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Which part of you contains your "personhood"?
Heart Transplants are also "person transplants".
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from The Week magazine
People who have received heart transplants are finding they also acquire habits and personality traits of the donors.
One 52-year-old classical-music lover suddenly developed a taste for heavy metal. It turned out he'd received the heart of a 17-year-old boy who loved metal bands.
A quiet housewife developed a fondness for X-rated movies after getting a heart from a murdered prostitute.
A man who received the heart of a woman killed under a train started having nightmares about being crushed to death.
"The heart is far more than a pump," says world-renowned cardiologist and author Bruno Cortis.
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The reason I like this story so much is it brings the fallacies of our compartmentalized language and concepts to the forefront. Where does our "personhood" lie? In the brain? The brain is electro-chemical. It and the body it resides in are a free flowing continuum of particles suspended in water. Every part of our being flows through every other part. If you cut off parts of the body it is like a hologram in that our entire "personhood" inhabits each part. Artists have known this for centuries. The personality of each one of us is captured precisely in parts of our bodies, body language, and morphology. We are more than the sum of our parts. We are a gestalt.
You can read more on this and other amazing relationships in heart research and its philosophical implications by searching "Bruno Cortis cardiologist."
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