Posted on 04/09/2008 11:41:37 AM PDT by xjcsa
Yesterday, the Mail told the extraordinary story of how a heart transplant recipient in America committed suicide - just like the man whose heart he had received 12 years previously. In another extraordinary twist, it emerged that the recipient had also married the donor's former wife.
So can elements of a person's character - or even their soul - be transplanted along with a heart?
One woman who believes this to be the case is CLAIRE SYLVIA, a divorced mother of one.
She was 47 and dying from a disease called primary pulmonary hypertension when, in 1988, she had a pioneering heartlung transplant in America.
She was given the organs of an 18-year-old boy who had been killed in a motorcycle accident near his home in Maine.
Claire, a former professional dancer, then made an astonishing discovery: she seemed to be acquiring the characteristics, and cravings, of the donor.
Here, in an extract from her book A Change Of Heart, Claire tells her remarkable story...
> So can elements of a person’s character - or even their soul - be transplanted along with a heart?
Could be. I read elsewhere, about a year ago, that there is a school of thought that some thinking processes happen OUTSIDE THE BRAIN, in all different parts of your body. According to this theory, your brain is only the major center for most thinking.
I don’t think scientists know enough about how the brain actually works to have a legitimate view on this, one way or the other, yet. I wouldn’t discount it out-of-hand.
Both of her husbands committed suicide? Was she some kind of a witch???
Don’t cockroaches have “multiple brains” controlling different body parts?
No that's a different story, never mind.
Ditto. What rubbish.
The Heart transplant/KFC and beer story has been discussed on Coast to Coast AM for years and years.
They don't know anything about the soul, either. A human being is hylomorphic, or a body/soul unity. A simple proof of this is that the body before and after the moment of death is hardly different, yet we know that a drastic change has occurred. That change is the soul leaving the body.
There are several problems with reducing thought to brain states. If a thought is simply a grouping of electrons, what exactly is apprehending these thoughts? That group of electrons? Then what exactly is thinking these thoughts?And if the self is simply a scanning mechanism in the brain, there must be as many selves as acts of scanning, etc, ad infinitum. Moreover, if my mind is simply a machine, how can I know whether it is functioning properly at any given time? Yet we possess certain knowledge, so this kind of radical skepticism must be false.
So the soul must exist. But the body/soul unity still remains a great mystery, perhaps because we are created in the image of God.
Am I the only person that immediately suspects that woman murdered both of them and made it look like a suicide?
Thailand???
I got Ellen Degeneres kidney and now I want to bang women. Oh wait, I already want to do that, never mind....
> So the soul must exist. But the body/soul unity still remains a great mystery, perhaps because we are created in the image of God.
There is ALOT to be said for that notion. I am convinced we don’t know the half of it, nor have we even guessed!
> Don’t cockroaches have “multiple brains” controlling different body parts?
I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. If you think about the squillions of individual activities that is happening in the human body ALL THE TIME, every second, it would make sense to have much of the processing de-centralized — otherwise the brain is going to be a very busy place, faster than any super-computer.
Even at a cell-level: stuff is happening, to a schedule, in a predictable way.
As I type my fingers are moving at an incredible blur of speed — I am a touch-typist, have been for nearly forty years — and it is inconceivable to me that anything other than muscle memory is at work. I think entire sentences and lo — they appear on the page, as if by magic. I am not thinking letter by letter or word by word. Half the time I am not even thinking, just reading the original text in front of me and transcribing verbatim, no conscious thought or interpretation happening at all.
That *can’t* all be coming from the brain, surely? Some of it, perhaps. But the sequencing, and the blur of motion as one finger after the other does an intricate and accurate motion, followed by another, and another, and another, faster than I can talk...? Surely distributed processing would make sense.
I’d be willing to guess that when I am transcribing (ie not composing, just typing what is placed in front of me) the “thought” process goes from my eyes somehow directly and magically somehow finds its way to my hands and fingers, bypassing the brain altogether — because I often have no idea what I have typed or why, it’s just there to be transcribed.
There is so much science doesn’t know, and it will take a very long time before we know the half of it.
I didn't immediately suspect her of murder, but it did immediately occur to me that it was more likely she was a factor in both men's death than the shared heart.
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