Cellular Memory Phenomenon Explained: Consciousness Beyond the Brain

Hat tip to Don Salmon for bringing this to my attention.

It is amazing to me what happens when you start looking for consciousness.  The information comes cascading in.  This time it’s cellular memory phenomenon.  You may remember an article I did a while ago titled:  Consciousness At the Cellular Level: The Experiments of Cleve Backster.  Another relevant post I did was:  Consciousness is Part of Reality, Not a Trick of Evolution

Backster demonstrated that consciousness occurs at the cellular level.  And while it was fascinating and it demonstrates the far reach of consciousness, it wasn’t until I ran across cellular memory phenomenon that a picture developed of how much this affects us, which is apparently a lot.

Cellular Memory Phenomenon is a term doctors coined for the personality changes that people undergo after organ transplants.  Here are some stories:

Cheryl Johnson received a kidney.

Cheryl Johnson, 37, says she has changed completely since receiving the organ in May. She believes that she must have picked up her new characteristics from the donor, a 59-year-old man who died from an aneurysm.

Now, not only has her personality changed, the single mother also claims that her tastes in literature have taken a dramatic turn. Whereas she only used to read low-brow novels, Dostoevsky has become her author of choice since the transplant.

Miss Johnson, from Penwortham, in Preston, Lancs, said: “You pick up your characteristics from your donor. My son said when I first had the transplant, I went stroppy and snappy – that wasn’t me.

“I have always loved books but I’ve started to read classics like Jane Austen and Dostoevsky. I found myself reading Persuasion.”

An annoymous post on a message board:

I had my transplant oct 2005… long story short it worked out, eventually. My problem is that I WAS an honor roll student in all my life until after this surgery. Then (9-11th grade) I dissappointed my family over and over again by failing in school, being mean… or lazy…. and its not me. I seem to be more controlling, and argumentative. but thats not the real problem at all.

I used to be the annoying (sometimes funny) kid from 1st grade -8th, but now I don’t even talk in school. The part that concerns me is that I dont care that im not talking, I dont want to talk to anyone because people make me sick. they are just overall useless, I could go on for days about it, but thats not the point. It worries me that Ive lost faith in humanity and myself.

I also cant enjoy all the things I used to do, for example I cant play Halo 3 because I shake and can never truly improve at the game.

Claire Sylvia from this article:

Claire Sylvia who received a heart and lung transplant in the 1970’s from an eighteen year old male donor who had been in a motorcycle accident. None of this information was known to Sylvia, who upon waking up claimed she had a new and intense craving for beer, chicken nuggets, and green peppers, all food she didn’t enjoy prior to the surgery. A change in food preferences is probably the most noted in heart transplant patients. Sylvia wrote a book about her experiences after learning the identity of her donor called A Change of Heart.

And one more from People magazine:

Bill Wohl was a hard-driving self-described type A executive until cardiac disease nearly killed him in 2000. A heart transplant at the University of Arizona medical center saved his life—and transformed it in ways he could never have imagined. Weeks after his operation, Wohl, now 58, heard a song on the radio by the British vocalist Sade. “I just started crying and rocking,” he recalls. Odd, since before the surgery, Wohl hadn’t heard of Sade and was not the type to mist up over a torch song. Later he contacted the family of organ donor Michael Brady, the 36-year-old Hollywood stuntman whose heart he had received, and made an intriguing discovery. Sade was one of Brady’s favorite singers. “It was,” says Wohl, “really, really freaky.”

There are actually quite a few examples out there, some of them quite spectacular, such as a woman whose blood type changed after a liver transplant.  In fact, there are so many examples that as a phenomena it is surprising that it receives so little attention.

There are of course, biological theories, such as the presence of neuropeptides,  But no one knows if they store memories and how they could store such specific ones.  Skeptics, of course, can always be counted on to come up with the most absurd theories and they don’t disappoint on this front:  they speculate that the patient unconsciously hears doctors and nurses talking about the donor while under anesthesia and the patient somehow is suggestible and has a personality change.  (I wasn’t aware that the donor organs arrived with a complete personality profile of the donor which doctors and nurses then discussed over the operation.  Has this magical suggestibility ever occurred under any other circumstances? What an idiotic theory.)

The Backster experiments demonstrate what is going on here. By putting very sensitive probes on small groups of cells, Backster was able to demonstrate that the cells reacted to the emotions of their owner, who was in another room.  This demonstrates that the cells had awareness of their own, independent of the rest of the body.  This is consciousness and if random cells demonstrate it then we can conclude that consciousness resides in every cell of the body and certainly in the organs.  Therefore, an organ transplant is also a consciousness transplant.  The recipient is literally receiving the personality of the donor.  Now, if you accept the Holographic Universe model, then the entire personality of the donor will be contained in each cell and therefore in the organ as a group.

Because people vary tremendously in the make up of their personalities, there are necessarily going to be great variations in how much of a donors personality they take on.  It is altogether likely that donor rejection has something to do with how easily people can change and accept the personality changes.  Someone who fights changes is going to have a more difficult time accepting a new organ because they will fight the personality changes that occur.

The person receiving the organ has their own personality, so they aren’t likely to transform completely; more likely, the recipient will take on a few attributes while discarding others.  I suppose it’s a bit like being married; we cannot help but take on some attributes of our spouses, but we don’t become them.

So what we have here is an experiment in cell consciousness that has been confirmed by field reports of cellular memory in transplant recipients.  In turn, the reports of cellular memory are being explained by the experiment.  Would knowing this make any different in lives of organ recipients?  Perhaps if the knowledge were used in the healing process.

Another question to be asked is what does this mean for the rest of us?  What part does the rest of our body play in our thoughts and actions?  Clearly, who we are is not completely within the brain, but also within the body.  It is another mystery of consciousness that will have to wait for another day.