A physician who has performed over 700 heart transplant operation says there is some validity to the recipients taking on desires and characteristics of the donor. If true, I wonder at the mechanisms that would cause this.
ohoh!! i just remembered something that may be useful. i'll see if i can dig it up. (it's about cognitive functions and how you can get gut feelings. i mean, TRUE gut feelings, in da guts)
wait here
[edit: screw it. here's some links. this one is about the enteric nervous system. while this one links it with neuropeptides. i'm going to bed]
As far as I know, there would be absolutely no biological basis for behavior like that. I mean, the heart is a muscle, a pump, not a second brain. I can't see how it could affect someone's personality. Could it have more to do with psychology?
It's quite well known that heart problems have *immense* influences on personality. Consider that the beating of the heart is one of the variables we can access to inform us about our emotional states ('my heart is hammering, i must be nervous').
When you think about it... the brain is just a really big electrical circuit, and it's got wires going to everything else in the body. If you change the properties of some of those wires, you very likely will change the overall properties of the system. You probably won't notice much if it's just a few neurons (like, if you injure your leg) but you'll notice a lot if it's a lot of neurons OR a lot of what the neurons are connected to (like if you get a heart transplant).
Whatever is going on, donors who say, had a love of baseball, somehow that enjoyment gets passed to the recipient...who may never had a remote interest in baseball.
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