Would you accept a murderers heart? (transplant)Follow

True and False.

Both the heart and the stomach have secondary neural networks around them. These networks are not nearly as large or complicated as in the brain, but are sufficiently large enough that some parts of a person's emotional reactions are stored/run from there.

It is partly a real feeling, not just a metaphor, if you experience a devastating event like "a punch to the gut", or experience fear as a clenching around your heart and/or stomach, or feel an incredible lightness in your chest when you fall in love. It's not just your brain sending nervous system signals to these organs that have a physical effect on these organs that you can physically feel. It is actually partly electrical synaptic events happening and experienced in the neural network around these organs.

Scientists have credible evidence that some donor hearts in a very small minority of cases have come with enough neural network tissue that a small but significant (that is, noticeable) portion of the donor's tastes and interests as a person have come with it.

This phenomenon started to be tracked down after some heart recipients noticed such extreme taste changes in themselves after operations that they felt compelled to track down their donor's family and find out his/her history, and then took this information to their doctors and asked for explanations.

One recipient woman previously did not drink much, and she especially hated beer, and any hot-spicy foods. After her heart transplant, she craved beer and hot Mexican foods so much she switched to having them almost daily. Which turned out to be the favourite foods of her donor once she tracked him down.

An older (50's, 60's?) recipient male was a very ...um... working class male in his personality and tastes. He loved rock and metal music and hated classical and opera. Although long married, he was a very closed off man, who didn't talk about his emotions much. After his heart transplant, he loved classical music, and started buying and listening to it frequently. But the thing that freaked everyone out was that he started writing poetry. He'd never written a poem in his life, and suddenly he started writing several poems a week, many of them passionate love poems to his wife. His wife was delighted but startled, and he kinda was happy with his "new" self but also troubled, so they tracked down his donor.

Tragically, it was quite a young man who had died in an accident. He'd been a concert violinist and an amateur poet. Once the recipient family knew where these partial personality changes came from, they felt much more secure in just settling down and enjoying them.

Separately, there has been a long known phenomenon of a percentage of heart transplant patients becoming depressed immediately after their operations, and staying depressed for a couple of years afterwards. In light of these newer findings I would be interested if they could document if donors have a history of depression, and then track recipients and see if there are any correlations with which recipients suffer post transplant depression.

As for getting away with murder after receiving the heart tissue of a murderer? We all have to control our immoral impulses with our "better halves" anyway. I should expect and hope that people's brains can over-rule their hearts.

Edited, Jun 8th 2009 3:21am by Aripyanfar

I'd take the murderer's heart and then I could go kill off all the annoying twids with the excuse that my heart made me do it.

I'd take it, but I totally wouldn't bury it under the floorboords in my bedroom, and wherever I did put it would be in a soundproof box, just in case...

Evidence that Gwyn is an gullible trollope #234


Gwyn - would you accept a ***** tranplant from an pederast?

You know it's sad when I read a thread written by some Twits just to read Nobby's and Smashes responses to them.

I would take the Heart, but only as long as they murder for Dark Chocolate with Espresso Beans. No one comes between me and my Dark Chocolate and Espresso.

Darn I take a heart from Varus if his was a match and I needed one. Thankfully I love Okra, just not as much as My Dark Chocolate and Espresso Beans.


I did say those were my Dark Chocolate and Espresso Beans, now just walk away and you may get out of here alive.

And in a heartbeat i would

Of course I would, what an absurd question. To not would be to let the murderer win!

Nexa

Personally, i'd rather die than have a major organic piece of a murderer implanted into me, simply because i do not want anything to do with such scum.

Remember when Homer became murderous after the hair transplant? I bet it'd be just like that.

Edited, Jun 9th 2009 11:04am by Annabella

I think he's being ironic.

No i'm being serious.

And as for ...

It's not that i'm being righteous, its that i dont want anything to do with someone who's making our society worse than it already is.

Would this include someone leaving their kids without a dad because they refuse a perfectly healthy heart transplant for some untenable moralistic *********