multivolume Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects.46 Sometimes, Stevenson shows, the later-born individual appears to inherit actual physical changes of the deceased, such as birthmarks and birth defects. An example is Lekh Pal Jatav, born in December 1971 in the village of Nagla Devi in the Mainpuri District of Uttar Pradesh, India. Lekh Pal was born without the fingers of his right hand, which were mere stubs. Shortly after he began to talk he mentioned a few words about a previous life and continually repeated the word “Tal, Tal,” which made no sense to his family. In due course a woman from the village of Nagla Tal, about eight kilometers away, came to Nagla Devi and noticed Lekh Pal in his mother's arms. This prompted her to relate that a child in Nagla Tal had had his fingers cut off in an accident, resulting in a deformity resembling Lekh Pal's birth defect.

Lekh Pal began to speak about the life of Hukum, the child from Nagla Tal, who at about three-and-a-half years of age, stuck a hand in the blades of a fodder-chopping machine while his father was not looking and had his fingers cut off. He described to his older sister how, in a previous life, he had stuck his hand in a fodder-chopping machine. He said he had a father and mother, as well as an older sister and a younger brother in “Tal.” Eventually Lekh Pal's parents took him to Nagla Tal and the distant families got together.

Was Lekh Pal's memories and birth defect evidence that Hukum had reincarnated in his body? Stevenson provides us with suggestive evidence, but the conclusions we draw must be our own.

Stevenson reports a wide spectrum of physical deformities and birth marks, together with photographs—malformed fingers corresponding to the amputation of fingers from a sword in a remembered lifetime; birthmarks corresponding to the entry and exit wounds of bullets in the remembered personality; congenital constriction rings in the legs of an individual who recalled being bound by ropes in a previous existence; the congenital absence of the lower leg corresponding to an accidental amputation of the leg in the previous personality; birthmarks corresponding to burns, knife wounds, and various other traumas occurring in the remembered individual's life.

Stevenson describes a variety of ways in which the images in the mind of a living person might create changes in that person's own body. He singles out stigmata and the physical phenomena associated with hypnosis as evidence that the thoughts of an individual can create demonstrable, visible effects on their own bodies. He discusses “telepathic impressions,” through which consciousness may bridge nonlocally between individuals at a distance. These cases are not hearsay. Stevenson has investigated a great many of them firsthand.47

Many believe that current science can explain all birth defects. Currently, however, Stevenson states that only 30% to 50% of birth defects can be explained by genetic abnormalities, teratogens such as thalidomide and alcohol, and infections such as rubella.45(p3) This leaves 50% to 70% in the “cause unknown” category. Moreover, geneticists can't tell us why one fetus and not another is affected following identical exposure to risk, nor why a birth defect takes a particular form, nor why a birthmark occurs at a particular place on the body. Genes, in Stevenson's view, are being asked to explain far more than they are capable of. They provide instructions for producing the constituents of proteins, yet they don't tell us how proteins and other metabolites become organized into cells and the complex organs that make up our bodies. These limitations are not widely admitted. “Some geneticists are not modest in assuring us that they will in due course supply all the information we need to understand embryology and morphology,” Stevenson notes. But “this amounts to a promissory note with no immediate cash value, and in the meantime we are free to consider the possibility of other contributory factors.”45(p180)

The British biologist Rupert Sheldrake has been among the most eloquent critics of genes as a sufficient explanation for form and pattern in living organisms, as described in his landmark book A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation.48

I owe a personal debt to Ian Stevenson. When I practiced internal medicine, I often cared for parents who were dealing with the death of a child. I recommended they read Stevenson's book Children Who Remember Previous Lives.49 This was inevitably consoling because it provided them with reasons for believing in the continuation of their child's existence in some form following death.

So What? 

What difference would it make if reincarnation were accepted? The most important consequence, Stevenson believes, is that it would show us that our mind might exist separately from the physical body and survive its death.

But how could a mind attach to a body, separate from it at the time of death, then reattach to another body later when reincarnation occurs? This, of course, remains a mystery. But equally mysterious are the confident claims of neuroscientists that the brain “somehow” produces consciousness in the first place. We forget that almost any claim made by anyone about the origins and destiny of consciousness is currently inexplicable. Which mystery shall we align with? Just because we may be more accustomed to one particular mystery does not make it correct. Familiarity is not evidence. If we were to acknowledge that we are all in the dark about the essential nature of consciousness, we might agree with Voltaire's position on reincarnation: “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once.”50

In spite of the criticism they arouse, questions about the nature of consciousness and the possible survival of bodily death deserve our sincerest consideration. As Stevenson puts it, “It has been wisely said that the question of a life after death is the most important one that a scientist—or anyone—can ask.”45(p186) Stevenson is not alone. To quote Orwell again: “The major problem of our time is the decay of belief in personal immortality.”51 C.G. Jung thought similarly. He held that immortality was real and that for most people belief in it is vital to psychological health. “As a doctor,” he said, “I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality.”52

Nonlocal Mind: An Alternative to Cellular Memory 

I believe the transplant phenomena we've examined are best accounted for by nonlocal mind, a concept I've previously described at length in this column.53, 54 Nonlocal mind is not localized or confined to specific points in space, such as brains or bodies, or to specific points in time, such as the present. Nonlocal mind is infinite in space and time; a limited nonlocality is a contradiction in terms. I find the evidence for this picture of human consciousness compelling, as do many others.19, 32, 37, 55, 56

Why is nonlocal mind a better explanation than cellular memory for posttransplant phenomena?

For one thing, it may be the best explanation for reincarnation, in which memories and traits carry over from one life to another in the absence of organ transfer. This suggests, as mentioned, that a transplanted organ may simply be unnecessary for the carryover of memory, and that the transplant may merely be along for the ride.

Moreover, there is no evidence that any cell in the body can actually produce a specific thought. This is as true for brain cells as for heart, lung, liver, or any other kind of cell. Even though the celebrated neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) famously stimulated specific areas of the brain and caused thoughts and images to appear in the mind of an awake individual,57 this does not mean that a thought resides in a brain cell any more than the image on a television screen lives inside the TV set. An image is not produced by the TV set, nor is a voice produced by a radio, but is extraneous to it in the form of an electronic signal. This analogy has been advanced by luminaries from William James to Rupert Sheldrake, and there is no compelling counterargument. Just so, cells, tissues, and organs may simply be a receiver of information and not its originator. I doubt that a donated organ retains cellular memory of the donor's experiences, which are then “played back” in the recipient following a transplant. This could be called a “CD theory”—the donated organ being the compact disc containing the information, and the recipient's body being the CD player that decodes or plays back the information.

Attempting to anchor memories, thoughts, and traits in cellular biochemistry, which can be transferred by moving tissue from one person to another, may reflect a longing for physically based explanations such as DNA and genes. Even Penfield, the founder and director of McGill University's world-famous Montreal Neurological Institute, reluctantly discarded this point of view. The year before his death, in his book The Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain, he said, “Mind must be viewed as a basic element in itself…. The mind seems to act independently of the brain in the same sense that a programmer acts independently of his computer…. It will always be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain….”58 I hear skeptics shrieking in the wings, denouncing Penfield's suggestion that the mind may be capable of acting independently from the body. I prefer instead the thoughtful response of the legendary Nobel neurophysiologist Sir Charles S. Sherrington (1857-1952): “That our being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I suppose, no greater improbability than that it should rest on one.”59

If Penfield is correct—if the mind can act independently of the brain, and if it is impossible to explain mind on the basis of neuronal activity in the brain—why is not the mind also capable of acting independently of the heart or any other transplanted organ? Why tie its actions to myocardial cells via cellular memory, as materialists have tied the mind to brain cells? Why not take a hint from giants such as Penfield and Sherrington: mind transcends cells? Opting for cellular memory seems a retreat, not the way forward. We are not bereft of hypotheses about how the mind might transcend the body, as described in Dean Radin's books The Unconscious Universe36 and Entangled Minds,37 Rupert Sheldrake's A New Science of Life,48 already mentioned, models advanced by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab,60, 61 and physicists Russell Targ and Elizabeth Rauscher.62

I suggest that the consciousness of a donor is fundamentally united with the consciousness of a recipient via nonlocal mind, and that it is this connection that makes possible informational exchanges between the two individuals, which take the form of posttransplant phenomena. Nonlocal connections normally exist between all minds, but the recipient's link with the donor is intensified because of the profound experience of impending surgery and possible death. When a recipient is facing heart transplant surgery, the donor becomes the most important individual in that person's existence, even though the donor's identity is unknown. Moreover, a heart transplant seems extraordinarily important because of the cultural and symbolic significance we invest in the heart. In addition, we have only one heart; if the transplant does not succeed, the recipient dies. It is different with other transplants. We have two kidneys, lots of skin, and billions of red blood cells. Consequently, the stakes of a kidney transplant, a skin graft, or a blood transfusion are not as high as with a heart transplant. For all these reasons, a heart transplant concentrates our consciousness more than any other type of transplant surgery. This intensification may be a primary reason why posttransplant parallels are more common following heart transplants than with the transplantation of any other organ. The prospect of having our heart excised, discarded, and replaced helps us shift toward the nonlocal side of the mind, of which we are largely unconscious during ordinary, everyday existence. If brain transplants become possible, we shall likely see that this procedure also has the power to trigger posttransplant parallels, perhaps even more profoundly than heart transplantation, and for the same reasons.

Proponents of cellular memory must face an inconvenient, stubborn fact. To reiterate, researchers in the field of anomalous cognition and reincarnation have documented that distant, normal individuals can exchange highly complex information, no matter how far apart. Moreover, these events display time displacement—ie, the information exchange is not confined to the present moment but can happen into the future and the past.60, 63, 64 So, if spatial and temporal barriers for information exchange are not absolute, there appears to be no reason in principle why a deceased individual such as an organ donor cannot convey information nonlocally to a living recipient, bypassing the transplant altogether. The primary link between donor and recipient may therefore be through consciousness, not tissue.

Could both mechanisms be involved? Could donor-recipient informational exchanges occur via nonlocal mind and cellular memory? Perhaps, although hypothesizing a double pathway violates the admittedly overworked principle of parsimony in science called Occam's razor. The burden of proof, I suggest, is on the proponents of the cellular memory hypothesis to demonstrate that a transplanted organ is required for the phenomenon to occur.

None of these considerations rules out conventional factors in posttransplant experiences—the effects of medications, memory lapses, selective memory, wish fulfillment, self-fulfilling prophecy, suggestion, and so on. It's just that these factors do not appear sufficient to account for the rich variety of posttransplant parallels that are now a matter of record.

Most of us are reluctant to honor our nonlocal connections with others. We prefer to hang on to the idea that we are solitary individuals who are isolated physically and mentally from everyone else, because this view is affirmed by culture and common sense. Throughout history, however, humans have discovered a great many ways of realizing their mental connections with others. Sometimes physical objects serve this purpose. For example, a ring, locket, poem, or photo can help lovers sense their unity. They understand that the physical object doesn't contain the actual memories and thoughts they have of each other; it is a symbol that triggers associations in the consciousness of the persons involved. A part of the body—a donated heart, lung, or kidney—might function in a similar way through nonlocal consciousness.

I suspect posttransplant experiences such as Claire Sylvia's are more common than we think. Hopefully her case will continue to encourage organ recipients to go public with their experiences, as people did with near-death experiences.

These cases are a reminder that we are united in deep ways—that consciousness is one, at heart. Pun intended.