Orlac, call your office.
- A "happy-go-lucky" man who killed himself with a shotgun died in the same manner and using the same method as the man from whom he received a transplanted heart over a decade earlier. Sonny Graham was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the throat in his backyard shed last Tuesday, US media reports....
Mr Graham, 69, never met Terry Cottle, who fatally shot himself 13 years ago, but took the heart of the 33-year-old South Carolina man in an organ transplant operation when on the verge of congestive heart failure. Mr Graham contacted widow Cheryl Cottle a year later expressing his gratitude. They continued their correspondence before meeting in person and eventually falling in love. The couple married in 2004 and moved to the US state of Georgia with the six children they had from previous marriages. In a 2006 interview with a local newspaper, Mr Graham said he felt an instant and unusual attachment when he met his donor's widow. "I felt like I had known her for years," Mr Graham was quoted by The Island Packet as saying. "I couldn't keep my eyes off her — I just stared"... - - Erin Tennant, "Man's mystery suicide mirrors that of organ donor", NineMSN News (9 April 2008)
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
The hand... controls me!
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Hi Tom
A documentary on the ABC covered many strange personality "crossovers" after heart transplants. One cardiologist pointed out that the heart has a quite complex neural architecture, almost a mini-brain, and IMO the fact that hearts have to rapidly respond to the brain's demands might mean that persistent patterns of response to situations are "buffered" in the heart's neural web, just like a computer might preload part of a program for when it's needed.
Our enteric nervous system is also quite large and, aside from a very few neuronal connections, largely independent of the brain. "Feeling it in your gut" might have real meaning too.
Adam
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