Your cells, all of them, not just the ones in your brain, retain memories. I know, it sounds like fiction. I wouldn’t believe it either if I were you. I mean, how could they remember your favorite tastes, your nervous habits, and your most vivid memories? And yet, it might not all be science fiction. Cellular memory is a popular theory, not merely confined to the pages of Stephen King novels.
I’m with you on this one, I like to stay on the side of caution. And I don’t believe everything I hear. It’s just that some transplant patients have such weird experiences after transplant that they have no other explanation. Take the 29-year-old lesbian who was a fast food junkie and received a heart from a 19-year-old female vegetarian who was self-proclaimed “man crazy.” All of a sudden after transplant, the recipient started reporting that meat made her sick and she was no longer attracted to women. In fact, she became engaged to marry a man.
OK, that one makes sense. She got a new heart and we all know that’s the seat of love. Nothing could’ve changed that. But then look at the story of Claire Sylvia, probably the most famous of the cellular memory stories. Claire was a healthy, active dancer before she received her heart-lung transplant. Then all of a sudden Claire began having peculiar changes like cravings for beer and chicken nuggets. Later, Claire found out that these were favorites of her donor and that he even had chicken nuggets in his jacket pocket when he died in a motorcycle accident.
See, that one’s a little weird and it makes you start to think if this stuff is real or just the beginning of the plot to a really bad horror film. I mean maybe all that fried food started to get to her donor’s heart, clogging those arteries with memories of Denny’s. I’m really not sure. And we haven’t even gotten to the freakiest story yet, where an eight-year-old girl received the heart of a ten-year-old who had been murdered. After the transplant, the recipient started having horrible nightmares of a man murdering her donor. The dreams became so traumatic that she went to a psychiatrist and then to the police to seek help. According to the psychiatrist, “…using the description from the little girl, they found the murderer. He was easily convicted with the evidence the patient provided. The time, weapon, place, clothes he wore, what the little girl he killed had said to him…everything the little heart transplant recipient had reported was completely accurate.”
Besides having the world’s worse defense attorney, that story really makes you quiver. If I was a donor, what would my organs remember of me? Would it be my calm attitude, a love of pizza, or all the TV I watch? As far as I can tell my new liver didn’t bring any new memories with it. And so I’m not sold on cellular memory. They say the best way to live after death is to donate your organs. And perhaps that’s not as fictitious as we all once thought.
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