It was the stuff you read about in science fiction novels. 63-year-old William Sheridan from New York, whilst waiting for a compatible heart donor, drew pictures as a way of killing time. His 2D stick figures bore no semblance to the world around him and mirrored those that you might find in a kindergarten. A heart transplant later, this all changed. Sheridan’s childlike drawings transformed into creative and artistic depictions of landscape and wildlife; of billowing brooks and wild imagination. You see, the transplanted organ had belonged to 24-year-old Keith Neville, a stock broker with a passion for art and once it was relocated into Sheridan’s body, the New Yorker had indeed, a change of heart.
Sheridan isn’t alone in this phenomenon. Over 70 personality change cases have been recorded following heart transplants, unlike any other organ. James Clark in the United Kingdom, never one for romance, all of a sudden started to write passionate poetry for his wife after receiving a transplant from an amateur poet. You have to ask the question, does a life threatening operation simply put things into perspective, making one more open to trying new things and experiencing life to the fullest or does the heart have some sort of mysterious connection to emotion and our personality?
Aristotle and the ancient Greeks 2500 years ago saw the heart as the seat of the spirit and the rational soul. When you feel bad after a sudden loss in your life there’s this tightness in your chest and it feels as though your heart is beating irregularly. It’s little wonder that so many years ago, it was seen as the centre of love and emotion. By the late 19th Century with advancements in medicine and technology, the important relationship of the brain to intelligence and emotion became established. Despite the growing evidence that the heart is merely a responder to stimulation by the brain, there is a growing movement among scientists that is trying to reverse this understanding. Some scientists are now convinced that the heart is so much more than just a biological pump; it may have memory and emotional intelligence.
You make me so lonely baby,
I get so lonely,
I get so lonely I could die.
Losing someone that you love is difficult. It’s hard to sleep, concentrate and find happiness in the things that you once loved doing. You can lose a ridiculous amount of weight and feel hopeless and nauseous all the time. The blood flow to your brain, changes. The anterior cingulate cortex associated with physical pain and distress in depression, becomes active and your immune response is weakened. Although it seems infantile and silly, evidence now suggests that you can die from a broken heart.
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Jim Callaghan, who died 11 days after his wife of 67 years, is one person who is believed to have died from a broken heart. A study conducted in 1996, examined 1.5 million cases between the ages of 34 and 84. It was discovered that the risk of dying from something that resembles a heart attack 6 months after the loss of a loved one, increased from the norm by 20 to 35%.
Broken heart syndrome, also known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, is a recognised medical condition that is caused by extreme stress often after the loss of a loved one and is more commonly found in older people. Fear and grief leads to a greater secretion of noradrenalin and adrenalin, hormones associated with the fight-and-flight response. These hormones lower the pumping ability of the heart and can cause chest pain and symptoms that closely mirror a heart attack. It differs from a heart attack, though. The heart undergoes a transformation; it takes up an atypical shape that compromises its pumping function. Its base squeezes normally but the middle and tip do not. This is not an ordinary heart attack. It doesn’t kill the heart muscle, just renders it helpless and can affect perfectly healthy people that don’t have any blood clots. Sufferers often recover within two to three weeks. It is a reaction to emotion.
Dr Ilan Wittsen of Johns Hopkins University has examined this remarkable condition. Blood samples from patients believed to be suffering from Broken Heart Syndrome contain high levels of adrenalin and noradrenalin which are more elevated than in normal heart attack patients. The heart responds to emotion like no other organ, but does it have a brain of its own?
Is your heart filled with pain?
Shall I come back again?
Tell me dear, are you lonesome tonight?
In 1967, Dr Christian Barnard performed the first heart to heart transplant. Although the patient survived only 18 days, it was clear that the heart was a secularised organ, capable of beating on its own without the help of the brain. A person can remain heartless for about 15 minutes and even after a transplant, the connections linking the heart to the brain can remain severed. It continues to beat autonomously because of the Intrinsic Cardiac Ganglia.
The Intrinsic Cardiac Ganglia, affectionately known as the “little brain in the heart” is integral to the heart’s maintenance and performance. It is a collection of cells dispersed throughout the heart that strongly resemble neurons, the cells of the brain. In addition to this, it has brain-like supporting cells, proteins and messengers. There are about 40,000 neurons that sense and control your heart rate and communicate with the brain. If the heart contains neurons, why can’t it behave like a brain and remember and associate?
Dr Garry Schwartz, professor of psychology at the University of Arizona considers the heart to be a “bio, psycho, socio, spiritual organ” and is convinced that it has independent intelligence and paranormal abilities. He argues that there is circular communication between the heart and the brain and that memory can be transferred to the heart. In the case of James Clark, Schwartz believes that the donor’s heart had cells associated with poetry prowess. Clark’s change in personality from a masculine English brute into a sensitive, and ‘in touch’ gentleman also convinced Schwartz, that the heart affects emotion and love. It’s probably important to note that all this is coming from someone who believes that psychic Allison DuBois, the inspiration of television’s Medium, can indeed contact the dead with 77% accuracy and that none of this research has been published in a peer reviewed journal.
Schwartz calls this theory cellular memory and believes that memory exists in every cell of the body but most strongly with the heart. Cellular memory has been the topic of many books and films. In the 1924 book inspired, silent film, Les Mains d’Orlac (translated, “The Hands or Orlac”), concert pianist Paul Orlac loses his hands in a tragic railway accident only to have them replaced by the hands of a murderer. Orlac becomes consumed with murderous thoughts and develops a thirst to kill, like something off an episode of Passions. It would be terrifying to think that now in the golden age of science and medicine we may transform transplant patients into living Frankensteins.
A Californian research organisation known as the Institute of HeartMath (IHM) has developed an entire discipline on heart training and meditation. Crazy haired Research Director, Dr Rollin McCarty is convinced that our high stress, anxiety saturated, socially awkward society may be the result of negative emotions being transferred from one person to the next by a magnetic field that radiates from the heart and through the skin.
In one study, McCarty got subjects to look at a series of photographs, both pleasant and unpleasant ranging from disfigured persons to large, fulsome boobs and recorded response times of the heart and brain. He found that the heart responded correctly to the image, at a rate greater than predicted by chance, before the brain did and before the repulsive picture, for example, was even viewed. McCarty suggests that it’s not the brain that perceives negative stimuli and then signals the heart to beat faster but that the heart intuitively reacts, then the brain and then the rest of the body.
Starting today I’m teaching my heart
Not to ache anymore
Just because we’re apart.
Reversing common scientific notions especially to a more primitive, 2500 year old idea is a difficult task. UWA’s own Nobel Prize winner, Barry Marshall had to face decades of dissent and publication rejections until he deliberately infected himself with a bacterium and had a severe inflammatory reaction. He proved that stomach ulcers could be treated with an antibiotic and were the cause of bacteria, not stress, lifestyle or diet but it was a long and arduous process of acceptance.
Science, as it stands, is reductionist and not holistic. It concentrates on each organ as a single entity, not the overall picture in order to get to the heart of the matter. One thing is for sure, you feel something in your chest when you lose something or someone that was important. Perhaps that’s the heart thinking and feeling for itself, but according to current scientific though, it’s the brain that’s holding the reigns.
Although his ideas may be a little farfetched, Dr Rollin McCarty has developed an effective way of coping with heartbreak. Pick something that hurts you, but don’t think about it, just feel it. Visualise the transfer of energy from your breath into your heart and activate feelings of positivity. It sounds wanky, but meditation really doesn’t get the credit that it deserves.
Find it in your heart to do the things that you love and make you happy. Give yourself time, talk and reflect. In order to transcend pain, you must first experience it; pain is your body’s way of motivating recovery. A broken heart can be repaired and strengthened, just think of William Sheridan and the artistic flare he never knew he possessed. I cross my heart.
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Not entirely sure why so many people liked this article more than all my others. It really is the end of an era. Who knew one silly office could mean so much to you. A sad, but healthy day.
