Transplant patients sometimes take on part of their donors’ personalities.

Glenda lost her husband, David, in a car crash. She made his organs available for transplant. A few years later, as part of a study by neuropsychologist Paul Pearsall, she met the young Spanish-speaking man who had received her late husband’s heart. Filled with emotion, Glenda asked if she could lay her hand on his chest. “I love you, David,” she said. “Everything’s copa­cetic.”

The young man’s mother, also present, was startled. “My son uses that word now,” she said. “He never said it before his heart transplant. I don’t know that word; it doesn’t exist in Spanish. But it was the first thing he said after the operation.”

Her son appeared to have changed in other ways too. Before, he had been a health-conscious vegetarian; now he craved meat and greasy food. He had loved heavy metal music; now he played nothing but fifties rock ’n’ roll. Glenda’s husband had been an ardent meat-lover and played in a rock ’n’ roll band.

Pearsall argues that the brain is not the only centre of human intelligence. The heart, he says, carries equal importance. He posits that the body is made up of cells that transmit “information.” Cells communicate this information to each other electromagnetically. Thus a transplanted organ can continue to broadcast old information, something like amputees’ experience of pain in lost limbs. Phenomena like these suggest cells have memories.

Critics deny the existence of proof that memories can be transplanted along with organs, and fear such assertions will cause donor numbers to fall. Some non-believers attribute personality changes in transplant recipients to the heavy drugs they must take to prevent organ rejection.